Heap of Links

A team of philosophers, engineers, and scientists at UC Santa Cruz are creating playing cards about ethics and technology -- suggest a question and get a free deck of cards when it's done (via Barry Lam)
Is it bad to be objectified? It may depend on the object: “It would be terrible to be treated like a paper towel… But it would not be so bad to be treated like an artwork” -- Becca Rothfeld (Harvard) on persons and artworks
Great ideas for adding a social dimension to online conferences -- from C. Thi Nguyen (Utah)
There’s a new enormous mural of Antonio Gramsci in Florence by street artist Jorit -- and it is causing some controversy
Ernest Nagel “was once an academic celebrity in the sciences, the leader of what we may call the scientific wing of pragmatism for a generation” but is “now largely forgotten” -- Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) on why "this neglect is a shame"
“Suddenly, we were asked to think directly about the central things that mattered” -- Michael Huemer (Colorado) on what's good and bad about philosophy
“Well, I don’t want to sit by this siren till I die of old age. / So what’s the reason I can’t turn the page? / Simple answer. Shame. / He’s the only man in the world who can see through my game.” -- poet Anne Carson renders Alcibiades's speech in The Symposium in verse (via Aaron Garrett)
“My academic and intellectual independence, the freedom to think things through for myself, hindered only (only!) by my own weaknesses, prejudices, and blind spots, has come at quite a high price” -- Susan Haack (Miami) reflects on her career as a philosopher
What should journal editors ask referees to do? -- Richard Yetter Chappell (Miami) offers some suggestions
Has being a philosopher met your expectations? -- a discussion at The Philosophers' Cocoon
There’s an asymmetry that explains why “transgender identities deserve social uptake and so-called ‘transracial’ identifications… almost always do not” -- but it's not based on "who 'really is' a woman or who 'really is' Black," argue Robin Dembroff (Yale) & Dee Payton (Rutgers)
How many people COVID-19 has killed seems like a straightforward empirical question -- but it's not, as philosopher S. Andrew Schroeder (Claremont McKenna) explains
“Philosophical advances in epistemology and in ethics profoundly shape our points of view. We don’t see them precisely because we see with them” -- an interview with philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
What is a particle? -- ask a dozen physicists, you'll get seven different answers
The British Journal of Aesthetics is celebrating its 60th anniversary -- with 12 short pieces that each look back on a different article the journal previously published, together offering a history of aesthetics over the past several decades
A conversation about hope -- with Myisha Cherry (UC Riverside), Sally Haslanger (MIT), and Jesse Prinz (CUNY)
“What makes the invocation of lived experience such a powerful move – the fact that it’s essentially private, removed from inspection – is exactly what makes it such a perilous one” -- Kwame Anthony Appiah (NYU) on how "identities are too multiple and complex to allow any individual’s experience to count as truly representative"
“The first thing the police had done was call in M’s three colleagues to see if they knew of anyone who might have a grudge against M. It was hence a great surprise when this somewhat routine procedure generated not leads but confessions—three of them” -- "Philosophy Rashômon," by Liam Bright (LSE)
“We tend to misconstrue the nature of oppositions in philosophy” -- Martin Lenz (Groningen) on how we can be misdirected by feelings of intellectual regret
Games, agency, art, and real life -- C. Thi Nguyen (Utah) in conversation with Carrie Figdor (Iowa)
The virtues of intellectual dependability -- they include intellectual benevolence, transparency, clarity, audience sensitivity, and intellectual guidance, says T. Ryan Byerly (Sheffield)
A public philosophy dispute over pandemic policies -- this links to the 4th installment in the debate between Ben Bramble (ANU) and Ian James Kidd (Nottingham) & Matthew Ratcliffe (York) - click your way back to the start
“Metaphysics does not consist in construction but in investigation” -- Alexander Douglas (St. Andrews) on Susan Stebbing and and the emergence of analytic philosophy
A “fact-check” but for the arguments public figures use -- a new series at PEA Soup
Honor codes can serve as a moral reminder that helps “place our values front and center in our minds” -- Christian Miller (Wake Forest) on the empirical evidence for an old-fashioned way of reducing student cheating
Controversy over a new statue in London intended to honor philosopher and women’s rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft -- "I can’t see her feeling happy to be represented by this naked, perfectly formed wet dream of a woman"
The ethical costs of upward mobility -- Jennifer Morton (CUNY) is featured on the NPR podcast Hidden Brain
The virtue of reverence, the wisdom of theater, the qualities of leadership, and more -- in an interview with Paul Woodruff (Texas)
Philosophy of Bitcoin -- Andrew M. Bailey (Yale-NUS), Andrew M. Bailey (Wyoming), and Craig Warmke (NIU) find that cryptocurrency is a philosophically rich topic
Using games, teams, Discord, and additive grading to create an online philosophy course that fosters community and excitement -- Margaret Greta Turnbull (Gonzaga) shares her "gameful" pedagogy
“Despite rumors to the contrary, arguments still work. We shouldn’t give up on them.” -- N. Ángel Pinillos (ASU) with arguments and evidence for using arguments and evidence
"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
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
"There is no campus free speech crisis: a close look at the evidence" -- we're at the debunking the debunking of the debunkers stage
Search the websites of leading philosophy podcasts -- a new feature from TrueSciPhi
How Wittgenstein invented the emoji -- “If I were a good draughtsman, I could convey an innumerable number of expressions by four strokes.”
"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
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
"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
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
"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
"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"
"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)
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
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
Zeno: "Looking for someone willing to meet me halfway" -- dating profiles of antiquity's most eligible authors
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."
Philosophy students from Western Michigan University travel to Alaskan villages and towns -- to help people with their taxes
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
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
Philosophical reflections on photography in the age of Instagram -- there is #nofilter on Daniel Star (Boston University)
“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
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"
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
"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)
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)
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
"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
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
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
What do we get when we combine utilitarianism and strong AI? -- an even stronger repugnant conclusion, argues Alexander Pruss (Baylor)
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)
The significance of philosophy to mathematics -- Richard Zach (Calgary) points to good account
Could philosophical debate aid prisoner rehabilitation? -- Kirstine Szifris (Manchester Metropolitan) on her experiences teaching philosophy to prisoners
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)
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"
"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)
"What could a philosopher have to offer a modern business?" -- Scotty Hendricks covers some real-world examples
What makes heavy metal music *heavy*? -- Jay Miller (Warren Wilson College)
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)
"We can all know that we have rights without having to check our genes" -- Jeff Sebo (NYU) on chimps, persons, and rights (NYT)
"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
"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)
"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
The impact of artificial intelligence: a new era? -- interviews with Luciano Floridi (Oxford), Huw Price (Cambridge), and others
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
"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
Philosophers on politics in the Trump era -- Charles Taylor, Michael Sandel, Harry Frankfurt, and Joseph Heath on CBC Radio (via Dirk Felleman)
Frog and Toad in philosophy -- noted at JSTOR Daily
"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
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"
"Undercounting the undocumented might introduce bias into our public policy" -- Michael Blake (Washington) on the possible citizenship question on the 2020 census
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.
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
"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
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)
"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
"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
A new series on Africana philosophy -- at the History Of Philosophy Without Any Gaps
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
What does Spinoza have to do with transitioning towards environmentally sustainable habits? -- Andrea Sangiacomo (Groningen) explains
"Seeing equality requires that you first believe it" -- Amia Srinivasan (Oxford) reviews "One Another's Equals" by Jeremy Waldron (NYU)
"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
Argument mapping in an epistemology class -- Adam Elga (Princeton) shows us how it worked in his course
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 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 secret to happiness may be unhappiness" -- a neuroscientist looks at what unhappiness does to the brain
Role playing games in philosophy class -- the students get into it, and end up doing more work for class, says professor Nicole Wyatt (Calgary)
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
The endless process of error detection and error correction -- it's just good intellectual hygiene
Concrete suggestions for increasing diversity in philosophy journals sought -- at this link and at an upcoming Pacific APA session
"This exposure compromises our privacy, to be sure, but it also compromises our freedom" -- Philip Pettit (Princeton/ANU) on social media (updated)
"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
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"
The aesthetics of tattoos -- a new series by Roy T. Cook (Minnesota)
Issues with the PGR's rankings in Chinese Philosophy -- "the ranking yields a list that looks decidedly weird"
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)
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
The life and ideas of Andy Clark (Edinburgh) -- a lengthy profile in The New Yorker by Larissa MacFarquhar
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
New learning outcome assessment for philosophy courses -- the "Meaning of Life" quiz
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
"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"
"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)
Do babies imagine? How? And how could we know? -- Claudia Passos-Ferreira (NYU) asks about the development of mental imagery in infants
"Oh, the shit you'll do after you're tenured" -- McSweeney's Seussifies tenure
"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
The nature of hope -- Adrienne Martin (Claremont McKenna) talks with Myisha Cherry (Illinois, Chicago)
"There’s more to come" -- William H. (Bill) Miller III, who donated $75m to JHU's Philosophy Department, in an interview in The Chronicle
"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
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
Fascinating series of articles on robots and ethics -- from Evan Selinger (RIT)
"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
Creating brains in vats -- mini-ones, for now.
Frankfurt's conception of "bullshit" has never been more relevant --alas
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
"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
Buzzfeed tells its vast readership: here are 37 philosophers you really should know about -- and they're all women
"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)
Public philosophy: kinds, challenges, and ideals -- Caleb Harrison and Macy Salzberger (UNC) talk with Skye Cleary
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)
Landmark moments for women in philosophy -- including an interactive timeline
William Jackson Harper (Chidi from "The Good Place") and Kwame Anthony Appiah team up -- to answer ethics questions on NPR's "Ask Me Another"
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
"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
What exactly is wrong with the alt-right's anti-Semitism? -- Jonathan Anomaly (Arizona) and Nathan Cofnas (Oxford) take a close look
Derek Parfit's photography will exhibited this coming May -- at Narrative Projects, an art gallery in London
"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)
A philosopher's case against feminism -- a draft for an upcoming "left and right" philosophy reader
Animated film portrays the philosophy of Zhuangzi -- it's called "The Country of Summer Insects"
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)
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
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)
Meeting with each of your undergraduate students -- philosophy professor Hollace Graff (Oakton) leads a project to improve student retention
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)"
Immigration and the natural lottery -- thoughts from Campbell Brown (LSE)
"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?
Our probabilistic memory systems and our counterfactual imaginations -- Felipe de Brigard (Duke) discusses his work on the connection between them
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)
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
41 lectures from Oxford's "General Philosophy" course -- taught by Peter Millican
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)
Can teaching philosophy to prisoners improve prison culture? -- Kirstine Szifris (Manchester Metropolitan) thinks so
An open-access symposium on John Martin Fischer's "Our Fate: Essays on God and Free Will" -- in Science, Religion, & Culture
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
"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
“We might be the highest-paid philosophers” -- Comedians Keith and Kenny Lucas, philosophy majors, on how "we’re actually using our degree for something"
"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
The Princess of Monaco, Charlotte Casiraghi, has co-authored a philosophy book -- "Archipel Des Passions" is about the emotions
"What makes systematic philosophy more than mere coherentism?" The former's starting points must be connected to reality -- Schliesser on Chappell on philosophical expertise
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
“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
"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
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)
"There is nothing uniquely Western about humanity’s attempt to understand the world and our place" -- Lloyd Strickland (Manchester Metropolitan) on diversifying philosophy
"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
"My workload had become inhumane" -- an academic explains why she physically collapsed on the job
Could artificial intelligences ever create real art? -- and if so, what needs to happen so that it can?
Anger, forgiveness, and public philosophy -- Myisha Cherry (Illinois, Chicago) talks with Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)
"Serenade (after Plato's Symposium)" for solo violin, harp percussion, and string orchestra -- by Leonard Bernstein
"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
A new biography of Alain Locke -- reviewed in the NYT
The trailer for the new movie, "The Young Karl Marx" -- called "both intellectually serious and engagingly free-spirited" by the NYT
Philosophy, language, and epidemiology -- work on harm and language by Lynne Tirrell (Connecticut) featured in Epidemiology Monitor
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
Two philosophers "overanalyze science fiction to mine it for delicious philosophical concepts" -- the new "Philosophers in Space" podcast
"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)
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
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"
A philosopher and a bat scientist get together to discuss -- you know
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 regularly updated calendar of ancient philosophy events and CFPs -- visit, subscribe, or follow on Twitter; created by Caleb Cohoe (Metropolitan State)
"The world's top expert on impostor syndrome…" (xkcd)
"The podcast that gets philosophical about everything" -- a conversation-based philosophy podcast from Dustyn Addington (U. Washington) & Whitney Johnson
Recent changes at the journal Nietzsche-Studien -- including new editors and advisory board members
Possible worlds, impossible worlds, and whether some things do not exist -- an interview with Franz Berto (Amsterdam)
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)
"However good one is at this, philosophical training will make you better" -- investor Bill Miller, on how philosophy affected his career
"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 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
New "women in philosophy" posters -- from the APA
Philosophical approaches to tragedy -- and their connection to "philosophical temperament"
"The complexity, difficulty, and artistry of Plato’s dialogues" -- an interview with Jill Frank (Cornell)
"The Soul of Wittgenstein" -- a new play
Animated videos of Plantinga's arguments -- from Notre Dame's Center for the Philosophy of Religion (via Josh Seachris and Dean Zimmerman)
"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 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
"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"
"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"?
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
Some pragmatism and early modern philosophy texts online -- Peirce, James, Emerson, Hume, Berkeley, and more, courtesy of P.D. Magnus (Albany)
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
The philosophers who consult on "The Good Place" -- Pamela Hieronymi (UCLA) and Todd May (Clemson)
Changes at the Blog of the APA -- Skye Cleary will be the new lead editor
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
Human dignity is an important but relatively recent moral concept; where did it originate? -- no, not from Kant, says Remy Debes (Memphis)
Philosophy-related political cartoons -- sketched at the Night of Philosophy
Why should gender be the state's business? -- Robin Dembroff (Yale) in the NYRB
"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
A philosophy PhD student at the University of Colorado is seeking a seat in the state legislature -- Jay Geyer is running as an independent
"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
"Free will can be injured just like other human abilities" -- Micah Johnson on criminal behavior, brain injuries, and free will
What is political theory? -- a working definition and five tasks for it, at Digressions & Impressions
Why moral philosophers should be reading anthropology -- are you aware of the field's "ethical turn"?
"Philosophy of science… can help us be better scientists" -- say two scientists, writing in The Guardian
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.
Perhaps philosophical education should concern itself with "raising apprentices of listening rather than masters of discourse" -- Pablo Muruzábal Lamberti on listening and philosophical dialogue
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
"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
Philosophy, public debate, and respectful engagement -- a discussion with John Corvino (Wayne State) and Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)
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."
"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
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."
Illustrations of philosophical thought experiments -- from Helen de Cruz (Oxford Brookes)
The varieties of introductory philosophy courses -- a new series at the Philosophers' Cocoon
Free speech on college campuses -- Gerald Dworkin tries to "complicate in a useful way the tensions in the debate"
(more on Winfield's bid for office here)
The philosophy of jokes -- a discussion with Jack Weinstein (North Dakota) and Al Gini (Loyola, Chicago) on Why? Radio
"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.
"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
"My approach to deciphering the Critique has been no different than to cracking a safe" -- "I was a bank robber until I read Kant"
A new exhibition space dedicated to Portuguese philosopher Damião de Gois -- a modern structure inside an old church
How philosophy makes progress -- look at the questions we ask, says Daniel Stoljar (ANU)
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.
"Artificial intelligence can now bullshit its way through conversations just as well as humans can" -- the technique is called "lexical acquisition through implicit confirmation"
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
At Google, "each and every team member must feel confident speaking up and making mistakes" -- two things philosophers have lots of experience with, no?
"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)
Another philosopher is running for Congress -- Richard Winfield (Univ. of Georgia) is seeking the Democratic nomination for Georgia's 10th District
"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"
What would make anti-racist optimism rational? -- thoughts from Gina Schouten (Harvard), one of the new bloggers at Crooked Timber
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
What's sold in the Metaphysical Supplies Shoppe? -- Occam's Disposable Razors, Cartesian Candles, and "some kinds of crystals and shit"
"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
"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
How utilitarian are you? -- test yourself on the Oxford Utilitarianism Scale
Needed: "a robust political ethics of resistance" -- an interview with Tommie Shelby (Harvard) on ghettos, justice, and philosophy
Philosophers at CEU introduce the basic issues in philosophy of perception -- in a brief and stylish video made by Jonny Hunter, a student there
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)
"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)
The logic community -- Greg Restall (Melbourne) wraps up his series of 12 things he loves about philosophical logic
Style, evidence, genealogy, metaphilosophy, and other problems Indian philosophy faces -- an account from Christian Coseru (Charleston)
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
The Breakfast Club and belief in God -- Agnes Callard (Chicago) on trying to believe
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
Gödel's 1939 unpublished lecture notes for a course in basic logic -- now published, by the Logical Society of Belgrade
"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)
Students pester women professors more (via FP)
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
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
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
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)
"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
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."
Aliveness -- Sean Kelly (Harvard) on a gift he received from Hubert Dreyfus
Sharing consciousness -- craniopagus twins prompt questions about the mind and the self
Derek Parfit, photographer -- a collection of his photos
"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)
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)
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)
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"
Love and existentialism -- an interview with philosopher Skye Cleary
Dude, where's my car? -- well, philosophy might help you find it (via Miguel F. Dos Santos)
"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
Everything you've wanted to know about reference (and something you didn't want to know about fish) -- an interview with Eliot Michaelson (KCL)
"Intentionally changing character is hard" -- Nomy Arpaly (Brown) on some of the difficulties of becoming a better person
"Pickle" is a philosophy podcast for kids -- from WNYC and ABC (a version of the latter's "Short & Curly")
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)
Epistemic vices -- an interview with Quassim Cassam (Warwick)
"The Rap Guide to Consciousness" -- via Daniel Dennett, who calls it "wise, funny, accurate---and musical!"
Eurocentrism, racism, and philistinism in philosophy -- Daniel Kaufman (Missouri State) talks with Bryan Van Norden (Vassar College)
"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
"Sophia" is a new online philosophy magazine -- it's the creation of a group of former University of Glasgow philosophy students
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?
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)
Reddit AMA this morning (12/11/17) with Jonardon Ganeri (NYU Abu Dhabi) -- starts at 11am
Alan White (Wisconsin-Manitowoc) is retiring -- he "perfected the topic-focused method of teaching Philosophy 101"
(He also wrote a lot of philosophy songs.)
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)
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
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)
"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
An interview with T.M. Scanlon (Harvard) (video)
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
"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?
"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)
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)
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)
Would Aristotle unfriend that person? -- Alexis Elder (Minnesota Duluth) on using social media wisely and well
Who one really is "deep down" -- Joshua Knobe (Yale) on the idea of the "true self"
Philosophy undergrads at St. Olaf interact with students in Iran -- for World Philosophy Day
"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?
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"
From Ancient Greece to the contemporary campus: two conception of free speech -- Teresa M. Bejan (Oxford) in The Atlantic (via Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin)
"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
Inequality and democracy -- Tommie Shelby (Harvard) talks with Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)
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
"Nearly all the grammar mavens agree that exclamation marks are overused" -- but they're wrong, argues Trip Glazer (Arkansas)!
"The unhappiness expressed by so many university academics might really result from an uneasy conscience about their own curiosity" -- at the Partially Examined Life
In praise of Philippa Foot -- by Nakul Krishna (Cambridge)
The TH!NK philosophy program for elementary students, created by Marcello Fiocco (Irvine) -- profiled at CHE
(previously)
Sexual misconduct by political theorist Gopal Balakrishnan (Santa Cruz) -- alleged in several accounts
"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
"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)
The wishes of the dead -- Barry Lam (Vassar) is featured on WAMC's Academic Minute
"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"
Interviews as assignments in philosophy courses -- how Stephanie Jenkins (Oregon State) does it
New cognitive biases poster -- now with definitions (and more entries)
The best philosophy books for beginners -- suggestions from several philosophers
"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
Ask Rivka Weinberg anything -- the philosopher (at Scripps) will be on Reddit this morning
"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
"Searching for Logic" is an open source logic textbook that focuses on searching for information, rather than deduction -- from Adam Morton (UBC)
"Things male academics have said to me" -- a list
Hume, the world's worst detective (EC)
Last year's Thanksgiving post -- on gratitude
"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
"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)
To reduce corruption in college sports, tell the truth -- says Samuel Gorovitz (Syracuse)
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"
The geography of political philosophy -- an interactive map from OUP
A graphic novel defending open borders is in the works -- by economist Bryan Caplan (GMU) and cartoonist Zach Weinersmith (SMBC) (via Jason Brennan)
The "hidden curriculum" of "unfortunate attitudes and practices" professors teach their grad students -- thoughts from Steven M. Cahn (CUNY)
"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
The difference between pedophilia and child sexual abuse, and why it's important -- commentary from Brian Earp (Yale)
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 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)
"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)
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)
"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
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)
Dine with Kant -- Alix Cohen (Edinburgh) is hosting
The philosophy of friendship… with animals -- John Hadley (Western Sydney) discusses it at The Philosopher's Zone
The humor in Wittgenstein's philosophy -- by David Egan (Hunter College)
Philosophers on the collective action problem of tax competition -- Danielle Wenner and Kevin Zollman (CMU) in the NYT (via LKB)
Varieties of time travel -- in assorted works of fiction (via Kottke)
"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
"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 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."
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
Do's and don'ts for the "personal statement" part of your philosophy grad school application -- from Geoff Pynn (NIU)
Have you heard The Pansychist? -- it's a philosophy podcast out of the UK with over 35,000 listeners a week
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 lies and the truth about "sex, love, and the aging woman" --Martha Nussbaum (Chicago) in the NYT's The Stone
"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"
More than just grade inflation -- the problems with grading at American colleges
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
"Labels of Love" -- the podcast series from Carrie Jenkins (UBC)
Who needs truth? -- Catherine Elgin (Harvard) describes her deontological approach to epistemology
"Waiter, there's a beetle in my soup" -- a philosopher creates a video game based on soup and Wittgenstein
"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
The Philosophical Rasika Report -- where grad students should go to study Indian philosophy
The favorite Twitter feeds of philosophers who themselves have at least 1000 Twitter followers -- if you don't already, follow Daily Nous
Writer's block? -- it's not necessarily an obstacle to publication
"Who is this French woman Kant is discussing?" -- Andrew Janiak (Duke) on women in early modern philosophy
"Poly" is hot -- in political philosophy
Ethics, the environment, and the future -- an interview with John Broome (Oxford)
"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)
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
Grade inflation and ageism -- a case for dropping transcript requirements from philosophy job applications
"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)
The "thinker theory" of free speech -- Seana Shiffrin discusses her theory of free speech on the latest "Why We Argue"
"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."
"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?)
"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
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
"Meritocracy was once a progressive force… but its historical moment has passed" -- against merit: a reading list
Not "the most fashionable philosophers" -- an interview with Mark Textor (KCL) about his work on Frege, Bolzano and Brentano
"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
"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
Punk rock philosophy -- a new series of posts by Roy T. Cook (Minnesota) at Aesthetics for Birds
"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)
"Pointlessness is terrible. Life is pointless, and that is really not ok." -- an interview with Rivka Weinberg (Scripps)
"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
"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"
"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)
"We wouldn't have all these problems… ...if people just learned to be more logical and science-driven."
Kant: Are you guys talking about snack mix? Glaucon: But of course. Join us.
"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
Understanding and operationalizing curiosity -- in order to program artificial intelligence to be curious
The aesthetic aspect of means-end rationality -- an unnecessarily but amusingly complicated argument from Elijah Millgram (Utah)
What makes for good advice? -- the Open Questions podcast discusses this with Eric Wiland (Missouri - St. Louis) and advice columnist Ellie Tesher
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
Next time you feel bad about how you're spending your time -- especially if you're a utilitarian
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
What is mental health? -- Anna Alexandrova (Cambridge) on the complicated concept
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
Blade Runner: "manna from heaven to a philosopher teaching personal identity" -- Helen Beebee (Manchester) explains
"The alt-right is drunk on bad readings of Nietzsche" -- Sean Illing at Vox
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
Naturalism in philosophy is not on the wane -- but Maarten Boudry (Ghent) explains why it may seem that it is
Academia's focus on "excellence" discourages both intellectual risk-taking and 'normal science' (via Adriel Trott's blog, The Trott Line)
A philosophy professor and his class collaborate with an art museum for an exhibit -- "The Meaning of Life: Visual Analogy"
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
Are erections voluntary? -- Nomy Arpaly (Brown) on adjusting credences and, uh, "believing at pill?"
"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
"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 want to do democracy right, we need sometimes to do something else entirely" -- words of wisdom from Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)
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 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
Should we redefine statistical significance? -- philosophers take up the question at The Brains Blog
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 ↑ )
Philosophers discuss Blade Runner -- in Smithsonian Magazine
How to make good use of political polarization -- experimentation via contests
If there are "creatures that know what they are doing but do not know why" -- the orthodox view in philosophy of action is wrong
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)
One of Richard Rorty's last interviews -- it aired live on KZSU in November, 2005
Bharath Vallabha has a new blog -- "Cosmic Awareness"
The moral problems of driverless cars (and trolleys, etc.) -- a whole episode of Radiolab on them
"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)
Thinking of starting a philosophy blog? -- read this first
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!
The philosophical issues in Star Trek -- how Star Trek really did "boldly go where no show has gone before"
"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)
"Embodiment" in philosophy of religion -- one of several topics covered in an interview with Ola Sigurdson (Gothenburg)
Derek Parfit submitted a draft of a paper to Philosophy & Public Affairs the day before he died -- It has just been published.
"Everybody is somebody's fault…" -- ask the ever-interesting philosopher Rivka Weinberg anything, even "unfair questions"
"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"
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
"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
"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
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 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"
"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
What questions does string theory answer? Which does it leave unanswered? -- a talk by James Ladyman (Bristol)
Libertarianism vs. meritocracy -- libertarianism doesn't take merit seriously, argues Thomas Mulligan (Georgetown)
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"
Retracting philosophy articles: are there more than just procedural grounds for it? -- Eric Schliesser comments
"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
The way modern academia measures research achievement means that some of the worst articles are the most successful -- "how academia has been hacked"
The Illusions Index -- a resource for deceiving your senses (via Umut Baysan)
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
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)
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 Eagles' Don Henley and filmmaker Ken Burns are Thoreau fans -- and Burns has made a short film about the philosopher
The Bertrand Russell archive at McMaster University will have a new home -- "the archive is the largest available on Russell anywhere"
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
"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
"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"
Awesomeness and suckiness -- a conversation with Nick Riggle (San Diego) at the WMFA podcast
"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)
"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)
Philosophobia: a new philosophy podcast -- from Steve Tatlow (Durham University)
"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
The Origins and Implications of White Nationalism in the U.S. -- a faculty panel at Brown University
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
Minds Online starts today -- it's an open access, online conference on topics in the philosophy and science of mind
Donald Trump and American plutocracy -- an interview with Hans Sluga (Berkeley) - starts near the 8:00 mark
A philosopher looks at the self-help slogan "live in the present" -- there's an insight in there, says Kieran Setiya (MIT)
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)
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..."
"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
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"
New blog on philosophical questions about imagination and fiction -- check out "Thinking About Fiction" from Kathleen Stock (Sussex)
Michael Dummett's grammar advice -- graded by linguist Geoffrey Pullum (Edinburgh) at CHE
Grading rubrics for philosophy courses -- Christina Hendricks (UBC) has some examples and is looking for more
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
12 things to love about philosophical logic -- Greg Restall (Melbourne) introduces a series of posts at his blog
"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)
"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
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
"I love women" -- empirical psychological research on implicit bias doesn't---and couldn't---live up to its billing, argue two philosophers
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)
A list of philosophical questions -- with each linked to a podcast discussing it
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"
Don't fight hate -- says David Livingston Smith (New England)
What is it for something to be alive? -- it's not an easy question, as Marc Lange (UNC) explains
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
"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
"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
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)
Does the peeping Tom who is never discovered harm his victims? -- David Boonin (Colorado) takes up the question at "What's Wrong?"
What it feels like to be in Houston -- Anne Jacobson (Houston), flooded in but fine, reports
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)
Philosophy is about questioning assumptions -- so philosophers should attend to one of the big ones, says Jennifer Scuro (New Rochelle): ableism
Which item in your office would you save from a fire? -- various academics respond
Should epistemology be part of the pre-college curriculum? -- it's "something all other subjects contain but do not properly address"
Onora O’Neill on trust, politics, and philosophy -- Nietzsche and Moore are problems, says the "unrepentant, card-carrying old Kantian"
Hume on punching Nazis -- look at the bigger picture, he would counsel
"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"
Finland's black metal music scene is into philosophy -- for example, the band Verge is partial to a Williams-like critique of Kant
"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
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"
A link to more philosophy links -- at Omnivore (via Saba Bazargan-Forward)
How Kant's ethics goes wrong, in 1000 words -- Nomy Arpaly (Brown) on Kant and well-being
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
The surprising significance of two random-looking shapes -- on fruitful classification in mathematics (for your "reality is counterintuitive" file)
Statue removal efforts hit philosophy -- conservatives in Turkey want a statue of Diogenes taken down
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
"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
Should journals publish work by graduate students? -- the discussion continues at Inside Higher Ed
The latest on the lawsuit against Laura Kipnis -- a memo in opposition to her motion to dismiss has been filed
"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)
Steps towards measuring the virtues -- on developing a scale of intellectual humility
"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)
As you plan for the upcoming semester -- don't forget to plan for having a life outside of work
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?
"The enormous, singular joke of our epoch is not funny" -- Justin E. H. Smith (University of Paris) on theories of humor
New philosophy blog of interviews with early-career legal and moral philosophers -- from Lucas Miotto (Edinburgh)
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
A student draws portraits of philosophers in the style of "cute anime boys"
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
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
"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)
The Franz Kafka video game -- now available for your iPhone, etc.
On the value of studying "minor" figures in the history of philosophy -- how to address those who are skeptical
"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."
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"
Nomy Arpaly (Brown) now has her own blog -- it's called "The View From The Owl's Roost"
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)
Two philosophers shortlisted for the 2017 Royal Society Science Book Prize (via Holly Lawford Smith)
"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?
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"
Philosophy journal corrects the official record regarding articles by Bruce Le Catt (via Michael Dougherty)
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?"
Race and philosophy -- an interview with Charles Mills (CUNY)
There will be no new posts at "Philosopher" -- but creator Meena Krishnamurthy (Michigan) says existing posts will remain up
Sometimes it seems that doing the right thing is impossible -- because sometimes it is, says Lisa Tessman (Binghamton)
A good, online, interactive game theory game -- a cool teaching tool (via Victor Kumar)
Wittgenstein fan tags monument in Chicago -- I suppose the spray paint does make a kind of "shhhh" sound
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
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
Deaths in the Iliad: an infographic -- including "stand-out performances in battle" (via Daniel O'Connell)
Some questions in the philosophy of wine -- a conversation with Barry Smith (U. of London)
The science of redefining the kilogram -- since the original has "gained weight"
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
"Why is the bathroom ground zero?" -- Jean Kazez (SMU) on the Texas bathroom bill
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
Beyond the "naive view" of the problem with fake news -- from Neil Levy (Macquarie)
French psychoanalysist, philosopher, & essayist Anne Dufourmantelle drowns in attempt to rescue children -- she is the author of, among other things, "In Praise of Risk"
A journey with Rorty -- one of several essays on him in the LARB (see "related" for others)
"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)
"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
"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
The philosophy of free speech at work when people protest certain speakers -- Jason Stanley (Yale) at The Philosopher's Zone
Settling that Russell thing once and for all (don't miss the mouseover text)
"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
Which heretic are you? -- a quiz based on Steven and Ben Nadler’s graphic novel account of the seventeenth-century thinkers (via Rob Tempio)
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
When philosophers invent problems (SMBC)
Should policy-relevant researchers stay out of politics? -- thoughts on academic research, political change, and the connection between them
"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
"Two major methodological challenges arise equally in contemporary cosmology and particle physics" -- Michela Massimi (Edinburgh) in The Guardian
"When you ask why he didn’t show up to your party, he says there are four causes" -- if famous philosophers were your friends
"The objects it creates might only be virtual, but the challenges it raises are all too real" -- the ethics and politics of augmented reality
"Is life a worthwhile risk?" -- Rivka Weinberg (Scripps) on the environmental factors relevant to that question
The trailer for the Amartya Sen documentary -- and India's Central Board of Film Certification's censorship of certain words in it
The ontological argument -- for the existence of Batman
"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)
Which students study the most? -- philosophy majors are third on the list
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
"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.
A philosophical novel based on Descartes' Meditations -- and the story behind it
"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)
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
A brief history of beauty (via Aesthetics for Birds)
A primer on Althusser -- via an interview with William Lewis (Skidmore)
"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
"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 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)
"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)
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)
The philosophical French president -- he studied under Ricoeur (via John McCumber)
These philosophers are doing their part to keep philosophy cool (via Colin Ruloff)
Good and bad arguments -- Trudy Govier (Lethbridge) talks with Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt) at Why We Argue
The "private government" that rules over most of us -- an interview with Elizabeth Anderson (Michigan)
"I certainly don’t have any plans" to eliminate the Center for Thomistic Studies -- says the new president of St. Thomas, Houston
Socrates' idea of a perfectly just city -- discussed by MM McCabe (KCL) on BBC Radio
How to talk to famous professors -- including "five time-tested approaches"
What it's like to chair a philosophy department -- reflections from Ronald Sundstrom (San Francisco)
Derrida and analytic philosophy -- does "Derrida undermine... the ground beneath the projects analytic metaphysicians pursue"?
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
Archaeologists discover fully intact 17th-Century belief system -- in an Ohio Congressman
Is the "open-endedness" of modern life a problem to be solved? -- Patricia Marino (Waterloo) raises the question
A defense of majoring in philosophy -- in The Washington Post
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)
On seeing a color you couldn't imagine before -- Neil Sinhababu (NUS) tries on color-correction glasses
Schopenhauer has a bad flight (via Micah Bailey)
The sex life and sexual ideas of Augustine -- in The New Yorker
"In response to growing anti-intellectualism and hostility towards philosophy, a crack team of the deadliest philosophers ever assembled was formed…" (EC)
Some perspective on human knowledge and the earning of a PhD -- an illustration (kind of an internet-age classic)
How a medieval bishop clamped down on Aristotle scholars and spurred multiverse theory -- in our world, at least
"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
New mini-philosophy course based on Game of Thrones at University of Glasgow -- unfortunately not called "I drink and I know things"
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"
"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
"Public universities have sunk into economic frailty over the last decades" -- who or what can save them?
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)
Before you teach your students the Monty Hall Problem -- teach the Mosteller Hall puzzle
"Writing advice to my students that would have also been good sex advice for my high school boyfriends" -- from Helena de Bres (Wellesley)
Five volumes of Bentham's correspondence are now available in open access form -- here's the link to the first (via Phil Baker)
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
What is a good death? -- reflections from Luc Bovens (LSE)
"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)
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
Philosophical theses you have never seen because they're extremely weak -- though they are frequently funny
The graphic (novel) account of Spinoza's Theological Political Treatise -- from Ben Nadler and Steven Nadler
Explaining philosophy with humor -- Tom Cathcart and Daniel Klein on the Philosophy Bakes Bread podcast
"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)
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
"Things that ought to be impossible actually aren’t" -- the study of "near-miss mathematics"
Pyramids and Tubes -- Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) compares different shapes academia can take
"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)
"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)
The extended cognition of spiders (via Robert Long)
"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
Might we benefit animals by eating them? -- a lecture by Jeff McMahan (Oxford)
Defending liberal toleration as a response to moral and social diversity -- Peter Balint (UNSW Canberra) in conversation with Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)
With so much information about philosophy programs and philosophers now readily accessible, do we still need rankings? -- David Sobel (Syracuse) raises the question
"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"
So you want to be a public philosopher? -- Carrie Jenkins (UBC) has some ideas, advice, and strategies for you
Does voter ignorance undermine democracy? -- Ilya Somin (George Mason) and Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt) discuss
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)
"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
Noam Chomsky, the"American Socrates" -- interview, information, illustration, a musical tribute (?) and more
A new blog with a focus on African philosophy -- from Omedi Ochieng (Denison)
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
"Be open to surprises" -- a brief interview with Christopher Hamilton (KCL) on our era of app-enabled love
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
"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"
"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"
Why is there beauty in nature? -- because it's adaptive? Richard Prum (Yale) thinks we shouldn't assume so.
"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)
"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"
Philosophy instructor arrested for striking a Trump supporter in the head with a bicycle u-lock -- his most recent class? "Introduction to Ethics"
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)
How to prepare for graduate school while poor -- a wiki guide
"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
"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)
"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
"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"
"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
"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"
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)
"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
Interviews with philosophers, centered around their reading -- Luciano Floridi, David Papineau, Massimo Pigliucci, Angie Hobbs, and others
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)
"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
How to turn children into "bullshit detectors" -- the experimental work of Andy Oxman (via Timothy O'Keefe)
"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
Writing Referee Reports: A Beginner's Guide -- from Lewis Powell (Buffalo)
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..."
Philosophy, Stoicism, and the military mindset -- Nancy Sherman (Georgetown) is a guest on a veteran's podcast
"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
"The Socratics and the Anti-Socratics" -- the Tuvel controversy and competing conceptions of philosophical expertise
Trouble with peer review -- some notable historical examples
"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
A new, free, online logic textbook -- by Craig DeLancey (SUNY Oswego)
"Which Field Is More F*cked: Philosophy or Psychology?" -- the Very Bad Wizards discuss
The ethics of "awesome" -- an interview with philosophers and former professional rollerblader Nick Riggle (San Diego)
What did Tommy Curry (Texas A&M) really say? -- a closer look at the raw material of the recent controversy
"Epistemological insiderism" -- a sociologist on the Tuvel controversy, in the NYT
On the lawsuit against Kipnis and the arguments in her book (and see the links towards the end of the post)
Attending a philosophy conference remotely -- a brief look at the whats, hows, pros, and cons
Defending the reality of time -- an interview with Tim Maudlin (NYU)
"The descriptive and normative are inextricably intermingled" -- Doris, Machery, and Stich on the relevance of psychology to ethics
30 tattoos of Socrates -- really
Philosophy, lactose-intolerance, and the biology of race -- a discussion with Quayshawn Spencer (U Penn)
A philosophical symposium on "Black Lives Matter" -- in the recent issue of the Journal of Political Philosophy
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 rather careful look at a part of Laura Kipnis's book -- at a new philosophy blog, Epistepocalypse
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
"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)
If the professor gives the students higher marks, the students return the favor -- another problem with student evaluations of teaching
"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
The most entertaining history of the world video (with brief mentions of some philosophers)
Not nice. Not necessary. Not sexy. -- John Corvino (Wayne State) on racial preferences on dating apps/sites
"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"
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"
"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)
"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)
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?
"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)
"Unsubstantiated claims about unspecified harms" -- José Luis Bermúdez (Texas A&M) on the Hypatia controversy
U. Wisconsin grad students start philosophy outreach program -- "We believe that no matter what you are doing, philosophy can help you do it better"
The philosophical lesson in the claim that giraffes are taller than ants -- from David Detmer (Purdue)
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
"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
A map of philosophy -- video version (via @anitaleirfall)
and an image of the whole map
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"
"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 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)
An "inclusive bibliography on race, gender, and related topics" -- a Google doc created in response to the Hypatia controversy
There are more pragmatists than you might have thought -- all about pragmatism, with Cheryl Misak (Toronto)
"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."
"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
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)
"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"
Which philosopher is still important to you today? -- interviews with folks on the street in Germany (in German w/ subtitles)
"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)
"I would rather do anything else than grade your Final Papers" (only a year old, but already timeless)
Martha Nussbaum's Jefferson Lecture will be livestreamed tonight (May 1st) -- 7:35 Eastern Time
"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)
"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
"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
"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
There were 704 submissions to the APA's Philosophy Through Fiction contest -- and the winner was just announced
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"
A new series of characteristically wonderful short videos from John Corvino (Wayne State) -- on religious liberty and discrimination (watch past the credits!)
"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)
New: The Australasian Philosophical Review -- the first issue is now out (click on the blue T & F Online button)
"I want my mommy" -- teaching philosophy to kids isn't that easy
Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale… about the value of professors?
"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
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?
"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
More on that "negative mass" fluid mentioned last week in the Heap -- perhaps not as wild as we might have thought (via Alex Grzankowski)
"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"
"You don’t need to feel like you’re succeeding" -- and other ways to figure out whether academia is for you
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)
Article attributed to disabled man Anna Stubblefield was found guilty of sexually assaulting is retracted -- but not, perhaps, for the reason you might think
"A joke is basically syllogistic" -- comedians Kenny and Keith Lucas, aka the Lucas Brothers, read a lot of philosophy
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)
"I hadn’t even noticed she was being talked over" -- a philosophy undergrad reflecting on her professor calling out interruptions
In philosophy of science, will increased scientific specialization crowd out the philosophy? -- Celso Neto (Calgary) on the future of philosophy of science
Physicists develop a fluid with "negative mass": the harder you push it away, the faster it accelerates towards you -- file under: reality > intuition
"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 (◔_◔)
"Just because the jokes you tell never change, doesn't mean that nothing does" (EC)
"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
"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
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)
"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
"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
"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
What was the universe like before The Big Bang? -- some speculation from Sean Carroll and others
They work. But we don't know quite how. -- on our understanding of current artificial intelligence
"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"
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!
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)
Kurt Vonnegut's writing advice -- culled from several sources
"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"
When did modern philosophy begin? -- Steven Nadler (Wisconsin) on A.C. Grayling's The Age of Genius
"Public intellectuals are necessary to filter the quality thinkers from the charlatans" -- Daniel Drezner (Tufts) on public intellectuals, thought leaders, & the marketplace of ideas
Moroccan gov't to revise philosophy textbooks in response to philosophers' charge that they "distorted" philosophy towards Islamic extremism
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)
Philosophical questions about emoji -- at Aesthetics for Birds
Consequences, rights, and uncertainty -- a publicly-oriented discussion w/ David Owens (KCL), activist Gita Sahgal, and Sebastian Farquhar (Ctr. Effective Altruism)
Fascinating questions about and insights into the morality of war -- from Saba Bazargan-Forward (UCSD)
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"
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"
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
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)
A philosophy professor and his students create an interactive film -- "Black Coffee" premieres April 21st
“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)
"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?
"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
"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
"There is much less of a connection between reasons and rationality than many people assume" -- an interview with John Broome (Oxford)
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"
"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)
How to write a doctoral dissertation -- advice from Robert Paul Wolff (from a few years back)
The philosophy tool kit -- Alan Hájek (ANU) with a primer for non-philosophers on what philosophical reasoning is like
Norms in the wild -- Cristina Bicchieri (University of Pennsylvania) talks about group behavior and social norms with Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)
In defense of fanciful thought experiments -- Patrick Lin (Cal Poly) at Forbes
The Bentham Seminars -- now available for download
"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
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
"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
Hateful language, lack of imagination, and the politics of fear -- David Livingstone Smith (University of New England) and Kwame Anthony Appiah (NYU) discuss
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)
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.
Do ants do things for reasons? Keshav Singh (UNC) takes a close look
"The self is empirically tractable," so it should be getting more attention in psychiatry -- thoughts from Şerife Tekin (Daemen College)
"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
What to think when you're accused of ableism -- well, it's probably partly true, says Eric Schwitzgebel (UCR)
Asking Matthew Liao anything about asking him anything -- at the Blog of the APA
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)
The "Philosophers' Ships" -- Lenin's name for the boats by which he exiled philosophers and other academics, students, journalists, and other intellectuals
"Asymmetrical polarization" -- political polarization happens, but not evenly across the political spectrum
An interview with hip-hop artist and philosophy major Olmeca -- by two philosophy students at the Univ. of Puget Sound
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
Do species have intrinsic value? -- Ross Barham (Melbourne) thinks Schopenhauer might help with that question
All ravens are black… or are they?
1 out of every 46 Americans are in prison, on parole, or probation -- Chris Surprenant (New Orleans) discusses mass incarceration
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
A trolley case in the idiom of ancient Chinese philosophy -- and how Mo Zi would respond to it
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
The philosophy of ruins -- the work of Elizabeth Scarbrough (FIU)
"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
Philosophy, Nazism, and Evil -- a discussion at The Forum
A 700+ page historical novel about Socrates and ancient Greece -- written in Spanish
An open-source "intro to reasoning" text -- what should be added to it?
"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
"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)
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?
"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)
What it will take for philosophy departments to give teaching more than just lip service -- thoughts from Steven Cahn (CUNY)
In praise of hierarchy -- a forum with Angle, Appiah, Baggini, Bell, Berggruen, Fraenkel, Risse, Romano, Tiwald, Wang, and others
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"
"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?
The role of philosophy in the creation of the computer -- in The Atlantic (via Daniel Fogal)
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
"Yoga is the practical element of a complex philosophical worldview" -- says Lisa Miracchi (Pennsylvania)
How rational is our rationality? -- an interview with Miriam Schoenfield (Texas)
Think of philosophy for kids as a kind of inoculation against indoctrination
Edgar Allen Poe was "at once more rationalistic and more pathological" than the Transcendentalists -- Using Emerson to understand Poe
"You can fake protest" -- Eric Schliesser on the faculty complaints "about students who have not yet resigned themselves to a life of quiet despair"
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
Consider the ant -- in case you were thinking about, say, eating them, says Cheryl Abbate (Colorado)
"Is Reason a Neutral Tool in Comparative Philosophy?" -- a forum with Jonardon Ganeri, Mustafa Abu Sway, Paul Boghossain, Georgina Stewart (via Omnivore)
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?
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"
Time, philosophy of action, free will, and more -- an interview with Roman Altshuler (Kutztown)
"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
A philosopher's arguments against bans on faculty-student relationships -- in Times Higher Education
The "Passions of Philosophers outside Philosophy" (PoPoP) series -- philosophers share their non-philosophy hobbies at the Philosophers' Cocoon
Happy 2588th birthday, Lao Zi, we got you a 5 ton cake -- more "whoa" than "wu wei"
"Information respect" and shopping -- philosopher Evan Selinger (RIT) asks communications prof Joseph Turow (Annenberg) a few questions
What can a philosopher tell you about toxic chemicals? -- ask Carl Cranor (UCR)
A collection of influential essays by J.L. Austin (et al) from Aristotelian Society publications -- accessible for free (for the month)
An economist looks at the emergence, consequences, and remedies for market power in scholarly publishing, in a new free book (via MR)
The real difference between analytic and Continental philosophers (via @MetaEpistemic)
When a student cries -- remember that "not all tears are equal"
The group writing retreat -- an approach to getting the words out
Can Kierkegaard help us understand Trump? -- Katalin Balog (Rutgers-Newark) thinks so
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)
"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
"Exercises in systematic, dishonest misunderstandings of the claims made by their supposed targets" -- Samir Chopra (Brooklyn) on recent remarks by Dennett and Williamson
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.
Ram Neta (UNC) discusses ants and philosophy -- at The Daily Ant
The libertarian case for "safe spaces" -- they're manifestations of freedom of association
What Plato's Republic tells us about today's politics -- and the attempt to make the people "drones without stings," from Jill Frank (Cornell)
Sartre vs. Camus -- the artful animation of the conflict and friendship between the two philosophers
"The aim of historic restoration is not to recover material authenticity, but to restore our relationship with the past" -- argues Erich Hatala Matthes (Wellesley)
Are creativity and psychopathology intimately related? -- there's empirical research that suggests they are
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"
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
"A Vote Of No Confidence in Trump's Epistemic Abilities" -- a petition directed at Paul Ryan and the RNC (via PhilPercs)
A mini-conference on inclusion and diversity in philosophy will be taking place at the Pacific APA
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
"The neglect of the history of philosophy journals is a neglect of central philosophical questions" argues Joel Katzav (Queensland)
21 versions of the basic computer game, "Snake," each with its own philosophical theme -- some are clever and amusing
The multiverse and the problem of evil -- thoughts from Dean Zimmerman (Rutgers)
"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
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
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"
Giant neuron around the circumference of mouse brains found -- along with giant speculation about its significance
Finance and trading strategies based on the ideas of Thales? (possibly for the abuse of philosophers file)
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
When does an action harm someone? -- join the discussion at PEA Soup
A social contract theory for a diverse world -- Ryan Muldoon (Buffalo) talks political philosophy with Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)
What does singer-songwriter José González listen to "to keep him sane when he's on the road"? -- a philosophy podcast (NYT)
Finding value in moral reasoning based on false premises -- thoughts from Elizabeth Anderson (Michigan)
"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
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
Physicist Sean Carroll and Buddhist scholar Alan Wallace have a chat about the nature of reality
Interviews with philosophers and others working on "consciousness and its altered states" -- from the Alius research group
"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?"
Philosophers write about ants -- a new weekly series at The Daily Ant blog (via Kathyrn Pogin)
Peter Singer answers twenty questions -- in the Journal of Practical Ethics
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
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)
Is mathematics going to "blow up"? -- incompleteness, infinity, and emulation theory
The philosophy of Westworld -- the latest Wisecrack video (spoilers)
"Nevertheless, She Persisted" -- ancient philosophy edition
It's a job in philosophy, but it looks pretty bad -- should you take it?
Poisoning the wells of reasoned public discourse -- Alexander George (Amherst) on our "forger in chief"
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
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)
"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
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
"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)
"A brief defence of paying attention to… biographical details of the authors we study" -- a case for "moderate historicism" from Liam Kofi Bright (CMU)
Tim Robbins will play a philosophy professor in a new HBO series -- from the creator of Six Feet Under and True Blood
"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
Does this little argument about consciousness bug you? -- why?
The "mash-up" song genre raises questions in aesthetics, metaphysics, law, and music theory -- and makes for an excellent episode of Hi-Phi Nation
Influential economist Kenneth Arrow has died -- known for his "impossibility theorem," among other ideas
Are university presses publishing fewer humanities monographs? -- or is more aiming for "the broadest possible readership" just pushing books out of the monograph category?
Why are we so committed to the idea of moral responsibility? -- a symposium on a skeptical take
Work-life balance in academia -- some coping mechanisms
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"
The pattern underlying several well-known paradoxes -- and some new ones, too
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
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
"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)
All about Habermas -- a review of a new biography of the philosopher
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"
Utilitarianism, liberalism, and the alleged need for campus conservatives -- John Holbo (NUS) continues his trenchant critique of Jonathan Haidt's "heterodoxy"
Women in early analytic philosophy -- four articles in a special issue of the Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy
A discussion of artificial superintelligence, consciousness, and related topics -- Nick Bostrom, David Chalmers, Ray Kurzweil, Elon Musk, and others
"You've been self-treating your depression all these years with philosophy" -- an interview with Whitney Mutch (Alabama)
Trump's Razor -- move over, Ockham
"It does take courage" to be a conservative student on a liberal campus -- "but don’t compare disagreement with your ideas to suppression"
Peter Singer on what it means to do philosophy -- and related topics. And surfing.
"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
Charles Taylor (McGill) tempers his secularism after mosque shooting (was the choice of photo cleverness or just luck?)
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)
Ethics in the news and culture -- have you checked out The Prindle Post lately?
WhatTheFuckJustHappenedToday.com -- helpful
Is human nature fundamentally good? -- a sketch of an argument from Eric Schwitzgebel (UCR)
"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"
PhilPapers has a new look -- and is more mobile-friendly
"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
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
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
"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
Thomas Pogge, trigger warnings, and the space of reasons -- Daniel Tippens on the conflict of moral and epistemic values
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
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
One minute time machine: a love story of sorts -- video, possibly NSFW for sexual language (via Massimo Pigliucci)
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
"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 radio program on Parfit -- The Philosopher's Zone, in Australia
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)
Philosophy and philosophical implications of quantum mechanics -- very interesting interview with Peter Lewis (Miami)
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."
"The secret to happiness is find something bigger than you and devote your life to it" -- says Daniel Dennett
"Star Wars and Philosophy": the open-access short course -- offered by the University of Glasgow
More on what the left can learn from Richard Rorty -- at Vox
"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
"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"
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)
"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
A statue of Socrates will be installed in the EU's Court of Justice which houses art from all over Europe
Teach curiosity -- it may be society's only hope
Nussbaum on "Hamilton" (the musical) and political virtue -- with commentary from others, at Boston Review
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
Rosi Braidotti (Utrecht) will be delivering the 2017 Tanner Lectures -- her topic: "Posthuman, All Too Human"
Trump's bullshitting and why it's so problematic
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"
How ordinary Americans carried out inhumane acts for Trump -- life in Milgram experiments, first for gov't employees, then for the rest of us
"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)
"Uncompromising internalism" about the mental -- an interesting and informative interview of Katalin Farkas (CEU)
"Politeness calls for the interaction of the mind and the heart" -- Henri Bergson on the varieties of politeness
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)
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
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?")
"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
"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
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
"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
"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
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)
Charles Taylor interviewed on the Quebec Mosque shooting and Trump's Immigration Order
Polyamory and the philosophy and biology of love -- a profile of Carrie Jenkins (UBC)
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
The ethics of artificial intelligence -- Amazon, Google, Facebook, IBM, Apple, and Microsoft are working on it, together
Varieties of ignorance -- Thomas Hofweber (UNC) on ineffable facts
"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)
The moral failure that is Trump's immigration order -- Joseph Carens (Toronto) interviewed at Vox
The Journal of Philosophy and modern Indian philosophy in the 20th Century -- and analytic philosophers' silence about marginalization
“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)
Truth "is essentially circular; there is no non-circular way of giving an extensionally adequate definition of truth" -- an interview with Anil Gupta (Pittsburgh)
Is desert making a come back in political philosophy? -- Fred Feldman (UMass) talk with Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt))
"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
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
"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."
"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."
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
Cornell philosophy PhD student Philippe Lemoine has a new blog -- focused mainly, so far, on political issues
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?
The "Lego Brain" challenge to physicalism -- from Gordon Hawkes (Calgary)
Philosophical writing by current and former students on current affairs and philosophy -- "Undercurrent Philosophy"
What is a sexual orientation? If it involves sexual desires, what's a sexual desire? -- thoughts from Esa Diaz-Leon (Barcelona)
The trolley graveyard (maybe not what you're thinking)
Alternative facts and Quinean holism -- Alan Jay Levinovitz (JMU) at Vox
"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
"Evolution did not design us to solve or even recognize this kind of problem" -- Dale Jamieson (NYU) on climate change
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?
A step-by-step interactive walk through of Plato's Euthyphro -- via Don Barker
"He is a baboon flinging shit at the liberal tradition and the liberal order" -- libertarianism and Trump
What is mathematical explanation and what are its limits? -- Charles McCarty (Indiana) explains (via Omnivore)
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)
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 first episode of the new Hi-Phi Nation podcast is out today -- on the wishes of the dead
"Donald Trump will complete the system of German Idealism… ...Hegel couldn't do it, Schelling couldn't do it, Fichte couldn't do it!" (via Kris McDaniel)
"The problem is philosophers who read only philosophy written and published in English" -- on the hegemony of the English language in contemporary philosophy
Why did Indian philosophy stop appearing in Mind and Phil Review? -- Joel Katzav (Queensland) investigates
A year's worth of philosophy podcast episodes -- listed in reverse chronological order
The tension at the heart of Jonathan Haidt's problem with liberal college campuses -- a good analysis from John Holbo (NUS) at Crooked Timber
"A virtual world is just as real as a physical world" -- David Chalmers (NYU) on virtual worlds, simulations, technology, and philosophy
"I used to want to be brilliant… I’m still an ambitious person… ...But the sum of my life is not my job" says Rachel Moss (Oxford)
"A Proof of the Reimann Hypothesis Utilizing the Theory of Alternative Facts" by Donald J. Trump
"Privately expressed contempt may be cathartic. Publicly expressed contempt, however, is perilous." -- Karen Stohr (Georgetown) on contempt in political discourse
"Why is wanting to look good for doing what is right a wrong reason to act?" -- Liam Kofi Bright (CMU) on moral grandstanding
Donald Trump as Lockean classical liberal? -- That's what Daniel Bonevac (Texas) thinks
And more articles by philosophers on the election at The Critique
Digital humanities fellowship for philosophers -- from the American Philosophical Society
"What might be called “anti-philosophical” forces do operate within journalism" -- an interview with journalist Joe Humphreys about his work reporting on philosophy
"The truth about post-truth" -- Kathleen Higgins (Texas), Jason Stanley (Yale) and others on CBC radio
Will Trump eliminate the NEH?
Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy issues statement on Trump -- "American philosophers have always encouraged Americans to make America greater"
Literally everything you'll ever need to know about semantic bleaching (at the pretty great Merriam Webster site)
"They boldly drink from the same well they've poisoned for everyone else…" -- on "moral grandstanding"
Efficiency, disruption, meritocracy, and the next four years -- Zac Cogley (Northern Michigan) on the influential values of Silicon valley
The idea of the multiverse is intriguing -- "but how credible is a scientific theory that might not be testable?"
A magazine called "Philosophy" is mostly not about philosophy, it seems -- but it may put fashion aside once in a while to "engage readers in discussion about the key questions facing society"
A taxonomy of philosophy graduate students (at PhilPercs)
Is that Bob Dylan singing about trolley problems? -- No, it's Wayne Norman (Duke)
A night of philosophy (and weird see-saws?) in Brooklyn -- Boghossian, Caruso, Chalmers, Colapietro, Critchley, Fatima, Gendler, Gotlib---that's just up to the g's---and many more on the program
MM McCabe (KCL) on her life, work, Trump, and more -- in a short but good interview on BBC Radio 4
"The reason why I think interpreters like the principle of charity is that it makes it seem as though we don’t have to choose between these two ways of reading." -- thoughts from Tom Stern (UCL) on the problem with the principle of charity
Potential grizzly bear attacks justify guns in schools says Betsy DeVos, Trump's nominee for Secretary of Education
"This is not about partisanship… this is about our very capacity for self-governance." -- "we will always be the country that elected Donald Trump as President. And... 'some things, you just can’t apologize for.'"
Philosophers discuss implicit bias and the recent critiques of the IAT -- at The Brains Blog
"Determine optimal amount to crack open office door in order to signal 'I am definitely here, but I definitely don’t want to talk to you'" -- and other action items on your radical professor's liberal agenda
Forbes Magazine's best science book of the year is by a philosopher -- "How Physics Makes Us Free" by Jenann Ismael (Arizona)
Philosophy organizations on Twitter -- listed in order of number of followers
The do's and don't's of defending tenure -- at IHE
Philosopher William MacAskill (Oxford) is one of Forbes Magazine's "30 Under 30" -- for his work promoting effective altruism
A "fast-paced fun-filled ethics podcast for kids and their parents" -- "Short & Curly" is currently the 16th most popular podcast in Australia
Are you having a kid while in graduate school? -- a current philosophy PhD student shares his experiences and advice
An imagined collection of drawings and notes by Spinoza -- by recently deceased critic and novelist John Berger
"You don't hear about ethics when things are going well" -- ethics in the wild: the director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics on Trump's plan regarding conflicts of interest
"The usual suggestion is that if only the press had been more strident in its condemnation, Trump’s behavior could never have been fully 'normalized.' This cliché gets everything wrong." -- Joshua Knobe (Yale) on cognitive science and "normalization" (via Eddy Nahmias)
The "positive conception" of mental health "hides moral and political ideals beneath a veneer of medical inevitability" -- Simon Keller (Victoria University) on changing conceptions of mental health
Looking back, Kant said that no progress had been made on logic since Aristotle and so thought there was no more progress in logic to be made -- he was wrong on both counts, says Catarina Dutilh Novaes (Groningen)
How a liberal arts college becomes a vocational school -- Colby-Sawyer College eliminates philosophy and English majors (via Daniel Brunson)
Hegel's love-hate relationship with Indian thought -- did he think that all of his work "culminated in no more than the very same insights articulated by distant Indian philosophers so many centuries before"?
A motorcycle accident, opioids, and bioethics -- Travis Rieder (Johns Hopkins) on the broader lessons of his withdrawal experience
What are the implications of thinking that "Math is for human flourishing"? -- a look at a neighboring discipline
"All the questions, all the caveats, all the limitations, you can’t go into that when you’re talking to a policy maker." -- Zeke Emanuel (U Penn) on education, academia, and politics
"The existing literature is laden with contradictory hypotheses and findings…" -- Alexander Krauss (LSE) on the scientific limits of understanding complex social phenomena
"Considerations relevant to the excusability or justifiability of using lethal force in the original encounter no longer apply once the victim is 'down' and obviously injured" -- Lawrence Blum (UMass Boston) on the oft-overlooked aspect of police shootings that should make BLM more comprehensible to its critics
"More fundamental disagreements are actually better for us than simply a disagreement between interests" -- Ryan Muldoon (Buffalo) on diversity and disagreement
Drawings of philosophical thought experiments -- by Helen De Cruz (Oxford Brookes)
What goes in those mathematicians' precious wastebaskets? -- that joke, that's what
(this one)
Want your students to email you sparingly and appropriately? -- try including something like this on your syllabus
"The answer to the question 'will the people tolerate authoritarian rule?' is yes, absolutely" -- Tom Pepinsky (Cornell) on "everyday authoritarianism"
Students aren't the main advocates for restrictions on academic freedom -- politicians are
Against charity in the history of philosophy -- Schwitzgebel on Adamson
What is it like to be a chicken? -- recent research on cognition, emotions, personality, and sociality in chickens (via MR)
On the point of philosophy -- the start of a series of blog posts at Scientific American
Spinoza in fiction -- his work plays a role in a novel about a teen coming of age in a racist California suburb
What can we learn from Rorty's liberal ironism? -- perhaps to be "united against the common danger of cruelty and humiliation"
Philosopher wins prize for best book manuscript "on a topic of pressing urgency to disability studies in the humanities"
Grad school survival guide -- a new series at Philosophers' Cocoon
Shelly Kagan (Yale) is interviewed about animal ethics by Katrien Devolder (Oxford)
On the idea of owning ourselves -- a discussion with John Harris (Manchester), Anne Phillips (LSE) and others
"Things Oughta Make Sense," says Louise Antony (U Mass Amherst) -- the 2016 APA Eastern Division Presidential Address
"While we may all have the capacity for philosophy, it is a capacity that requires training and cultural nudges." -- on the value of teaching philosophy to the young
How can you keep your brain working well into old age? -- use it until it hurts
The challenges of doing history of the present -- are we at (cyber)war?
Schopenhauerian existentialism for dads? -- it can generate "something that optimism typically forbids: meaningful empathy" for children
Mattel named its creepy kid version of Amazon Echo "Aristotle" -- maybe they should have gone for "Bentham"
Many disabilities are "merely ways in which bodies can be different, not ways of their being intrinsically badly off" -- Elizabeth Barnes (Virginia) in conversation with Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)
"Stereotyping leads to errors in judgement regardless of whether the stereotype that is applied reflects reality" -- Kathy Puddifoot (Birmingham) on the "accuracy" defense of stereotypes
Scam or merely "the more quotidian inattention to academic rigor that characterizes much of legitimate academia"? -- a look at "fake academia"
Reasons for antinatalism: Benatar's arguments, environmentalism, the Trump presidency -- plus thoughts from "probably the world's first and only antinatalist webcam model"
How are we doing in comparison to Thomas More's Utopia? -- hard to say, as we don't know how seriously he meant it
Ethical issues in treating alcoholism -- a discussion with Gregory Pence (UAB)
Power, language, and how racists are unicorns -- an analysis from Shen-Yi Liao (Puget Sound)
"We need to recognize that gender inequality starts when a woman tries to have children, not only after she has them." -- miscarriages and the tenure clock
"The ideals of democracy, secularism and pluralism are the crown jewels of Modern philosophy" -- but they're "buried within a great deal of... conceptual confusion and arrogance"
Reddit's upcoming "Ask Me Anything" interviews with philosophers -- mark your calendar
The ethics of big data -- a collection of links at Omnivore
A paper sculpture of Dan Dennett
"Try to show how changing facts does not necessarily mean changing worldviews" -- and other advice for helping facts play a larger role in disagreements
Tips from James, Epicurus, and Kierkegaard -- on how to keep your New Year's resolutions
Philosophy, racial inequality, and elementary school students
You may have known that Schopenhauer loved poodles (no you didn't) -- but did you know he gave them all the same name?
Philosophy described as a "perversion and blasphemy" -- in an Islamic textbook used in Morocco
"Disabled philosophers should be using their time and energy to produce quality philosophy, not using it to navigate a hostile bureaucratic process to earn the right to even enter into the discourse." -- an interview with Joseph Stramondo (San Diego State)
"There was Kuhn, on the one hand, and then the rest of the department, on the other" -- James Marcum (Baylor) on Kuhn, science, and virtuous medical practice
Against Santa -- David Livingstone Smith (University of New England)
"An artist writing about how you should think about how you live" -- the writings of Donald Judd
What it's like to talk as a bat -- "One of the call types indicates the bats are arguing about food..."
That our reasons follow our actions doesn't make them ineffectual -- thoughts from Jesse Summers (Duke)
Heidegger's correspondence with his brother -- further confirmation of his anti-Semitism
"Our faith in each other has been inexorably shattered" -- Julian Friedland (Univ. Colorado, Denver) on politics in the "harsh light of history and social psychology"
On the effect of "direction of change" on personal identity intuitions -- it seems to matter whether the changes are improvements or deteriorations
A 4D printed gun: "transcends time itself, just like the right to own one: you've had it all along" -- that and more in the libertarian holiday gift guide (via Veronica Petersen)
Dirty Secrets of Consciousness: (1) we can't define it -- a talk from David Chalmers (NYU)
True history of real trolley problems -- and the Brooklyn Dodgers
"A tension between those with a responsible risk aversion on behalf of themselves and humanity and those few daring souls who are willing to risk all to improve man's estate" -- is that how to understand the history of modern philosophy?
"The point at which it is most plausible that there is repression [of conservatism in academia] is the point at which one might think it is reasonable given general academic norms" -- a closer look at the varieties of conservatism and how they're treated in academia
Loyalty in moral philosophy, ethics in criminal justice, and other relatively overlooked issues -- John Kleinig (CUNY) is interviewed about his work
"Charles Taylor ruined my perfectly good consulting career"
Cursing in class -- "an advanced teaching technique"
Rogue One: an engineering ethics case study -- when the Force is not enough
"Identity politics isn’t really the name of a new phenomenon" and "If Black Lives Matter is “'identity politics,' then identity politics has provided one of the most significant political mobilizations in defense of freedom in the United States in my lifetime."
"There's a large gap between these visible surface features, on the one hand, and the internal lives of the people and invisible stories of places that lie behind these surface features." -- interview with philosopher-photographer Scott Walden
Brains as prediction machines -- Andy Clark (Edinburgh) in conversation with Carrie Figdor (Iowa)
Eternal recurrence wouldn't be so bad if you lived here -- a house in Venice where Nietzsche lived is for sale
You gave one lousy answer to one question in your job interview -- how bad is that?
Bye irony, hello "calm, diligent, and joyful" efforts to defend principles -- Christy Wampole (Princeton) at The Stone
"What Good Are The Humanities?" – a lecture by Talbot Brewer (Virginia) -- live-streamed Wednesday, 12/14 at 5:30pm EST
The difference between American and British letters of recommendation -- from Jonathan Birch (LSE)
"There are, and can be, no books of wisdom." -- thoughts from Claire Grant (Cambridge) at PEL (via BotAPA)
How many philosophy jobs have been advertised this season? -- turns out The Smoker is not extinguished
"When threats replace reasoned debate, truth is replaced by power." -- Jason Stanley (Yale) on democracy and the preservation of freedom
The Myth of the Unpalatable Did you know that Wilfrid Sellars is credited as the originator of the "Incompatible Food Triad" problem?
John Finnis and Germain Grisez ask Pope to affirm that “many human beings will end in hell” -- among other things
How confused is Westworld about consciousness? -- one take by Berny Belvedere (spoilers)
Bringing some of the history of logic into a Logic 101 course -- interesting idea, suggestions needed
Plato, fake news, and democracy -- David Lay Williams (DePaul) at the WP's Monkey Cage
"Abolishing the Electoral College is urgent. Democracy itself is at stake." -- Kenneth Taylor (Stanford) at Boston Review
“If you’re shameless enough, you can sell anything.” Even philosophy. -- Selling Stoicism to the masses
The use of "Open Educational Resources" in philosophy teaching -- information from Richard Zach (Calgary)
"When it comes to the contest between depth and superficiality, we are in it together." -- Talbot Brewer (Virginia) on the value of the humanities
APA establishes a new prize in aesthetics -- the Arthur Danto/American Society for Aesthetics Prize
When a professor of philosophy needed a kidney transplant, his former students volunteered -- "He taught us how to think and how to be better human beings. He was never just a teacher to many of us."
High-brow academic gossip -- from Jesse Eisenberg
What makes someone a conspiracy theorist? Joseph Heath (Toronto) has an answer
Why do we laugh? -- psychologist Robert Provine is working on that question
A non-profit open-access network for humanities scholars to share work
The two best papers in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science this year (via Elizabeth Hannon)
The young man whose criticism brought Wittgenstein back to philosophy, who Moore was nervous about lecturing to… -- this "glittering star" needs a better biography, says Ray Monk
The "Philosophy" snowboard -- designed by Jeff Koons, with a depiction of the allegory of the cave
Teaching "generic critical thinking skills" is a waste of time -- instead, "we ought to focus on subject-specific critical-thinking skills that seek to broaden a student’s individual subject knowledge"
"We should not call attention to ourselves" -- the aliens that find us will likely be AI, and so even more alien than we think, says Susan Schneider (U Conn)
A new movie with a philosophy teacher as the main character -- "Things To Come" from writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve
A poster-sized version of the Anti-authoritarian Academic Code of Conduct -- submitted by a reader
"I've got to hurry. I have about ten more years at the peak of my thinking powers." -- an extraordinary profile of Susanne Langer in The New Yorker (1960)
The next move for a long-running substantive philosophy blog? -- the future of Flickers of Freedom
"Why are women so mean?" -- and other questions Mark Alfano (Delft) comes across via predictive and prescriptive analytics
"Privilege" alternatives -- "risk" might capture some aspects of it, argues Lauren Hall (RIT)
"Post-truth": an analysis and an internal critique -- from Scott Aikin and Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)
Plans for a database of work by women philosophers for use in undergraduate courses -- at the University of Calgary
Brain size, lifespan, and evolution -- Peter Godfrey-Smith (CUNY) on what we can learn from octopuses
Being a philosopher during the Night of Philosophy in Paris -- an interview with Gregg Caruso (SUNY Corning)
"The laws of logic are constitutive norms for thought" -- Jessica Leech (Sheffield) interviewed on modality, logic, and more
What is the origin of timely quote, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing"? (via Anders Weinstein)
Billionaires and philosophers -- a get-together
"How many successful relationships do you think have started from someone saying 'you're a dickhead'?" -- Ira Glass talks with Eleanor Gordon-Smith (University of Sydney) about cat-calling
Threats to the freedom of student media -- "the advisers feared for their jobs" (via IHE)
How philosophy can address the problem of climate change -- Kieran Setiya (MIT) answers three questions
"The window of liberal democracy is closing, and the time for its vigorous defense is now." -- Jason Stanley (Yale) on the instability of democracy
More Rembrandt than any Rembrandt? Or Less? -- questions about some interesting art technology
A feminist Thoreau? -- Anne LaBastille's "argument for the availability of nature, and the wild, to the woman who chooses it"
A philosopher on the "professor watchlist" speaks out -- he will continue to teach "high stakes philosophy"
Online anonymity may be a reasonable response to the trolls in philosophy -- but what would be better is more charity all around
Martha Nussbaum doesn't get angry. Is that why she doesn't get anger? -- Amia Srinivasan (UCL) on Nussbaum's case against anger
Causation by omission for the better
The person behind Existential Comics -- an interview with Corey Mohler
The philosophy and psychology of assholery -- today (Tuesday) at 1pm Eastern time on WNPR
More on the anti-authoritarian academic code of conduct -- at Inside Higher Ed
"They just have to get you confused enough so that you don’t know what is true." -- Michael Lynch (U Conn) on the internet shell game
The social philosophy of music's economics -- thoughts from Peter Godfrey-Smith (CUNY)
How fast can you think? -- Barbara Montero (CUNY) tells us
"Tell your people in charge that if they don’t take care of their problems, they will have problems with me." -- Castro, regarding the lack of working refrigerators, as reported by Sartre
Philosophers discuss evil -- Peter Dews (Essex), Rebecca Roache (Royal Hollaway), and others
Is it ethical to punch a Nazi?
Counterpoint to ↑
Optimism and objectivity in judgment: the case of the infamous dress
New philosophy and culture blog: Ad Populum -- from Nils Stear (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) and guests
When Ryle refused to allow a review of Gellner's "Words and Things" in Mind (via L.A. Paul)
Ways of thinking about Trump's relationship to truth -- some tweets from Jacob Levy (McGill)
"No biracial philosopher would ever invent the doctrine of social constructivism, or think that there is absolutely no self" -- thoughts from Jonardon Ganeri (NYU Abu Dhabi)
Newcomb's problem discussed in The Guardian -- you can let them know if you're a one- or two-boxer
For a regime of free speech to be tolerable, people must speak up argues Carol Hay (UMass Lowell)
The first in a series of conversations on what thinking is between a literature professor and a philosopher/robot engineer
Anxiety, philosophical isolationism, the "topics now being Columbused by departments of philosophy," and more -- an interview with Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (UCLA)
Don't get distracted by Trumps buffoonery says Carol Hay (U Mass Lowell)
What does diversity mean to you? -- a survey
About Wisecrack, the LA startup behind "8-bit Philosophy" and other "unexpected entertainment that informs"
New careers for moral philosophers
"Yes, my adorable mistress, I will see you this evening even if it means losing my head on the scaffold" -- Voltaire's love life
A long-running philosophy competition for the public is looking for a good question
Are we living in Carl Schmitt's world? -- a collection of links
Possessing the quality of "obscuring the situation with analytical precision" -- What is "Kafkaesque"?
The ethics of biosocial science -- video of Tanner Lecture by Dorothy Roberts (Penn)
A solution to the Gettier problem? -- the work of Duncan Pritchard (Edinburgh) covered in Nautilus
"Quite often when things start getting really interesting in these neighbouring disciplines it’s because they are getting philosophical, whether or not this is recognized." -- an interview with Edward Harcourt (Oxford)
Can philosophy heal a "post-truth" society? -- the president of Ireland thinks so (via Joel Walmsley)
Former philosophy grad student continues to contribute to the discipline by starting his own coffee roasting business
Tocqueville on Democracy in America -- a conversation at Brown University with the PEL folks
What is the most important contemporary philosophy book that is out of print?
"The most insightful and eloquent defenders of Trump foresee a bad and bloody ending to his rule" -- Schliesser doing the dirty work
Tips on doing an evaluation of your colleagues' teaching -- from Russell DiSilvestro (CSU Sacramento)
"Soul-crushing, freedom-undermining, waste of human potential" -- against work
Assistant professors: write up the CV you want to have when you go up for tenure -- and other tips for tenure-track success
The hobo's enchiridion -- "established at the Hobo National Convention of 1889."
We're smart because we're dense -- it's not a paradox, it's brain science
From "delinquent adolescent in the rural Midwest" to Columbia University professor -- an interview with Justin Clarke-Doane
Just in time: an annotated edition of Mein Kampf (and it wins an award from the Leibniz Association)
"How I Failed Ethics," a new song by The Magnetic Fields (via Seth Mayer)
Reflections on Trump-supporting intellectuals -- from Eric Schliesser
Ignorance and the election -- a discussion among four philosophers
Croatia issues a postal stamp honoring Aristotle -- in celebration of World Philosophy Day
"All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back." -- Richard Rorty's prediction of this past election
A World Philosophy Day philosopher quote quiz -- from OUP
"I had more visitors while I lived in the woods than at any other period of my life; I mean that I had some." -- Thoreau was funnier than you remember
"Redress philosophy’s unphilosophical parochialism" -- on philosophical engagement with Buddhist thinkers
Telling humans from robots -- philosophers and others on questions raised by Westworld
What does it mean to "normalize" Trump? -- thoughts from Joshua Knobe (Yale)
Three ways to be not quite free of racism -- a taxonomy by Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside)
If you keep close tabs on current pop culture and love philosophy then you'll like Philosophy Memes for Fantastic Philistines
"Post-truth" is Oxford Dictionaries' word of the year
Vagueness basics by Timothy Williamson (Oxford) at Aeon
“Kids, you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is never try.” -- in defense of teaching a Simpsons-themed philosophy course
Scientists have been making and using human "minibrains" in a device about the size of a cell phone
Should you work for the Trump administration? -- Guess who says, in effect, "be the George"?
"If western culture were real, we wouldn’t spend so much time talking it up" -- Kwame Anthony Appiah (NYU) on cultural myths and cosmopolitanism
A look at citation and publication rates by gender in the philosophy of science -- an analysis by Evelyn Brister (RIT)
Leibniz’s way of thinking paved the way for the information age that blossomed 250 years after his death (and he designed what is perhaps the world's most beautiful calculator)
Post-election college paper grading rubric
G. A. Cohen did not want to be like Leonard Cohen -- at least not in college (via Michael Otsuka)
Regret isn't just about the past -- thoughts from Gordon Marino (St. Olaf)
Wikipedia's own (secret?) page on how all first lowercase links in Wikipedia ultimately lead to philosophy (via David Velleman)
David Papineau and Eleanor Gordon Smith discuss women in philosophy -- at the Philosopher's Zone
An "Ask Me Anything" with Stephen Puryear (NC State) -- today (Monday) at noon, eastern time
The good in illness -- thoughts from Ian J. Kidd (Nottingham)
"Most men I’ve met seem for some reason to believe that they inherently know how to fight" until someone "beats the crap out of them." Same for arguing. -- One needs to train, so study philosophy
The psychological paradoxes and vicious cycles of loneliness -- an interview with a professor of medicine and psychiatry at Imperfect Cognitions
Day 1 in Trumpland -- a collection of links
A philosophy professor / farmer on the rural white Trump voters she knows -- "there is much in these lives that does not warrant your scorn or derision"
Real world version of the original (not bystander) trolley problem / utilitarian virtue (via MR)
When it's rational to judge yourself as better than others, and when it's not -- the research of Ben Tappin (Univ. of London)
Which philosopher will be the sensible, non-nonsensical answer to Žižek? (via Stephen Grimm)
Schopenmeower (EC)
Dance, followed by philosophy -- in NYC next March
Teaching logic using presidential debates -- Michael Titelbaum (Wisconsin) tried it
Leave aside moral limitations on lying. What are the natural ones?
Plato's Republic is the most-taught book in U.S. colleges
— edging out Aristotle's Ethics? (or is it the restriction to U.S. data that's making the difference?)
What we're asking when we ask "why?" -- thoughts from Bradford Skow (MIT)
How often professors are described as "genius," "strict," or "sexy" in RMP evaluations -- data across disciplines and gender
Philosophy of race, and race in philosophy -- an interview with Ron Mallon (Wash. U. St. Louis)
People are more likely to litter when they see litter around them, and more likely to act racist when they see racism around them -- Jenny Saul (Sheffield) on an important aspect of the US election
"There are aspects of the world that we can only bring into view if we go in for the kind of non-neutral thinking that is the mark of work in the arts and humanities." -- an interview with Alice Crary (New School)
States claim moral rights over territories to establish and protect borders, to control airspace, use natural resources, and so on. What could justify this? -- A. John Simmons (UVA) in conversation with Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)
We don't have five senses -- Aristotle was wrong, says Barry C. Smith (Univ. of London)
Interviews of philosophers and scientists on the relationship between philosophy and science (via Richard Pettigrew)
Voting paradoxes: a very clear video introduction (via MR)
"This campaign season has been an indictment of our understanding of mass communication" -- Jason Stanley (Yale)
"Wait, it wasn't cool?" -- apparently philosophy is cool again
"One great advantage of formal, or mathematical, methods is in the high degree of clarity and precision they bring to questions of structure." -- an interview with LSE's Campbell Brown
Put aside the "hard problem"; what about the "real problem" of consciousness? -- thoughts from a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience
Women seem to be better off than men in a number of ways, says Philippe van Parijs -- does that challenge conventional thinking about gender justice? A symposium (via Harry Brighouse @ Crooked Timber)
From ancient China, an alternative to Aristotelian accounts of virtue -- the philosophy of Mengzi
The algorithm that sorts science from non-science at the largest online repository of scientific papers
The Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues starts podcasting (via What's Wrong)
Logician, personal assistant to Trotsky, and art world philosopher -- Jean van Heijenoort had an interesting life
Two ideals of openness in philosophy -- and how they sometimes conflict
Over 150 attacks on academics -- 16 months of data collected by Scholars at Risk (via IHE)
The median humanities PhD earns 25% less than the median PhD across all fields -- and further data on PhDs and earnings
What is explanation? -- discussed by Nancy Cartwright, James Ladyman and an "outspoken metereologist"
How pop culture mangled Nietzsche -- a video
New project to collect data on the careers of humanities PhDs (via IHE)
A public service announcement
"We don’t make sense; and the glittering ornaments of civilization are only means to distract ourselves from this fact" -- Charlie Huenemann (Utah State) on cynicism
Criticism of the APA's new Code of Conduct -- from Eric Schliesser
"If you are not Irish, but you celebrate Halloween, then you are engaging in racist cultural appropriation." -- Who's going to dress up as Jason Brennan?
You were reading a book by Thomas Nagel. We made eye contact and you smiled. -- the view from the G train
"Propagandists… understand very well that, by treating facts as something to be actively made, one may eventually change the way truth is understood" -- Donald Trump, a 16th Century Jesuit historian, Harry Frankfurt, and the alt-right walk into a J.E.H. Smith essay
Sleep is the new sex? -- Cressida Heyes (Alberta) on her work on philosophy of sex and love
Peter Singer wins 2016 "Fight Against Stupidity" award
Meet your new digital self, for use now and after you're dead -- "Replika" is just the beginning
Nicholas Wolterstorff (one of the founders of the SCP) comes out in favor of same-sex marriage -- If he can do it, perhaps others can, too
Clarity is an important norm for philosophy but "with all expert practices there are risks that their norms can become oppressive."
How to address the concerns of students who are skeptical about the philosophy -- tips from Nickolas Pappas (CUNY)
"Perfectly Rortyan… without apparent effort it constituted a maximal provocation" -- Crispin Sartwell (Dickinson) remembers Richard Rorty
If you oppose a wall between the US and Mexico, what else should you oppose? -- Hrishikesh Joshi (Princeton) on immigration
Former philosophy professor Anna Stubblefield ordered to pay $4 million to the guardians of the disabled student she was convicted of sexually assaulting
Children: "They are so precious that their parents concentrate on them to the exclusion of nearly everything else and feel justified in doing so." -- Marcia Angell on Alison Gopnik
The real lessons of Echo and Narcissus (not new, but excellent)
The Wi-Phi team will be answering questions live on Monday, Oct. 24th -- lots of info about their work at this link
"1795. Just five years [after the publication of the Critique of Judgment]… a bunch of kids, drunk on Kant." and is it true that "Kant, unawares, cracked open academic barriers, letting in those he considered cranks"?
"Little by little, you should distance yourself from the spirit of the professional university" -- on living "less anxiously" as an academic
There's a ballet based on Leonard Bernstein's "Serenade after Plato’s Symposium"
Lady Philosophy was busy, but David Lewis had some time to talk with Boethius (EC)
Some days, this is exactly what it is like to be a blogger (via Eszter Hargittai @ Crooked Timber)
Advice you'd give your earlier self about your current philosophical work -- a new series at PEA Soup
"God is dead…and we have killed him… Want to get a drink?" -- a funny video trailer for the forthcoming book, "Love Voltaire Us Apart"
(related)
Mercedes-Benz decides its autonomous cars will prioritize saving the people they carry -- goodbye Trolley Problem, hello Prisoner's Dilemma... or Invisible Hand?
Telling personal stories in philosophy class
Resources for teaching and learning about mass incarceration -- a multidisciplinary site
"Certainty is static. Doubt propels." -- a conversation with Joanna Kavenna, "champion of the contemporary philosophical novel"
What it's like to be a philosopher with A.D.D. -- and what the profession can learn from that
How the logical thinking of Euclid saved the United States
Newly released letters by Heidegger -- still a Nazi
A hiking and biking and philosophy excursion -- outreach sponsored by the North Dakota Humanities Council
The rules of Paradox Club -- by Alex Baia
You can accept Heidegger's premises without committing yourself to being a Nazi like him -- because he did not produce logically valid arguments
Kwame Anthony Appiah (NYU) is the 2016 BBC Reith Lecturer -- listen to the first of his lectures here
(and a Guardian piece on the lecture)
"Why think that philosophy can facilitate instrumental rationality… absent the skills and expertise of local context?" -- on the idea of philosopher as manager or consultant
The Bernadete paradox and a new variant of it to puzzle over -- from Roy T. Cook (Minnesota)
The evil god challenge -- an animation from Stephen Law
The world is becoming a better place -- says Peter Singer (Princeton)
Reflections on APA committee service -- from Christopher Pynes (Western Illinois) at LR
How not to treat deaf academics -- a list from Teresa Blankmeyer Burke (Gallaudet)
A collection of crackpots and loons -- jury selection at Existential Comics
"It’s not that we care too little about others; it’s that we care too much" -- Christopher Freiman (William & Mary) on the evils of conformity
Hilarious "reverse debate" on consciousness -- Chalmers vs. Rovelli
"Many people don’t recognize how much the future of humanity matters to us" -- Sam Scheffler (NYU) interviewed on the "collective afterlife," justice, toleration, and more
"If I am not personally to blame for slavery and its aftermath, we often hear, why should I be apologizing if I have not done anything wrong?" -- Nick Smith (New Hampshire) on apologies and reparations
"Professional philosophy has abdicated its role in helping individuals navigate large, existential problems" -- a review of “American Philosophy: A Love Story”
Western Illinois Philosophy might find new home in a "Mathematics, Logic, and Philosophy" Dept. -- a sensible, if unusual, grouping (LR)
Susan Haack (Miami) wins Ulysses Medal from University College Dublin
The word "the" and racist speech -- a linguist takes a look
Using computerized reasoning to tackle a time-travel paradox -- one option: if Marty were his own grandfather...
Philosophers haven't been paying much attention to sleep says Cressida Heyes (Alberta), who explains why they should
"On the scapegoating of French Theory for the decline of the humanities" and deconstruction as a "distinctly American phenomenon"
When your students say, "Who's to say?" (via Dan Korman)
"There has to be a widespread belief that voting matters, and that voting one’s conscience is the right thing to do -- even if neither of these beliefs really stands up to the light of reason."
Return policies of various philosophers -- a list
Links on human extinction (at Omnivore)
A collection of syllabi for courses in ethics, broadly construed -- you can add yours, too
How to have better conversations -- excellent advice here
The New York Times on philosophy's recent shitshow
Advice for journal editors -- including when to not bother sending out a paper to referees
Technocratic ideology, strategic racism, and moral judgments -- Jason Stanley (Yale) on the Flint water catastrophe
Which philosophers will be added to Wikipedia? -- and how can you have a say?
The value judgments embedded in PhD programs' language requirements -- along with some data on which languages are approved
Then complete an MA in philosophy while playing professional basketball in Europe -- how Matthew Rachar (Brooklyn College) went from basketball player to philosophy professor
A journal editor's wishlist -- by Jennifer Lackey (Northwestern), editor of Phil Studies and Episteme
One reason philosophy might be a good career choice (via Philosophy Matters)
The academic job market is 90% things completely out of your control and 10% things in your control so just concern yourself 1000% with this last 10% -- a general (not philosophy-specific) introduction to the academic job market (via Carolyn Dicey-Jennings)
Providing epistemic arguments for scientific methods -- an interview with Chiara Lisciandra (Groningen)
The importance of the human species -- does it depend on whether there's intelligent life elsewhere in the universe?
There's a word for buying books and not reading them (via Rob Tempio)
Two tech billionaires take Bostrom's simulation argument seriously enough to have hired scientists to help them "break out" but seem to have missed that if the argument is sound then we're simulated, too (or maybe it's just bad reporting?)
A history of ideas about time travel -- it's nonlinear, of course
What can you do with a philosophy degree? -- the cover story of the Wheaton Quarterly (via my mom!)
"The Sooty Empiric": a new blog on philosophy, science, empiricism, metaphilosophy, & more -- from Liam Kofi Bright (Carnegie Mellon)
A virtual colloquium for philosophy of religion: nominations welcome -- at The Prosblogion
Morally offensive scientific findings are harder to believe -- what are the implications for science in a democratic society?
Boston Public Library re-installs philosophy mural
When the administration asks the philosophy dept about recent innovations in teaching show them this
Inside Higher Ed article on the SAF and SCP conference controversies
"Insecurity has its advantages — sometimes it provides unexpected chances" -- John Kaag (U. Mass Lowell) with the story behind "American Philosophy: A Love Story"
Kantian dinner parties as public philosophy -- a project at Marquette
"Thinking about it for an extremely long time—until your head feels like it's going to explode" -- quotes from the grade-school kids Jana Mohr Lone (Washington) teaches philosophy to
New Philosophy of Science Lab at UQAM to foster collaborations between science and philosophy (article in French)
Implicit bias isn't always the whole story -- Jenny Saul (Sheffield) on police shootings, police training, and police accountability
"True comic competence requires moral competence, and true moral competence requires comic competence" -- says David Shoemaker (Tulane)
"If one is black in America, what could rationality possibly look like?" asks Chris Lebron (Yale), in a discussion of life plans
"There is no single test or formula for producing moral progress" -- an interview with Catherine Wilson (York)
And to avoid bullshit: a writing guide for professional philosophers -- by Neil Mehta (Yale-NUS)
Don't get excited, but International Stoic Week is coming up -- these people really seem to care about Stoicism
Psychologists win Ig Noble Peace Prize for work on bullshit detection -- though The Guardian misidentifies them as philosophers. Because, well, bullshit. (via Dale Miller)
(Here's that bullshit research)
(and some earlier work on this subject)
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? -- Time Magazine asks Roy Sorenson (Wash. U. St. Louis)
The poetry of intergenerational ethics -- verse by Felicia Nimue Ackerman (Brown)
“There are no natural ‘we’s" -- Chandran Kukathas (LSE) on freedom of movement
Civic engagement projects in philosophy courses -- Chad Wiener (ODU) on how and why he includes them
The call for "safe spaces" is nothing new -- what's new is whom the safe spaces are for, argues Vanessa Wills (GW)
Related: how dangerous is artificial intelligence? -- a survey of experts
"The first published standard for the ethical design of robots" -- "a bit more sophisticated than that Asimov’s laws" (but why does it cost over $200?)
"No significant correlations between [teacher evaluation] ratings and learning” -- a new "astonishing" meta-analysis
An African philosopher with albinism aims "to critically interrogate deep-seated ideologies in African traditions" -- an interview with Elvis Imafidon
A new podcast series on philosophical locations called "Philosophy Sites" -- from the folks at Philosophy Bites. (What's next? Philosophy Fights?)
Diversity, the de facto "link between curriculum and personnel," and related issues -- in Times Higher Ed
How to tell if you're a jerk -- linked to this before, but it's a good reminder
How US prisons violate three principles of criminal justice -- thoughts from Judith Lichtenberg (Georgetown)
Leonardo DiCaprio is selling one of his houses. but can buying it "actually offer a reprieve from the agony of being a human in the world?" -- "Or, is it certain that 'we cannot escape anguish, for we are anguish,' as John-Paul Sartre once put it?" (via Kathryn Pogin)
The explanatory power of panpsychism -- a critical look by Keith Frankish in The Atlantic
More on the nature of the self: can it survive death? -- videos of Galen Strawson, Michael Tooley, Raymond Tallis and others from the show "Closer to the Truth"
How should blogging fit into evaluation, promotion, and tenure? -- and how does it at your institution?
"Not just really boring and technical but utterly misguided…" -- Tamler Sommers (Houston) on most of today's philosophy, at Products of the Mind
"I made a career transition from academia to journalism, and I’m still breathing" -- a brief interview with tenure-track-philosophy-prof-turned-journalist David V. Johnson
"if you’re curious about people’s capacity for reasoning, don’t look at cases where being correct doesn’t matter… Rather, look at how people cope in everyday life." -- Paul Bloom (Yale) thinks we're not all that irrational
"Why do people pursue PhDs despite grim job prospects? For one, because job prospects elsewhere haven’t been great either." -- on the rationality of pursuing a PhD
"On this challenge our contestants have to attempt to call up their internet provider and cancel their account" -- The Stoic Gameshow (EC)
How much of our behavior is determined by genetics? -- Kenneth Schaffner (Pitt) talks with Carrie Figdor (Iowa)
Philosopher tramples ignorant political scientist on Twitter -- nice work, Bryan Van Norden (Vassar)
A "new ideological mask that decorates [a] sort of self-betrayal… with the misleading veneer of self-actualization" -- Talbot Brewer (Virginia) on alienation and the dangers of mistaking your career for your self
A philosopher with a fatal and excruciating condition is not allowed to kill herself before she's incapacitated by her disease -- Karen J. Warren (Macalester) on fighting for legal options for dying with dignity and autonomy (via Kate Norlock)
All about virtue epistemology -- an interview with Ernest Sosa (Rutgers)
How to give profs a safe space to write up minutiae that would otherwise further clog academic publishing: require them to blog?
"Philosophy for our Times" -- a philosophy podcast series
An impressive collection of philosophers writing about Africa (scroll down to the end of the "Introduction" to see summaries and links to 20 other articles)
He has achieved "a place of enduring significance that surpasses that of any other thinker in our time" -- the life and ideas of Jürgen Habermas
Set up an "Ask a Philosopher" booth -- at the farmer's market, at the mall, at...?
This blog is more important than you think -- the time-dependence claim and blogging
New developments in robot intelligence
What should be included in a survey about making philosophy courses more diverse? -- a pre-survey
An optical illusion -- argh, our minds (via Alex Guerrero)
Panpsychism basics -- from Godehard Brüntrup & Ludwig Jaskolla (Munich)
Making a classroom discussion an actual discussion -- thoughts from Harry Brighouse (Wisconsin)
"Evidence has overtaken Chomsky’s theory, which has been inching toward a slow death for years" -- Scientific American on a paradigm shift in linguistics
A new app, Allo, examines the content of incoming messages and suggests quick replies to send back -- Evan Selinger (RIT) on the latest in "smart" communication tech
How often do mainstream Anglophone philosophers cite non-Anglophone sources? -- not much
"Defining 'inductive argument' should not be this difficult" -- "Carnap, give me strength."
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science has made its book review section online-only -- so as to leave more pages for articles
"Fear of falling to my death gives me a break" -- an interview with Bas van Fraassen (Princeton) on science & philosophy & other stuff
"Social networks, academia, and the general public were abuzz with the news that philosophy might be removed from the list of required courses for high school juniors and seniors." -- life in Chile
The tangled interplay of personal, social, and national self-conceptions -- the work of Saba Fatima (Southern Illinois)
"An organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but that is just tuned to fitness" -- the ideas of Donald Hoffman, discussed at NPR's Cosmos & Culture
"We face a choice, as always, between humanity and barbaric violence, and we can only start to make that choice by recognizing the elements of barbarity we have already accepted as normal" -- Stephen Darwall (Yale) and his son, writing in support of the 9/9/16 prison strike
Philosophers author open letter regarding compensation for bone marrow cell donation -- you are invited to sign
How sociology is considering counting social media activity and public engagement for tenure
Outstanding papers in aesthetics & philosophy of art -- the 2015 AFB Fab Flock Five
"Aristotle is basically a little bitch" -- the beginning of the school year is a good time to remind you about @myphilprof
Should soldiers and civilians be subject to different punishments for "unjust acts of aggression"? -- Cécile Fabre (Oxford) comments (via @philosophybites)
Someone do this for philosophers, please -- social psychologist playing cards (via Gregg Caruso)
What is the self? -- TV show Closer To The Truth interviews Searle, McGinn, Blackmore, Dennett
Religious studies should be more philosophical -- but not in an "arid" analytic nor a "fuzzy" Continental style
When not teaching, "what is my lecturer doing?" -- a guide for students by Sara Uckelman (Durham) (via Philosophers Cocoon)
"Professional philosophers’ intuitions were even more susceptible to the presence of irrelevant options than lay people" -- philosophers are people, too, part 63,702
"Try making nothing less like nothing" -- the science side of the question of how there's something from nothing
On trying to understand artificial intelligences -- fascinating challenges
A collection of links on happiness -- at Bookforum's Omnivore blog
How a blind child's friends helped her make sense of color (via Kottke)
"Behind the human tendency to make the leap from 'is' to 'ought.'" --the psychology of status quo bias in moral thinking
Why philosophers might be good at business -- "philosophy breeds the kind of thinking that leads to innovation"
What is experience? -- David Chalmers (NYU), Peter Hacker (Oxford), Susana Martinez-Conde (SUNY Downstate Medical) discuss
A philosophical look at scientific revolution -- more complicated than the Kuhnian story, says Daniel Garber (Princeton) on Australia public radio
"There’s nothing more depressing than meeting incoming freshmen… who have declared themselves as accounting majors" -- on the parents who won't let their kids major in the liberal arts
The wisdom of children (via Kevin DeLapp)
(related)
Philosophical questions about photography -- exposed by Jonathan Ichikawa (UBC)
"Doing the reading: This weird trick helps students pass the class," "Descartes: How I Lost 180 lbs just by thinking," "15 Things Adam Smith never said (#8 will SHOCK you)," and more suggestions for #clickbaitsyllabus
When excellent peers miss the point -- Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) on why "history of philosophy make space for anachronism to ensure historical accuracy"
How philosophers can help science an interview with "father of string theory" Holger Bech Nielsen (via Henrik Schoeneberg)
"This has been an open question in philosophy for literally thousands of years!" "I just answered it."
Knowledge, food, health, and a new eating disorder: "orthorexia, or righteous eating" -- discussed by Nancy McHugh (Wittenberg)
"Students had arrived to his opening class to find copies of a New York Times article detailing his alleged sexual misconduct scattered on their seats." -- Thomas Pogge's first day of class this semester at Yale
Crispin Sartwell reinstated at Dickinson College (LR)
The philosophy of anger -- Martha Nussbaum (Chicago) in conversation with Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)
Was the EU referendum a truly democratic process? -- a discussion with Jennifer Hornsby, AC Grayling, David Papineau, Anthony O'Hear, Liza Thompson and Adam Ferner
New Scientist Magazine: "Metaphysics has much to offer the study of the natural world" -- its latest issue is all about philosophy (articles may be paywalled)
Robert Paul Wolff begins a series of video lectures on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason
For the start of the school year: six novels about campus life recommended by The Guardian
The virtues of the airplane passenger -- I suppose they're saving the difficult issue of reclining seats to future work (via John Corvino)
Library porn (click on the photos for more about each library)
A professor goes on hunger strike to protest denial of tenure (via Nick Riggle)
Students seem to learn more from more attractive instructors -- The researchers don’t think that sexual interest explains the results
A look at the work Jana Mohr Lone (U. Washington) has done bringing philosophy to kids (an article and a video)
Some fellowships for refugees with PhDs at the University of Konstanz
Two-thirds of the world's mathematicians hail from just 24 scientific ‘families’ (via MR)
An in-depth and terrifying look at the near-future of weapons technology -- distinctions smeared, civilizations destroyed?
"Life is triggering." Yes it is. And so? -- Kate Manne (Cornell) with a follow-up piece on trigger warnings
"You would take a couple of months to reply? How are they not dead or problem-solved by the time they get their response?" "They're not any of them solvable problems." "Oh." 4 advice columnists have a chat. They're different from ethicists. (And they forgot to invite Louis Generis.)
Ten underappreciated philosophers of the Islamic world -- an introductory timeline from Peter Adamson (LMU Munich)
How Sahotra Sarkar (Texas) predicted the path of the Zika virus's spread in the U.S. -- "I use the freedom and the opportunity to actually do things that I think are ethically most important, which is to focus on these neglected diseases."
"The particular morality of caring for children" -- the standard moral theories don't get it, says Alison Gopnik (Berkeley)
“Philosophy is a powerful preparation for the journey upon which young people, from wherever they come, will embark," says Sabina Higgins, First Lady of Ireland
"Most humans beings just aren’t all that interesting, even if they happen to be you. Intellectuals recognize this early on, and so they move their field of attention over to more interesting things." -- which explains why "an intellectual is sort of stupid"
New statistical study points to further trouble for cognitive neuroscience and psychology studies (via Mark Alfano)
Metaethics and why it's important -- an interview with Ralph Wedgewood (USC) at 3:AM Magazine
"An unfortunate paradox: philosophy, the arena of thought most relevant to all people in all places, has become the least accessible" -- a review of a book by a philosopher who says that "fracking tells us something important about the way we live"
What can obsessive-compulsive disorder teach us about autonomy and the mind? -- Robert Noggle (Central Michigan) on OCD and quasi-beliefs
Unclear what the methodology is behind this list of 50 influential philosophers (at a site that appears to blend editorial and sponsored content, run by a philosophy PhD)
Grad students at private universities in the U.S. may unionize -- according to a new NLRB ruling
Italy is giving each of its 18-year olds €500 and a year to spend it on cultural goods and events (via Atlas Obscura)
Combining theoretical skepticism and practical certainty -- Kristen Irwin (Loyola Chicago) on the underexplored ideas of Pierre Bayle
Two pedagogical suggestions for making philosophy more diverse -- from Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside)
"No matter how angry you get, you in fact can never gain payback for the wrong done to you." Do our common notions of anger and forgiveness make sense?
"A trenchant critique of an entrenched liberal idea: that knowledge is a good in itself and worth pursuing for its own sake" -- the Jason Bourne movies, according to philosophy grad student Francey Russell (Chicago)
"The Nature of Philosophy" -- a video series of conversations between Massimo Pigliucci (CUNY) and Daniel A. Kaufman (Missouri State)
The Open Logic Project has amassed a collection of stylized portraits of logicians -- see the the Project's Twitter feed or FB page for its ongoing "guess the logician" game
Advice for graduate students on how to read -- not new, but useful at the start of the year
What is mathematical beauty? And what is its relationship to explanatory power?
Pessimism about humanity is historically warranted but also a dangerous self-fulfilling prophecy -- Jason Stanley (Yale) on his parents, the Holocaust, and being realistic and idealistic
Check out the Philosophical Overdose -- a collection of videos of and on philosophers and philosophical ideas
The philosophy blog of three high school seniors
A guide for students on how to email their professors -- I'd say email it to them, but do they even read email anymore?
"Spinoza's Dream": the folk concept album -- from singer-songwriter & UC Davis philosophy PhD Dave Nachmanoff
"These laws make citizens complicit in violating the rights of migrants" -- very interesting questions about the personal ethics of immigration from Javier Hidalgo (Richmond)
A guided tour of some of the big questions of modern philosophy -- via an interview with Don Garrett (NYU)
Which one of these three stories about philosophers is true? -- a version of Wait Wait Don't Tell Me's "Bluff the Listener"
Neighbors "can illuminate our reluctance to know ourselves and they can spur self-understanding" -- the life and recent work of Nancy Rosenblum (Harvard)
"Writing about philosophy from the point of view of intellectual history rather than internal argumentation" -- and with cartoons, to boot
Climate change and the ethics of having children -- Travis Rieder (Johns Hopkins) and other philosophers featured at NPR
An easy way to create a "Jeopardy" style game for your course
Further reporting on what may possibly be the only portrait Spinoza sat for -- at Smithsonian
Whatever happened to philosophy of geometry? -- David Corfield (Kent) looks into it (via Omnivore)
The ethics of doping in sports -- a transcript of a debate between Robert Sparrow & Julian Savulescu
Affective scaffolding and the inability to feel pleasure -- some interesting phil psych from Alex Miller Tate (Birmingham)
Mistakes to avoid when publishing an academic book (via MR)
"Part of the problem with making a film about Arendt, or any philosopher, is that philosophers are not supposed to have lives" -- an attitude that ignores "the social networks that support the labor of thinking"
"What exactly do we mean when we say that someone holds extreme beliefs?" asks Anthony Booth (Sussex)
"Your nerd philosophy of language will never work" (EC)
The risks and benefits of publishing in less prestigious journals -- a list and discussion at The Cocoon
"Science fiction became our reality and we don't even think about it." And it's happening again -- an animated introduction to genetic engineering, CRISPR, and the future
Trolley Problem Memes makes New York Magazine
"The whole enterprise of competitive athletics has been, in effect, a search algorithm for genetic outliers" -- genetics, performance, and the human
A puzzle about the size of your butt (from 5 years ago, but new to me, via @gravbeast)
The University of Chicago now has a "Center for Practical Wisdom"
Trans experience in philosophy -- Perry Zurn (U Penn) on challenges, issues, projects, and a report from a conference
Precisely how vague are we? -- Richard Yetter Chappell (York) at the intersection of metaphysics & philosophy of action
Hegelian approaches to contemporary issues in crime and punishment -- the recent work of Brandon Hogan (Howard U.)
The ethics of trying to lose -- thoughts from Robert Simon (Hamilton)
"'Eudaimonia' is Greek for 'This university Is run by corporate stooges And is doomed.'" -- a poem about your university's brand new institute
Judge some self-driving car moral dilemmas and create some of your own -- at MIT's Moral Machine website
"Through the agonistic hyperrealist lens of soda dispensers and Fall Out Boy lyrics" -- types of dissertations in political philosophy & theory (don't miss the comments)
"People may be excessively cautious when facing life-changing choices" -- new research on status quo bias (possible paywall) (via MR)
"In constantly redefining property, capitalism has always engaged in redistribution" -- Elizabeth Anderson (Michigan) on the idea of social insurance
Following up on that depressing NYT article about friendship: "Take Two" interviews Alexander Nehamas (Princeton)
Should Neil deGrasse Tyson stop pontificating about the ideal society? Simple: just see whether the data supports it (via Kelly Truelove)
Three women philosophers of color on the condemnation of Thomas Pogge -- at Leiter Reports
Spinoza, politics, and religion -- a program on the BBC about this "radical"
Fun broadcast about puzzles on public radio -- with Roy Sorenson (WUStL).
When you catch someone submitting the same paper simultaneously to multiple journals -- David Shoemaker (Tulane) at PEA Soup
New site in the works about the variety of jobs held by philosophy degree holders -- examples sought
How Bayesian are our brains?
"Recent research indicates that only about half of perceived friendships are mutual" (NYT)
The speed limits of thought -- Barbara Gail Montero (CUNY) at OUP Blog
I, for one, welcome our new cetacean overlords
And who are those moral experts, anyway? -- thoughts from Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside)
Sort of like "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee" -- but really "Book Lovers in Book Stores Getting Books"
Donald Trump, Frankfurtian BS Artist Par Excellence -- Fareed Zakaria in the Washington Post
"Disavowing experts goes hand in hand with regressions towards morally dubious stances" -- Helen de Cruz (Oxford Brookes) on moral experts
"The orgasm is to women… as nipples are to men." -- says Elisabeth Lloyd (Indiana), in the NYT
Why do we watch sports? -- BBC radio program includes discussion with David Papineau (KCL)
"Retribution is pointless" -- Martha Nussbaum (Chicago) discusses punishment on The Minefield
An easy-to-read introduction to machine learning (via kottke)
The downsides of public philosophy
Nussbaum on the radio -- on "the need to feel"
Otto Neurath, logical positivist, civic happiness consultant -- "Care must be taken to avoid the accidental creation of a lunatic asylum"
Fiction by philosophers -- a "top 10" list in The Guardian
"The potential for intolerance lies in the logic of religions" -- Gary Gutting (Notre Dame) on the connection between religion and violence
Doing philosophy on the side -- advisable?
What is a "hermeneutical impasse"? -- Luvell Anderson (Memphis) explains
Who were the women of ancient philosophy? ...and history, biography, poetry, etc.
"My supervisor ordered me directly to stop publishing the truth. And my phone is tapped" -- what it's like to be a Turkish academic now
Various philosophers recommend various books -- in "The Philosopher's LIbrary" series at 3:AM
Worries about Pokémon Go and virtual reality -- addressed by David Chalmers (NYU/ANU)
Game theory and cookies for parents
Why physics needs philosophy -- a talk by physicist Carlo Rovelli (Aix-Marseille)
APA considering clarifying its grad school deadline policy to address efforts by depts to get students to pre-commit
Who should pay for climate change? -- Michael Sandel (Harvard) discusses this with 60 people from around the world (BBC)
A discussion of genetic enhancements, cloning, choice, and Orphan Black -- on NPR with Gregory Pence (Univ. Alabama, Birmingham)
Travel question: Bentham's head—carry-on or checked luggage? (via Zac Cogley)
Further background on Pogge's hiring at Yale -- Kagan declines to say what he knew; Larmore effectively killed Pogge's chances at Chicago
"It demonstrates that the esoteric contributions academics make are continuing a discussion that has its roots in the lives of ordinary people and children" -- wonderful interview with Tom Wartenberg (Mount Holyoke) on doing philosophy with kids
Don't try this in class (EC)
Chef David Chang (Momofuku) is a dialetheist about salt -- it's part of his theory of deliciousness (via MR)
"However crappy [Clinton's] brand of corporate elite rule may be, you or your loved ones will not end up in a labor camp in Oklahoma wearing a pink triangle… By contrast this is a real possibility under a Trump presidency, and there is no source of moral authority in the global order whose ascendancy Trump's election would clinch to which we might appeal to help you get out."
The Library of Congress has pretty much everything ever published, with 10,000+ items added daily -- but you never make use of it. Here's why. (via Bookforum's Omnivore)
"I have a huge amount of experience in being ignorant and not worrying about it." -- Brian Eno channels Andy Clark and Leonard Read on the "artificial intelligence" that is civilization (via Kottke)
A collection of "grinworthy" philosophy quotes (most on phil math and logic) -- collected by Aaron Thomas-Bolduc (Calgary)
A philosophical look at the mid-life crisis -- The Independent listens to the Philosophy Bites episode with Kieran Setiya (MIT)
Philosophy major turned police officer uses philosophy in his police work
Stolen brain in vat helps man get high -- police hope to locate brain's "rightful owner" (seriously)
Philosophers discuss gun control -- Dan Demetriou, Michael Huemer, Lester Hunt, Lance Stell and others (scroll down to "Latest Posts")
"Buttery Friendships" -- the Very Bad Wizards on character, good lives, and friendship
Roger Scruton wins barrel of Amarone -- a prize awarded to those who "promote the fundamental values of the Venetian homeland"
Do people hear "Black Lives Matter" as a quantity implicature? -- Ian Olasov (CUNY) at Slate
The philosophy and physics of time -- a report in Quanta about the "Time in Cosmology" conference at Waterloo
Zeno vs. Zeno -- luckily, it's not a race (EC)
The difficulties of self-knowledge -- Alex Rosenberg (Duke) in the NYT's Stone
Soldiers are subject to a specific kind of exploitation: "moral exploitation" -- argue Michael Robillard and Bradley J. Strawser (via Barry Lam)
Everything you want to know about neo-Fregean philosophy of mathematics that Richard Marshall was not afraid to ask Bob Hale (Sheffield)
Philosophy prof uses Kendrick Lamar lyrics on exam, exam goes viral
There aren't any facts -- so argues Arianna Betti (Amsterdam), in conversation with Carrie Figdor (Iowa)
Best prank to play on an academic -- an example
Do black lives matter? -- the Funky Academic takes a philosophical look at the question
Pokémon? Go. -- philosophers discuss the latest game craze
The ethics of not paying your library fines -- should you wait until they (sorry) throw the book at you?
Did Hume discover stereotype threat? -- some evidence for that claim, at D&I
A collection of links on artificial intelligence, ethics, and related issues -- at Omnivore
"The most intense pleasure" art can provide, among other things -- I guess I really should read Proust
The NYT's "The Stone" seems to be taking a weird approach to philosophy of disability -- Shelley Tremain shares her correspondence with its editor
What is "swamping" and how should we respond to it? -- remarks from Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse (Vanderbilt)
An election season syllogism contest -- from Danielle Allen (Harvard) in the Washington Post
A thoughtful review of two recent books on altruism -- by Robert Mark Simpson (Monash)
"Philosophers sometimes point to conceptual problems with scientists’ pronouncements, without stopping to ask whether these flaws really affect the pragmatic payoff of that scientific work" -- an interview with Tim Lewens (Cambridge)
"Not quite robot; not quite living organism" -- scientists create a stingray biomachine
What is misogyny? A forum at Boston Review -- featuring Kate Manne (Cornell) and several respondents
"I was looking toward the internal life of a black person in America… You were looking in the direction of your own innocence" -- Chris Lebron (Yale) on Black Lives Matter
"Most professional philosophers are really philonikers", that is, lovers of victory -- says Joseph Trullinger (GW)
"Repeat and re-repeat verbs as often as possible with a re-prefix. Aim to frame and re-frame, imagine and re-imagine, inscribe and re-inscribe" and other writing "advice" for academics
Reforming the doctoral dissertation (via Philosophy Impact)
The Pogge sexual harassment story makes the NYT
Is virtual reality any less real than… reality? -- thoughts from Anco Peeters (Wollongong)
Health as a capability, and the right to it -- a talk by Sridhar Venkatapuram (KCL)
Philosophers, take a brief survey constructed by George Newman and Kevin Tobia (Yale) (survey contains some images; if they don't load, try a different browser)
Philosophy departments and others are avoiding events involving alcohol -- so as to avoid "inappropriate behavior"
TV show host corrects his own misuse of "begs the question"! -- at the 4:04 mark; also, it's a decent interview with Chuck Klosterman about fallibility
The ethics of returning stolen art by professor of art crime (!) Erin Thompson (John Jay/CUNY) (via Jeff Sebo)
Scientists think philosophy is one big ¯_(ツ)_/¯ -- according to one scientist who seems to be making a poor induction (via Kelly Truelove)
Can artificial intelligence have feelings? -- a TEDx talk by Susan Schneider (Connecticut)
What is "insurrectionist ethics"? -- Lee A. McBride III (Wooster) explains
If we understand addiction as a "learning disorder" then our treatment and views of it may change for the better
It isn't wrong to illegally immigrate argues Michael Huemer (Colorado)
The power and predicament of the provocatively dressed woman -- by Jessica Wolfendale (West Virginia)
How to prep for grad school if you're poor -- crowdsourced advice organized as a wiki
Values and victim-blaming -- what can philosophers do with this psychological research?
What we cannot know -- science and math edition
Progress on the Zarathustra comic by John Holbo (NUS)
On academic envy and how to deal with it
…and related to that (via Jacob Levy)
New Hampshire high school ethics club organizes a philosophy conference with over 1000 students -- the idea is to engage in Socratic dialogue "to become more critical thinkers and respectful communicators."
The "hardest logic puzzle ever" -- and how to solve it
Suffering vs. Oblivion: the results of a survey -- of particular interest to ethicists (via Robert Long)
Questions about the Pacific APA -- answered by the departing secretary-treasurer, Dominic McIver Lopes (UBC)
Distinguishing between public philosophy, punditry, and advocacy -- at Digressions & Impressions
Very few parts of your body last your entire life -- some parts of your brain, and something else (via kottke)
"I would define philosophy not as the study of a genre of texts… but rather as a discipline that addresses works in any genre by asking whether they present valid arguments" -- Peter Levine (Tufts) on the need for diversity in making philosophical progress
Philosophy and the "crisis in physics" over the lack of empirical data -- at NPR
Forget everything you know about memory -- Daniel Hutto (Wollongong) corrects some misconceptions
"The personality of philosophy": a collection of links -- at Bookforum's Omnivore blog
Philosophy Talk wins award for its Snowden interview -- at the 2016 New York Festivals International Radio Program Awards
"It goes too far in blaming all whites for all forms of racism and it does not go far enough in directly addressing injustice against nonwhites" -- Naomi Zack (Oregon) on the discourse of white privilege
Have you checked out the Ethical War Blog lately?
"Does an objective moral reality exist and, if so, is it cool to break up with somebody via text?" -- modern philosophical conundrums (in The New Yorker)
“Yale is not Big Brother,” Kagan said, “and you wouldn’t want it to be Big Brother.” -- why Yale did not open a second investigation of Pogge
Chompsky -- the food truck named after you-know-who (via Kathryn Pogin)
€2 coin in honor of Georg Henrik von Wright -- issued by his native Finland
Philosophy of perception in Reid and Berkeley, and neglected Italian philosophers -- discussed in an interview with Becko Copenhaver (Lewis & Clark)
Well behaved women seldom make history, early modern philosophy edition -- why Cavendish is better known than Conway
Susan Wolf (UNC) defends being a foodie -- on Australian radio
The trials of being a grad student -- depicted in Lego (via Paul Gowder)
Hobbes vs. Rousseau on human nature -- can science settle this dispute?
A response to Sean Carroll on zombies -- from Richard Yetter Chappell (York)
Do's and Dont's of making your philosophy syllabus more diverse -- advice from Katharine Jenkins (Cambridge) and Jennifer Saul (Sheffield)
The rhetorical strategy of "spitballing" -- explained by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse (Vanderbilt)
"How many senses do we have?" is a philosophically interesting question -- Mohan Matten (Toronto) interviewed on that and other matters of perception
Useful skills for working alone (via Mario Damen / @manenpaard8)
Philosophers on the EU Referendum -- Alexander Douglas, Véronique Munoz-Dardé, Jonathan Wolff, Lucy O'Brien, Ralph Wedgwood, Paul Snowdon, & Jennifer Hornsby (via Adam Ferner)
Local vegetables, fresh bread, and philosophers -- on doing philosophy at the farmer's market
Interested in the ethics of privacy in the information age? This article breaks down the latest techniques Apple and others use to protect privacy while gathering data
"You don’t think you’re a zombie, but that’s just what a zombie would say" -- physicist Sean Carroll on philosophy of mind, at Nautilus
"The measures that have been adopted by sports organizations to prevent or 'manage' concussion and CTE do not promote or respect the autonomy of athletes" -- Syd Johnson (Michigan Tech) on the bioethics of athletics
Facebook's "IRB" -- how it assesses the social media giant's experiments on you
Causation: contextual and pluralistic -- Julian Reiss (Durham) in conversation with Carrie Figdor (Iowa)
If it's taking a few years to find your first permanent job in philosophy would you be better off forgoing temporary employment for a year?
Can you figure out the television paradox? -- a puzzle from Roy T. Cook (Minnesota)
What exactly is a slippery slope argument? -- Douglas Walton (Windsor) with the analysis (via Omnivore)
Roger Scruton has been knighted
Providing a high-quality intro to philosophy to high school students -- at a philosophy summer camp
Edward Snowden's actions weren't civil disobedience -- but that doesn't mean they're indefensible, argues Candice Delmas (Northeastern)
The US Senate has proposed drastic cuts to its Fulbright-Hays program -- if enacted, there will be no competition for the grants next year
"You might be thinking that I was sent here from the future to persuade everyone to quit messing things up…" -- Molly Gardner (Bowling Green) is interviewed at the Blog of the APA
"Dialogues with Phil and Sophia – Who’s Moving?" is a new philosophy book for kids -- with characters based on Derek Parfit, Christine Korsgaard, Paul Katsafanas, & Marya Schechtman
Teaching the analytic/synthetic distinction -- a couple of perspectives at the Blog of the APA
"When the time comes for action we should hope that there is some fund of thoughtful and wide-ranging work that has benefitted from the luxury of not needing to work next to a ticking clock" -- an interview with David Estlund covers a lot of ground in political philosophy
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science is looking for a new co-editor-in-chief
Read the 2015 Journal of Applied Philosophy Best Essay Prize winner -- "Geographies of Meaningful Living" by Cheshire Calhoun (Arizona State)
"Your past self did not consult you when she made the plan to resist temptation" -- Johanna Thoma (Toronto/LSE) on negotiating with yourself
Retraction Watch on a 14th instance of plagiarism by Martin W.F. Stone (formerly of Univ. of Leuven)
"The pluralist’s judgement that the argument is valid in one sense but invalid in another… tells us more information… than the single judgement delivered by one favoured logic. -- an informative interview with logical pluralist Greg Restall (Melbourne)
"Current western academic philosophy is far from 'useless'—its use is in serving euro-american imperialism" -- a critique of Daily Nous and other servants of imperialist, chauvinistic, bourgeois philosophy
The third most popular class at Harvard is a survey of Chinese philosophy. It's taught by Michael Puett, interviewed in the NYT
The ethics of programming self-driving cars will be even more complicated than you think -- it's not just a version of the trolley problem, explains Jesse Kirkpatrick (George Mason)
What does The Critique of Judgment have to do with Shrek? -- NPR looks at the work Tom Wartenberg (Mt. Holyoke) does with philosophy and kids
"Like routing sewage into the Louvre" -- on robots' understanding of humans
"A series of cognitive science works which combine conceptual confusion with unfounded over-generalisations based on modest empirical results" -- but tell us what you really think, Hanoch Ben-Yami (CEU)
Excuse of the day
A frustratingly complicated egalitarianism for our frustratingly complicated political reality -- Martin O'Neill (York) on Thomas Scanlon's current work
Billionaire inventor and entrepreneur Elon Musk thinks we are simulations -- based on Nick Bostrom's arguments
An analytic political philosopher explains what it would mean to "decolonize" philosophy -- and why we ought to
Are you your body? The philosophical puzzles behind some biological facts -- an excellent animated video (via Kottke)
Behind the "Absurd Popularity" of Trolley Problem Memes -- an interview at HuffPo of the two philosophy students who created it
Philosophers' disdain for bards and poets "leaves out the bulk of human experience" -- Justin E.H. Smith (U. Paris, Diderot) on inclusiveness in philosophy
A new series of blog posts on threats to academia and related issues in Turkey -- edited by Chad Kautzer (Lehigh)
That probably wasn't Aristotle's tomb they found last week
Exploring the boundaries of moral responsibility -- David Shoemaker (Tulane) in conversation with Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)
It is "false analytic hygiene" to worry about describing "epistemic erasure" as a kind of violence -- a popular broadcaster's appreciation of his white philosophy profs, and his reflections on the absence of black voices in academia
The Job-Market Mentoring Program 2016 is now accepting sign-ups -- at Philosophers' Cocoon
"WTF is that person talking about and why are they talking about it that way?" -- that one line shows just how out of control Patricia Marino (Waterloo) is
13th century Japanese Zen teacher Eihei Dogen should be a better known philosopher argues an astrophysicist, at NPR
APA Executive Director Amy Ferrer reports on this year's divisional meetings -- at the Blog of the APA
de Beauvoir, Bourdieu, Foucault, and Merleau-Ponty play Monopoly™ (EC)
A professor goes undercover as a student at a community college and learns a lot about the lives of his students
What is an achievement? -- thoughts from Gwen Bradford (Rice)
"What are called 'Internet trials' are thus imperfect opportunities to debate and explore… the nature of professional philosophy in light of practice" says Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam)
The relationship between knowing how likely it is that P and whether we should believe that P -- it's not straightforward, argues Martin Smith (Edinburgh)
The startling implications of the "interpretive sensory-access" theory of the mind -- from Keith Frankish (Open University)
Why the sciences need the liberal arts -- remarks from Lorraine Daston
The limitations of neuroscience's ability to meaningfully explain microprocessors may suggest limitations in its ability to explain brains
The science and sociology behind the efforts to eliminate aging and natural death -- a look through the hype
"Repeal existing laws… that criminalize or penalize directly or in practice the consensual exchange of sexual services between adults for remuneration" -- Amnesty International finally clears up its policy recommendation
(which several philosophers previously discussed here)
Has Aristotle's tomb been found? -- archaeologists at ancient Stagira in Central Macedonia think so (via Daniel J. Brunson)
Interesting: interestingness is not zero-sum
If we care about the future of philosophy we should be paying more attention to how it is taught to most students
Bullshit: the video -- starring Harry Frankfurt and various artists working in that medium (via Rob Tempio)
It would be too good if Wittgenstein's return to philosophy was motivated by a literal door handle, right? Yet maybe it was
What Is wrong with the policing of minorities In the U.S? -- philosopher John Kleinig (CUNY) takes a long, hard look, at The Critique
Progress at the boundary between the finite and the infinite
A new "composite metric" ranking of philosophers on Twitter -- to take into account both philosopher and non-philosopher followers
"Spinoza, did you drink my orange juice?" "You know, in a way, everything is a single substance, don't you think?" (EC)
A philosophy prof-turned-journalist shares 10 tips for op-ed writing (the Blog of the APA)
"Yes, philosophy is best suited to the academy. And yes, philosophy is something everyone can and should do." -- Laura D'Olimpio (Notre Dame Australia) on public philosophy
Philosophy and virtual reality -- a short video interview with David Chalmers (NYU)
"When we act unethically, we’re more likely to remember these actions less clearly" -- "ethical amnesia" blocks memories that threaten our moral "self-concept"
"Have attempts to simplify some seriously knotty ideas for broad public consumption damaged the real thing?" -- a discussion of the risks of public philosophy
Consider the APA's committee for “Asian and Asian-American” philosophy -- "That title indicates to me that this committee is there for the wrong reasons" says Amod Lele (BU)
Dennett "quoted" at Clickhole
Thinking about taking your PhD in philosophy into the non-academic work world? -- some tips here
"It is hard to accept that events might be explained by what goes on in the future" says Huw Price and Ken Wharton, but...
"The marketing director of a global consultancy helpfully suggested that academics need to have a 'product launch'." "We already have one, I said: it is called 'commencement'."
Everyone has imposter syndrome -- except for you. (via Rosa Terlazzo)
"Why do so many scientists talk about our mental life as if we were computers?" -- the mind: we're doing it all wrong (via Jonathan Trerise)
How whites get affirmative action in college admissions -- by philosophy grad student Hrishikesh Joshi (Princeton)
The anonymous philosophers of the modern era -- commentary from three non-anonymous philosophers
Do the liberal arts need saving? -- IHE on a conference on the topic featuring Talbot Brewer (Virginia) and Martha Nussbaum (Chicago)
High school philosophy teacher in Colombia under fire from Catholic church & parents for raising basic questions in philosophy of religion
What does a teenager do after making millions from creating an app? Go to Oxford to study philosophy, of course
We can distinguish "the particular methodology used" from "the preoccupations of the people using it" to defend X-Phi against charges of sexism. That and more in an interview with Bryony Pierce (Bristol)
"Philosophy is one tool… that you can use to engage in human repair" -- Tim Stock (Salisbury) on the value of teaching philosophy to prisoners
Peter Adamson (LMU) interviewed about Indian and Islamic philosophy -- at Ordinary Philosophy's podcast
A bibliography of recent and forthcoming work on W.E.B. Du Bois (via Liam Kofi Bright)
"I’m not crying for myself any more…. I’m crying for my students" -- Alexandra Bradner on adjuncting in philosophy
A brief video interview of Raymond Geuss (Cambridge) on nihilism -- at FourByThree Magazine
Under what conditions should you take Peter Singer to McDonald's for dinner?
"Free market ideology" is not the source of our policy woes -- Jason vs. Jason
The latest issue of nonsite.org is all about philosophy and photography (via Philosophy Matters)
Philosophical, psychological, and other approaches to the study of free will -- in The Atlantic
"Those who suggest that Chinese philosophies are irrational have never heard of any of these arguments because they do not bother to read about Chinese philosophy and dismiss it in ignorance." -- an interview with Bryan Van Norden (Vassar)
In need of an administrative position? Get help creating your own here (via CHE)
Democratic vocabulary obscures a non-democratic reality, argues Jason Stanley (Yale)
MoralResponsibilityBlog -- a new philosophy blog
Have you checked out the Unmute Podcast recently? -- interviews of Nancy Bauer, José Mendoza, Luvell Anderson, Meena Krishnmurthy & others
He grew up in Harlem, sold and took drugs, killed a man in a street fight… & he just graduated with a degree in philosophy from Columbia (via Sydney Penner)
WaPo humorist Gene Weingarten rags on philosophers ...for not being sufficiently pedantic?
You don't need to know what you assert, and other provocative claims about language -- Rachel McKinnon (Charleston) in conversation with Carrie Figdor (Iowa)
When Paul McCartney visited Bertrand Russell
Margaret Cavendish is the subject of a new historical novel by Danielle Dutton -- at Vox
A Yale undergrad explains why the school's president can't have it both ways -- applied philosophy of language from Karléh Wilson in Boston Review
The Funky Academic -- philosophy and funky music, of course
True artificial intelligence? Logically possible, but highly implausible -- according to Luciano Floridi (Oxford)
Is "The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt" secretly all about ancient Greek philosophy? -- an attempt at a 'yes' answer
The right theories, not merely good method, drive scientific advance -- thoughts---and an interactive timeline---from J.D. Trout (Loyola)
"The reliance on an exclusively vocational paradigm as the sole guide to education policy-making is a failure to meet the legal standard for securing a basic right." Danielle Allen (Harvard) and others in a forum at Boston Review
What do we owe living beings… on Mars? -- Kelly Smith (Clemson) considers our options
Philosophical ruminations on housework -- from Mary Townsend (Tulane)
"Learning to settle for less may help us to learn more" -- Peter Adamson (LMU) on the difficulties of studying women philosophers of antiquity
Philosopher-rockers The Counterfactuals have a new album coming out -- its first song is pretty sweet
"Poetic Naturalism" is what non-anti-philosophy-physicist Sean Carroll calls his view
Maybe Bergson didn't affect what Einstein got his Nobel Prize for, after all -- a careful look from Wayne Myrvold (Western)
Ethical issues arise in research into the capabilities of brain-injured, supposedly "vegetative" patients -- the work of PhD student Andrew Peterson (Western) is featured on CBC radio
Did social justice make us rich? -- that and other questions about what lessons "the Great Enrichment" holds for political philosophy
Friendship epistemology nightmare -- a study claims that half the people you consider friends don't feel that way about you
Keep clicking on the first link of any Wikipedia page and eventually you'll get to the entry for "philosophy" -- but where will these clicks take you along the way?
Recipe for a philosophy paper -- by Keith Frankish (Open University)
The good and the right in the Marvel Comics Universe -- Mark D. White (Staten Island / CUNY) answers some questions
"Professional philosophy has an extreme prestige hierarchy" -- is that part of the explanation for some philosophers' unhappiness?
The winner of the 2015 Philosophical Quarterly Essay Prize is grad student Matthew Babb (Southern California)
An advertisement for philosophy, starring Curious George -- worth sharing (EC)
"People have this illusion that if they strike out they’ll accomplish something, but of course they won’t… they only accomplish something by having a smart idea." Martha Nussbaum (Chicago) on anger.
"For eudaemonia / you get the idea / be virtuous by day and night. / Departures from virtue / are all gonna hurt you / sometimes I wanna say yeah right" -- a song from Nomy Arpaly and David Estlund (Brown)
The FDA is soliciting input on what "natural" is (until tomorrow)
You're doing it all wrong: Kant episode -- with your host, Allen Wood (Indiana)
Reasons it's a great time to become a political philosopher (though for some reason he left out this one: it's a golden age for philosophy)
A series of vlogs from Bence Nanay on mental imagery (at Brains)
The book based on the graphic novel dissertation -- reviewed, in graphic novel style, by Stephen Asma (Columbia College)
The "basic interpersonal moral mechanisms that literally socially construct shared moral understanding" -- discussed by Miranda Fricker (Sheffield)
Former CSU LA philosophy prof reaps millions from horse racing -- "Philosophy is really about possibility," he says
The U.S. needs elites "to protect this precious democracy from its own destabilizing excesses" -- to combat Trump, the constitutional order's "extinction-level event"
Someone created a parody Twitter account of Daily Nous and I am so mad that I didn't think of the name first
Woody Allen almost met Sartre -- "It can be arranged for a price" he was told
A philosopher and a journalist are interviewed about their new book -- a game-theoretic guide to parenting
Trolley Problem Memes -- the Facebook page
What do tenured philosophy professors have to be unhappy about? -- hypotheses from Jon Cogburn
Three philosophy students among the new crop of Gates Cambridge Scholars: Sanna Alas, Nathan Hawkins, & Joseph Wu
Biotech company gets permission to try to bring parts of the dead (gavadie?) back to life using stem cells, peptides, lasers, and nerve stimulation
The emergence of the "Trump Academic" -- is success at odds with integrity? (via Andrew J. Cohen)
Why is simpler better? Elliott Sober (Wisconsin) on the difficulties of justifying Ockham's Razor
The history of peer review, its purposes, and its problems (via Nathan Ballantyne)
Where in the brain do spontaneous thoughts arise? -- a team, including philosopher Evan Thompson (UBC), investigates
Dear Students Who Have Just Completed My Class, I would rather do anything else than grade your Final Papers
Philosophy of action has never sounded more interesting than it does as described in this interview with Sarah Paul (Wisconsin)
Age α to age 40: you have enough value that society does culture to you. Age 40 to age Ω: there is enough time to take revenge for having had culture done to you.
"We are essentially starting from scratch when identifying the building blocks of 'creepiness.'" -- an empirical study (via Bookforum's Omnivore). Choice quotes throughout.
An interview with Maudemarie Clark (UCR) on Nietzsche's immoralism --- at FourByThreeMagazine (see link at end to 2nd interview on Nietzsche's politics)
Charles Taylor (McGill) interviewed on Australian radio
Is philosophy the key to getting teens to "trade image-management for deep reflection"? Charlotte Blease (Leeds, Harvard Med School) thinks so
Responding to radical skepticism -- Duncan Pritchard (Edinburgh) in conversation with Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)
To make progress, one needn't make a difference -- an interview with Julia Nefsky (Toronto)
"I was looking for the reason why art could give meaning to life… and I ended up seeking to give meaning to my life through a metamorphosis into an analytic, English-speaking, international philosopher of art." (via Sara Protasi)
Guessing and assessing the principle that best explains your opponent's view can be a way of changing the topic
New 3-song EP from Frege called "Got Love" (Gottlob?) -- it's a pretty chill "electro-soul" band
Czech philosopher has been protesting outside Oxford's Balliol College for days over his "radical reinterpretation of Plato"
The "CV of Failures" -- including a meta-failure
It's like Airbnb, but for peer review (via Marginal Revolution)
Philosophy, science, and unicorns -- and Good Housekeeping
"Contemporary analytic philosophy has this problem to an unusually heightened degree." Kieran Healy (Duke) on rudeness in philosophy
Set theory sex joke (via John Schwenkler)
Philosopher as security guard -- a Studio C comic sketch (from a few years ago)
The inaugural issue of Continental Thought & Theory is out -- it contains over 30 short pieces on "intellectual freedom"
In 3 years, Minorities and Philosophy (MAP) has gone from 0 to 60 Chapters (Blog of the APA)
There's a new prize for work in aesthetics sponsored by The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
"One of the three of you will fail this class… The other two probably will as well." -- Epictetus is a hard professor (EC)
T.M. Scanlon is retiring from teaching -- there will be a conference in his honor on 4/30/16
"It’s conscious agents all the way down" -- Donald Hoffman (Irvine) explains why he thinks the world is just in our heads
What can be learned from interviewing a dozen disabled philosophers?
"Philosopher (F. H. Bradley)": the poem -- by Kelly Dean Jolley (Auburn)
"Doing the knowledge": the "fifth element" of hip hop -- Derrick Darby (Michigan) on how it can lead to a remarkable life (via William Irwin)
A lost song from Boethius' "Consolations" -- set to music and performed
How should we understand Socrates? -- an interview with M. M. McCabe (Kings) at Five Books
"I think of politics and morality as like a jigsaw with too many pieces." -- an interview with Jonathan Wolff (UCL) surveying the landscape of political philosophy
A different way to write a philosophy book -- "I faced some resistance"
How teaching in prison changed a professor's philosophical views -- Jennifer Lackey (Northwestern) at the Blog of the APA
"Attacking so-called 'continental philosophy' in the name of 'analytical philosophy' was absolutely not the point of our critique" -- one of the Badiou Studies hoaxers explains
Philosopher punches Canadian Prime Minister Really.
The biology of beings' boundaries -- fascinating, but be warned: it starts with a disgusting story
The party game you've been waiting for: Cards Against HumanitIES
The APA has, over the years, "privately sent letters to a number of institutions in response to proposed cuts to or closures of philosophy departments" -- Amy Ferrer on how the APA speaks
Starring Immanuel Kant as Captain America and John Stuart Mill as Iron Man ... with Aristotle in a supporting role
Einstein's Nobel Prize was not for his theory of relativity because of Henri Bergson
The best answer to "Is this going to be on the test?" (via Ryan Lake)
The case for the sophistication of nonhuman minds (via Victor Kumar)
Are offensive jokes more or less objectionable if they're funnier? (via What's Wrong)
Distinguishing between analytic and continental philosophy -- Massimo Pigliucci (CUNY) surveys a couple of attempts
Are insects conscious? -- some scientists and philosophers think so
Humeans should not fear an AI takeover (no that's not a typo)
New award honors students who take an ethical stand -- from Penn State's Rock Ethics Institute
The 300 best-selling books by philosophers with over 1000 Twitter followers -- 20 were written or edited by Peter Singer
The Office: Ancient Philosophy Edition (EC)
The APA's Eastern and Central Divisions get new Secretary-Treasurers: Jeffrey Dunn (DePauw) and Elizabeth "Elyse" Purcell (SUNY Cortland), respectively
What happens when deadlines are eliminated? -- with grant programs submissions dropped by 59%
Can the domain of a specific philosophical inquiry be settled in advance? -- case in point: what is moral philosophy about?
The 14-volume complete edition of all of Carnap's works -- to be published by OUP, starting next year
A profile of Nicolas Berggruen, the man behind the new $1m philosophy prize and other philosophy initiatives
Foucault, Nietzsche, and nihilism -- the "historical horizon in which man... comes to know his own subjectivity"
The liar paradox gets tense -- with Roy T. Cook (Minnesota)
Mystery will remain, even if science can explain away the mysteries of religion -- a conversation between Eric Dietrich (Binghamton) and Carrie Figdor (Iowa)
The significance of recently discovered ancient Chinese texts (via David Grober-Morrow)
Bored at the museum? Maybe aesthetics can help, says Bence Nanay (Antwerp/Cambridge)
A collection of links on race and justice -- at Bookforum's Omnivore blog
Police epistemology: an interactive article -- how body cams, dash cams, and bystander cams tell different stories (via Kottke)
Errors, misrepresentations, and bias in the AAUP's report on Title IX
A detailed and interesting look at the Sleeping Beauty Problem (via Philosophy Matters)
What explains phantom phone vibrations? -- Robert Rosenberger (Georgia Tech) offers a theory (via IHE)
How caring for an ailing dog helped illuminate the value of philosophy -- a series of posts (4 so far) from Michael LaBossiere (Florida A&M)
"People who are seen as holding to moral absolutes are more trusted and more valued as social partners" in comparison to consequentialists
Feminism and the Limits of Williams -- he doesn't avoid the hazards of moral philosophy he saw in others, says Kate Manne (Cornell)
The PGR has been down for a few days -- with grad school acceptance deadlines coming up; no word from the editor, yet, about why (4/16 update: it's back up)
Learning from philosopher's lives, not just their ideas -- a review of Sara Bakewell's "At the Existentialist Café"
Implicit bias and philosophy -- a series at the Brains blog
Living in the moment -- a woman's lack of autobiographical memories raises questions about personal identity and the good life
Former philosophy student creates mobile game based on Bergman's "The Seventh Seal"
Christine Korsgaard on her work on animals and the good in an interview with a student at the Centre for Ethics at U. Toronto (audio)
Wise or Not Wise? The Game Show. Hosted by Socrates (EC)
John Corvino (Wayne State) on ABC News discussing "religious freedom" laws -- they're about religious freedom as much as "eating all the ice cream is about making room in the freezer"
Is it true that "a college degree tends to develop a wide range of soft skills"? If not, what does that say about the ethics of promoting higher ed? (via Michael Sturm)
Philosophy's PR problem has at its core… ...something like logical positivism?
"Impatience is essentially a way of being out of tune with what is really important" & other insights from Buddhist ethics, in an interview with Nicolas Bommarito (Buffalo)
Ordinarily, people don't maximize expected utility -- but this doesn't make them irrational, argues Lara Buchak (Berkeley)
Was it wrong to hack and leak the "Panama Papers"? -- thoughts from Tyler Cowen (GMU)
Philosophically-minded poetry from Keli Birchfield (Temple)
Pop philosopher cites imaginary philosopher to call real philosopher "fake" -- (from a few years back)
A journal dedicated to experimental philosophy may be in the works
"Diversifying our discipline is not a competition, and one program’s successes in this effort is not another’s failure." -- the Philosophy Department at Memphis responds to The Chronicle
"Belief is one of the most central and important concepts in all of philosophy" -- should it be associated with thoughts or with actions?
“Are you a nihilist?” “Not as much as I should be.” -- and other "fragments of nihilism" from Eugene Thacker (New School)
"Sokal hoax" at Badiou Studies (via Jason Brennan)
Classroom management and the gender gap in philosophy -- thoughts from Harry Brighouse (Wisconsin)
Input sought on how to visualize philosophy placement data
David Chalmers (NYU), Neil deGrasse Tyson, and others discuss the idea of the universe as computer simulation
Public philosophy as an opportunity for the philosopher to learn from the public -- thoughts from Nicole Vincent (Georgia State)
What are the goods of work? And how should they be distributed?
Philosophy of Mind: the All-Female Syllabus -- by Zoe Drayson (UC Davis)
Narcissistic students seem to benefit from having narcissistic professors while non-narcissistic students earn lower grades from them
Images of and quotes from logicians over the centuries -- from David Marans (St. Thomas University)
Viggo Mortensen recites "The Human Crisis" by Camus as part of "Camus: A Stranger in the City," a month-long NYC event
Can illness be a philosophical tool? -- Havi Carel (Bristol) thinks so
How exactly does Berkeley argue for his idealism? -- listen to Samuel Rickless (UCSD) explain it
In 1983 a philosophy professor in El Salvador was "disappeared" and his wife, a philosophy student, had to give up her dreams to become a professor
How to effectively chair a q&a session
"I do not see how anything that we have learned about brains or culture has changed the basic philosophical issue since Kant’s time" -- an interview with Karl Ameriks (Notre Dame)
The moral dimension of inattention and what philosophers have had to say about it
Urban animals are smarter than their rural counterparts and animals with bolder personalities are better learners
Philosopher wins award for "fostering disability studies and culture"
Reflections on the recent Pacific APA -- from Marcus Arvan (Tampa)
Those "walking counterexamples," the cynics, need the academy -- but the academy needs them, too, says Nickolas Pappas (CUNY)
On the AAUP's critique of Title IX -- the latest in a recent exchange
"John 'John' Rawls" (or, "Reflective Peequilibrium") -- photo by Michael Thompson, in Auburn AL
The ethics and lessons of carrying out—and chickening out from—Sokal-style hoaxes -- by Adam Riggio
What is it like to be a conservative in academia? (IHE)
The petition to allow guns at the Republican National Convention -- a philosophical look
"A" is the most common grade earned at all kinds of colleges -- a new report on grade inflation
365 short podcast interviews with philosophers arranged by theme
A special q&a episode of History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps -- for its 250th episode
The benefits and costs of various logics -- an interview with Bruno Whittle (Yale)
The logic question most everyone gets wrong (via Chris Bertram)
"Philosophers’ ambivalence about practical engagement long predates the history of disciplinary specialization" -- Derek Bowman (Providence) on Frodeman and Briggle
A philosopher's recent work with the World Bank
"How the bacteria living in the gut can alter the way the brain works" -- Are we controlled by microbes?
What is philosophy of neuroscience and why is it needed? -- a brief interview with Carl Craver (Wash. U. St. Louis)
AI might have super-intelligence, but will it have consciousness? -- thoughts from Susan Schneider (U Conn)
The common ground of theists and atheists -- thoughts from William Irwin (King's College)
The best 100 Twitter jokes -- so good (see #30, which isn't even the funniest one)
Cop workshop asks, "What would Aristotle do?" (via Jesse Summers)
Philosophy and (versus?) the class interests of philosophers -- comments from Eric Schliesser at D&I
Louis CK and philosophy -- a brief preview from Ethan Mills (U. Tennessee, Chattanooga)
Advice for mid-career academics -- Helen de Cruz (Oxford Brookes) in THE
"The state of teacher training in philosophy isn’t very good." but most philosophers think they're "sufficient teachers"
New short promotional video for women in philosophy -- created by Darlene Deas (via LR)
"The contemporary interpretation, implementation, and enforcement of Title IX threatens academic freedom and shared governance" says the AAUP (via IHE)
Top ten design flaws in the human body -- at Nautilus
What are public research universities good for? -- a report from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences
The lost art of drinking while grading (via Mark Alfano)
Philosopher among faculty leaders calling for "no confidence" in Board of Governors at the University of British Columbia (via Jeremy Snyder)
A series of blog posts on the emotions by Rebekka Hufendiek (Basel) at Brains
Play an online video game in which philosophers fight each other (instructions are in Portuguese)
Studying philosophy gets the official Buzzfeed listicle treatment
Privacy, technology, and "grey power": the power behind those with power -- a brief video interview with Luciano Floridi (Oxford)
Are we on the cusp of a new era in particle physics? -- the beginning of a new series of articles at Boston Review
Add your state's philosophical association to this list -- compiled by Christopher Pynes (WIU)
What did Spinoza really look like? -- some skeptical questions about his portraits, from Eric Schliesser
Philosophy professors describe their jobs -- a new series at Philosophers' Cocoon
The Museum of Modern Art has put over 65,000 images of art from its collection online -- this is a good place to start. Enjoy.
"The ultimate foundation of the right to private gun ownership—physical security—is also the basis of the right not to be shot." -- David DeGrazia (GWU) in the Baltimore Sun (via What's Wrong)
"My hands are very sore tonight. I cannot hold a pen." -- the story of an ironworker-turned-philosopher, from John Kaag (UM Lowell)
This is your kid on Nietzsche (EC)
Destigmatizing disability through design -- raising interesting questions about public language and individual well-being
How—and why—should we teach modern philosophy surveys to undergrads? -- thoughts from Eugene Marshall (Florida International)
"Imagination can indeed be a transformative tool in the betterment of ourselves and the society in which we live" says Amy Kind (Claremont McKenna) at OUPblog
Which philosophers should have movies made about them? -- and which already have?
"Any attempt to improve the pay and conditions of adjunct faculty will encounter unpleasant trade-offs" -- the work of Jason Brennan (Georgetown) et al discussed at IHE
How to make the most of the last 5 minutes of class? Four philosophers share their answers
Laying the groundwork for "worse than Trump" -- Jason Stanley (Yale) on radio KNPR
Are academics unprofessional? Yes, but here are some tips for not being so
The importance of philology - and the structure of the university, by Justin E.H. Smith (U. Paris, Diderot)
A radical critique of my "bourgeois" remarks on diversity in philosophy in terms of philosophy's "old" and "new" guards.
The outrageously awful makes the merely bad seem okay by comparison -- Jennifer Saul (Sheffield) on racism and political rhetoric
On the use violence and threats to prevent people from engaging in life-saving and life-changing activity i.e., on immigration restrictions
"We won’t be able to agree on the facts, let alone values." -- a discussion of The Internet of Us, by Michael Lynch (U. Conn), in The New Yorker
Plato's Symposium to be performed as a "pop-up love party" -- complete with thematic 7-course snack menu
Sanders and Clinton, institutions and individuals, economics and race -- Jason Stanley (Yale) on recent political rhetoric
"Make advancement dependent on what academics do during normal working hours, rather than in their evenings and weekends." -- says Jonathan Wolff (UCL)
Follow @WorkbookForArguments for examples of arguments to use in critical thinking and logic classes
"Romans regarded philosophy as being of no more use than drilling holes in millet seeds" and other facts about the Romans
Philosopher Clancy Martin spent some time with the Ted Cruz campaign and reports on it in The New Republic
"We make progress in metaphysics by observing connections with closely related fields where the 'rules of the game' are better understood…" -- an interview with Mahrad Almotahari (UIC)
London may get a statue of Mary Wollstonecraft
Kegels for Hegel is an "art music duo" aimed at "perverting" philosophers by writing explicit songs about wanting to have sex with them
Compulsive punning is a real thing, apparently (via MR)
If you were wearing the Ring of Gyges, would you be able to see? -- technological challenges to invisibility
Friendship v. Logic (xkcd)
Campbell U. renames "Dept. of Religion & Philosophy" as "Dept. of Christian Studies" -- the name is "more accurate," says the chair
(the study was previously discussed here)
"Soames lives in a philosophical world without losses or even trade-offs" -- Eric Schliesser on Scott Soames's recent defense of analytic philosophy
A public with access to google is not thereby an informed public -- we still lack understanding, argues Michael P. Lynch (U Conn)
"Undergraduates who take their first course in a given subject from a graduate student are nearly twice as likely to subsequently major in that subject compared to their peers who take the same course from full-time faculty.” (IHE)
Scientists made artificial sperm in a lab and it worked really well -- mouse sperm... for now
What should be taught in philosophy of mind now? -- thoughts and questions from Carolyn Dicey Jennings (UC Merced)
Teaching philosophy to kids improves their performance in math and English -- particularly disadvantaged kids
American Statistical Association's official statement on p-values in light of misuses and misconceptions
We're headed for a world full of Nozickian experience machines -- the ethics of virtual realisty (via Omnivore)
Data on women in philosophy graduate programs in Brazil (click on "Mulheres na Pós-Graduação em Filosofia no Brasil")
Robert Stainton (UWO) is doing some good work helping refugees (via LR)
Psychology is in "a crisis of philosophy of science" -- more on the replication conflict
Academics on social transformation and the recent campus protests -- at Boston Review
Libertarianism is more pluralist than its advocates and critics tend to realize -- thoughts from Matt Zwolinski (U. San Diego)
Star Trek gets the Parfitian personal identity treatment in a new animated video (via Kottke)
Another response to Bill Nye's ignorant remarks about philosophy -- at Quartz
There's a real need for both academic "jargon" and public engagement -- or, "philosophy" and "rhetoric"
"A ruthlessly deterministic score" -- a review of the performance of "Mind Out of Matter"
Ego depletion, the idea that "people hold a reservoir of mental strength that drains each time we use it" may itself be drained... of evidence
A critique of the critique of the replicability critique in psychology (via Mark Alfano)
Recovering from a bad third-year review -- some good advice
"We all have the right to make over our image and our life" -- that and more on the ethics of the internet giants
A philosophy graduate student could use your help
The real-world Heideggerian challenges to Western liberalism -- by Alexander S. Duff (Holy Cross)
How super-intelligent humans will come about -- the genetics of IQ
Anti-love drugs and when it's ok to take them -- the taboo on treating love "needs to go"
From rising star Kant scholar to homeless crack addict -- when bad things happen to smart people (via Michael Glawson)
Soup, yelling, and the origins of Western philosophy -- from Mallory Ortberg
Thomas Nagel (NYU) on drone warfare (in the LRB)
The letter against Derrida's honorary degree at Cambridge -- reexamined by Eric Schliesser at D&I
Music that captures "sense of awe and wonder that lies at the heart of Dennett’s scientifically informed philosophy" -- hear it live at Tufts
How a Trump presidency would be good for philosophy -- by Peter Adamson (KCL) (via Mark Alfano)
The negative effects of expressing skepticism about sexual assault -- thoughts from a philosopher who was raped by another philosopher
Anonymity and the dark web: "The ills tend to cluster in liberal countries, while the benefits tend to cluster most in repressive regimes" (via Bookforum's Omnivore)
"By Anglo-American standards Levinas is a very bad philosopher, in the sense that there are no arguments…" -- a conversation with Simon Critchley and Alexis Dianda (New School) on Levinas
Free Speech on Campus: The Debate (tonight) -- streaming live at 6:30pm eastern time, with Jason Stanley, Wendy Kaminer, and John McWhorter
We're “literally drowning in issues that have fundamental philosophical significance,” says NEH Chair William Adams
What contributes to negative opinions about philosophical research? -- some research on that from Wesley Buckwalter (Waterloo)
"What made you become a philosopher?" "The same thing that sometimes makes me reconsider my choice: people who are too sure of themselves." -- the beginning of an excellent interview of Katja Maria Vogt (Columbia)
Africana and African-American philosophy: a bibliography -- by Patrick S. O'Donnell
Oxford University Press is having a massive 60% off sale today (Leap Day)
"I must… prescribe for you a pure moral sedative" -- Immanuel Kant, advice columnist
How philosopher Ryan Muldoon (Buffalo) helps the World Bank as part of a multidisciplinary team
Connections between philosophers on Twitter who have between 3000 and 5000 followers
and which philosophers' Twitter feeds are most popular with philosophers on Twitter?
"Human life in North Korea is a nightmare, and the world ought to do something about it," says Hrishikesh Joshi (Princeton)
A reply to Bill Nye's dreadfully ignorant musings about philosophy -- from Dan Linford (Christopher Newport Univ.)
Philosophy grad students: follow this writing advice -- courtesy of Bryan Frances
I, for one, welcome our new (old) parasite overlords -- more on toxoplasmosis gondii
The best story about Elizabeth Anscombe -- and a claim about the point of philosophy
On the "absurd arguments that place freedom of speech in opposition to social justice, activism, and even liberalism" -- thoughts from Jason Stanley (Yale)
An undocumented transgender woman from Mexico interrupts President Obama -- Is this philosophically significant? Andrea Pitts (UNC Charlotte) thinks so
Is vegetarianism even possible? -- some questions from Andrew Smith (Drexel)
Yes it can go too far, but "we don’t define the value of a policy based on its most extreme manifestations" -- a defense of political correctness
Would we even know if machines became conscious? -- "What we really need is a consciousness detector that... doesn’t presuppose the outcome"
U. Houston's faculty forum on concealed weapons -- click on "Campus Carry Faculty Forum" and see slides 6, 8, 10, and esp.15
"Academia is all about rejection" -- some advice on how to deal with it
A letter in support of philosopher George Yancy and against the attacks on him for his writing at the NYT's Stone
What do philosophers do? Thoughts from Nick Byrd (FSU) on how to, and how not to, answer that question
On the value of Ethics Bowls
How swear words get their offensive force -- by Rebecca Roache (University of London)
Applied philosophy: increasing in quantity and quality -- thoughts from John Corvino (Wayne State)
Top 40 Philosophy: a new podcast -- first up: "I Love Rock 'n' Roll"
If the opening to MacIntyre's After Virtue were written today, sort of -- and its significance for social conservatism
"Boxing and philosophy very much go hand-in-hand" -- a program for kids
It's "galling" and "naïve" to think that secular ethics must have been derived from Christianity
Philosophy student and radical "guerilla street politician" advocates violence, if needed, for Hong Kong independence
"A colorful reference volume of all the colors in existence" All? Really? (via Daniel Moseley)
Scary how reasonable it can sound: the case for tracking everyone and everything
"The unbearable asymmetry of bullshit" -- explained by Brian Earp (Hastings, Oxford)
Philosopher vs. venture capitalist on how much inequality we need -- Zac Cogley (Northern Michigan) takes on Y Combinator's Paul Graham
"Metaphysics… should be informed by the remarkable success of scientific practices" argues Ken Waters (Calgary) (via Justin Caouette)
"The demand that Apple program a backdoor into the iPhone is tantamount to the demand that people’s minds be made available for inspection at any time" -- Gordon Hull (UNC Charlotte) on Apple, the FBI, and extended minds
Does 'ought' imply 'can'? A data-centered approach -- from Vlad Chituc and Paul Henne (Duke) in the NYT (via Kevin Temple and several others)
"Everything is socially constructed" -- a fascinating and wide-ranging interview with Jesse Prinz (CUNY)
How a group can be responsible for its actions even if no member of the group is -- Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (Duke) on that and related topics (via Katrien Devolder)
University of Colorado's next visiting scholar in conservative thought is a philosopher: Francis Beckwith (Baylor)
"We cannot escape ethical life. Nor can we find peace in it, either." -- a review of an atttempt at the social science of ethics
We clearly don't know enough about how to live well with other species, but that doesn't stop "naturefaking"
Quantitative analyses of women in value theory, compared to other areas of philosophy, and how the situation has changed over time -- from Carolyn Dicey Jennings (UC Merced) and Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside)
The world now is a thoroughly awful place, but not in comparison to how it used to be -- reflections from Leif Wenar (KCL)
How ageism compounds the harm suffered by disadvantaged job candidates
What would utilitarian self-driving cars really do? -- Patricia Marino (Waterloo) lays it out
The "remarkable elasticity" of Scalia's jurisprudence -- Posner on Scalia (not new, but timely)
Has the world gotten more or less free lately? What kind of freedom? And how is it measured?
Spanish civil servant skipped out on work for six years -- to read philosophy
Skepticism, truth, pragmatism, Wittgenstein, and more -- an interview with Jose Zalabardo (UCL)
"Diverse inquirers are in a position to challenge us: from their social position, different phenomena matter, different questions are pressing. " -- the AAA&S induction speech of Sally Haslanger (MIT)
The first introductory philosophy episode in the PBS series "Crash Course" is pretty good https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1A_CAkYt3GY
What is criticism? -- Critic A.O. Scott interviews himself on the topic
The first direct observation of gravitational waves -- officially announced this morning
Ayn Rand once put a curse on a man's penis. Did she invent 'negging,' too?
"Oil is the largest source of unaccountable power in the world" -- Leif Wenar (KCL) interviewed about "Blood Oil" at Vox
Academics write for each other, but must they do so as badly as they do? -- do we need more "stories"?
"Whatever the outcome, you should never take the process, or yourself, too seriously." -- Allen Wood reflects on the pursuit of a career in philosophy
The ethics of awesomeness. Awesome. -- by Nick Riggle (San Diego) and sent in by many
A philosopher takes on the Centers for Disease Control - Rebecca Kukla (Georgetown) on drinking while pregnant
The number of APA members self-reporting as "Black/African-American" doubled in one year -- Eric Schwitzgebel (UCR) wonders how that happened
FDA bioethics panel approves "3 parent" embryos to stop diseases -- Congressional ban still in effect
Philosophers debate tipping. Nozick has the best line (EC)
Did the UK government just propose to ban its grant recipients from activities intended to influence the government? -- Chris Bertram (Bristol) reports
What are the physical requirements for being a philosophy prof? -- how some schools discriminate against the disabled
Does what we know depend on what we're asked we know? Plus an 8th Century Gettier case (possibly) -- from Jennifer Nagel (Toronto)
Love: "one of the few areas left where philosophers have a clear advantage and can make genuine progress" -- says Berit Brogaard (Miami)
How the lover is an addict -- the neuroscience of love
Popper, Heidegger, and Iran (via Gerald Dworkin)
Several conversations with philosophers -- the latest is on well-being with Chris Heathwood (Colorado)
Q: What’s your biggest extravagance? A: Children -- a brief interview with Simon Blackburn (Cambridge / UNC)
It's good that David Brooks read some Susan Wolf -- but could someone send him some Peter Railton and Elinor Mason, too?
New studies cast doubt on Libet's oft-cited neuroscientific evidence against free will (via Nick Byrd)
"Ought" does not imply "can" in popular usage -- an interesting X-phinding
Today's "leading" (?) pick-up artist was prefigured by Kierkegaard argues Patrick Stokes (Deakin)
The work and working habits of a productive young philosopher -- an interview with Adrian Currie (Calgary)
More details on the case of the ivory-smuggling philosophy prof of St. Cloud State University
A call for philosophy in K-12 education in the U.S. -- at The Washington Post
What was Anna Stubblefield thinking? (via Michael Dougherty)
Nietzsche the collectivist? -- an interview with Andrew Huddleston (Birkbeck)
What is a non-empirical philosopher doing in a science policy research role? -- Sophie Stammers (KCL) tells you
How to support your students’ academic aptitude and goals while also asking, “What can we do to strengthen your Plan B?” -- Tim Johnston at APAblog
Here's your Groundhog Day lesson, philosophers -- from Michael Ventimiglia (Sacred Heart)
The epistemic case against natural life sentences -- from Jennifer Lackey (Northwestern) in the NYT
Don't say "don't read the comments"
Should your school add a degree in philosophy, politics, and economics? -- Jonny Anomaly (UNC, Duke) on PPE programs
"These passages… portray the emotional life of the intellectual mind, as replete in self-awareness as they are ruthless in accuracy" -- Charlie Huenemann (Utah State) on an excerpt from Hume
The risk of a lifetime -- Rivka Weinberg (Scripps) and Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt) discuss procreation ethics
Philosophy as "intellectual maintenance" -- Gary Gutting (Notre Dame) argues for philosophy requirements at Catholic colleges
What will space aliens really be like? -- thoughts from philosopher Susan Schneider (Connecticut) and astronomer Seth Shostak (SETI)
When is an objection grounds for rejection? Kathryn Norlock (Trent) on refereeing
An interview with the team behind 8-Bit Philosophy -- including plans to work on The Walking Dead and House of Cards
"The best judgment of really top experts who really know these situations at a granular level…" regarding how close we are to the end of civilization
New portraits of logicians -- and a game to play with them (via Richard Zach)
"Publics, as John Dewey argued, never simply exist; they are always created" -- so how should academics write for the public?
What is a dominant species? And which species will be dominant when humans are gone?
Some activities are both games and sports, some are sports that aren't games, and some are games that aren't sports -- which category suits chess? Thoughts from David Papineau (KCL)
What's a philosopher doing at the World Economic Forum 2016 at Davos?
Art philosophers like -- have you checked out the AfB 100x100x100 series lately?
The Philosophers: 3 short stories in The New Yorker by Adam Ehrlich Sachs -- they're good
Don't ignore the moral contributions of artisanship & technology -- fake meat edition (via kottke)
We have too narrow a conception of bigotry argues Jennifer Saul (Sheffield) at Huffington Post
Breaking News: Student Consults Syllabus! (via IHE)
"When we can’t do all that we’re required to do, what shall we do?" -- the research of Lisa Tessman (Binghamton)
Parfit's "Condition K" — the terrible real-world version (via Regina Rini)
"I'm not their mother. And I'm not their girlfriend, either" -- Carol Hay (UMass Lowell) on the typecasting of the woman professor
Is there an academic version of this story? -- why it's good to have a "fuck off fund"
A discussion of shyness and introversion and success in academia -- at Philosophers' Cocoon
The job market in philosophy from the point of view of a disabled philosopher -- an interview with Andrea Nicki
Rational sentimentalism, the "moralistic fallacy," what philosophers can learn from their teenage kids, and more in an interview with Justin D'Arms (Ohio State)
"The rumors of my deviation from libertarianism were much exaggerated" -- a very brief audio recording of Robert Nozick by Julian Sanchez (via Trevor Burrus)
Moral philosophers have a role to play in public debate -- an argument by example from Rory Kraft (York)
APAblog begins an interview series on the research of early career philosophers starting with Kate Manne (Cornell)
Philosophy is "a discipline that is in the business of explaining mysterious-seeming contradictions" -- Clancy Martin (Missouri, KC) interviews Jason Stanley (Yale)
Applied contextualism: a fallacy in thinking about sexual assault cases
Causal illusions, including that "special type of causal illusion in which the potential cause is our own behavior" -- Helena Matute (Bilbao) explains
It's not tone-policing to ask for charity, respect, or kindness -- Thoughts on "call-out culture"
"Turning away refugees is like kicking drowning people back into the lake as they struggle to save themselves" -- Neera Badhwar (Oklahoma) on the arguments used against admitting refugees into the U.S.
"I consider the relationship between metaphysics and science to be very subtle" -- an interview with Tuomas Tahko (Helsinki)
Teaching without that "line that must not be crossed if the essay is to count as the students’ own work" -- Jonathan Wolff (UCL) tries a new approach
Retraction Watch notes "severe shortcomings" in three works by an academic working in philosophy and communications
"To make one's life all about a harm, since that is what protracted litigation would have done, seems to me a sacrifice that morality does not demand" -- Martha Nussbaum on "Why Some Men Are Above the Law"
What's keeping you from being a philosophy blogger? -- thoughts from Adriel Trott (Wabash)
"Should we be closing PhD programs that better serve women and minorities in philosophy?" -- some people appear to be recommending this
…or are they?
New developments in building optical illusions
Peculiarities of pain and suffering: an "imperative theory" -- a discussion with Colin Klein (Macquarie)
The metaphors philosophers use for "argumentation" that get in the way of "virtuous adversariality"
Anna Stubblefield sentenced to 12 years in prison
"It would be a mistake, I think, to blame students for their unwillingness to confront and revise their [ideologies] in the moment in front of their peers" -- Eric Schliesser on one of the challenges of philosophical teaching
St. Cloud State philosopher pleads guilty to smuggling ivory
When people think it is or is not permissible to lie, and why -- Gerald Dworkin follows up on his popular essay in The Stone
Needles and Necessity -- a Facebook group for philosophers who knit
The epistemology of drone strikes -- the strikes are based on information that isn't knowledge, argues Robert G. Brice (Loyola)
Philosophers and others on immigration, refugees, and related issues at The Critique
The APA leadership structure explained
Student evaluations of teaching: even more biased than we previously thought
"The Anthropocene adds nature to the list of things we can no longer regard as natural" -- a forum at Boston Review on political ideals and the environment
St. Teresa: patron philosopher of single women?
Truth or Dare: philosophy version (via The Philosophy Foundation)
Philosophia Mathematica editors allow book reviewer to out himself as comically out of touch -- were they being clever or too lax?
Liberalism and the intermediary groups of civil society -- a symposium on "Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom" by Jacob Levy (McGill)
More information about the philosophy curriculum proposed for secondary schools in Ireland
How restrained should we be in our treatment of religious beliefs that we do not share? Peter Jones (Newcastle) on religion, offense, and respect
An interview with hedonistic utilitarian Torbjörn Tännsjö (Stockholm) -- at 3:AM Magazine
On being a Shia Muslim woman philosopher -- an interview with Saba Fatima (Southern Illinois)
New open-access academic publisher funded by college libraries and grants
Advice on applying for jobs at community colleges from Robert L. Muhlnickel (Monroe CC) at APAblog
The men of "Y'all Qaeda" want to "take back their land" -- Justin McBrayer (Fort Lewis) introduces them to some basic questions in philosophy of property
So what if moral and philosophical reasoning is post-hoc rationalization? -- thoughts from Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) and Jonathan Ellis (UC Santa Cruz)
Government house medicine: John Worrall (LSE) on why a ban on prescribing homeopathy may not be a good idea -- at the LSE Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method Blog (via Ewan Rodgers)
Objections to adding cross-cultural content to your philosophy syllabi -- considered by Anand Vaidya (San Jose State)
Allen Wood (Indiana/Stanford) provides job dossier advice at APAblog
"For female students, an increase of one standard deviation in attractiveness was associated with a 0.024 increase in grade (on a 4.0 scale)." -- attractiveness bias in grading, at IHE
"Imposter Syndrome makes you forget and remember all of the wrong things." -- Keisha Ray (UT Health Sciences)
Each of us likely owes our existence, in part, to some historical atrocity. Todd May (Clemson) asks: What do our thoughts about that imply for our concern for future generations?
Against even "perfect" killer robots -- an interview with Duncan Purves (NYU), Ryan Jenkins (CalPoly), and Bradley Strawser (NPS), in Forbes
"The sciences have undermined religion in recent centuries—but so have the humanities" -- Russell Blackford (Newcastle) on "accommodationism"
A real-life version of Frank Jackson's Mary? Katelyn Hallman (UNF) on the new glasses that allow colorblind people to see color
If [professional philosophers] won’t do the thinking, "it’s inevitable that technologists will pull double duty as ethicists and developers alike" (via Philosophy Matters)
How can one browse the internet with practical wisdom? Charlie Huenemann (Utah State) takes up the question
The head of the AI lab at MIT on self-driving cars: they can "avoid the trolley problem altogether." Hmm.
How prominently is women's philosophical work discussed? One empirical measure
What should you do when your university hosts a talk by Donald Trump? -- be tolerant, but don't be a chump, say Carol Hay and John Kaag (U Mass Lowell)
Open access philosophy journals with peer review -- a list compiled by Kathryn Norlock (Trent)
More on the experimental music project featuring John Malkovich reading Plato -- in Rolling Stone
White America, "imagine that your child is black" -- George Yancy (Duquesne) asks you to "listen with love" in a column about racism
Piercing "the scrim of authenticity" of the Mast Bros. -- an unintentional brief for the need for a deeper, broader, and more interesting business ethics
Ignorance no obstacle to pontification -- Roger Scruton on contemporary dancing edition
"There is a democratic republic of jerks, and we are all potential citizens of it…" while "capito-democracy is essentially a customer-loyalty program skewed in favour of asshole elites"
More on Bar Ilan University's treatment of Hanoch Sheinman
A new site for keeping track of events and scholarly work about David Hume
Bar-Ilan U. imposes extra review burden on legal philosopher Hanoch Sheinman for his expression of sympathy with victims of violence in Gaza (via Mark van Roojen)
“What are you going to do with that?” “Think,” I replied Harvard Med School prof defends majoring in philosophy, in WaPo
More on order effects on philosophers' intuitions -- a reply from Eric Schwitzgebel (UC RIverside) to recent critiques
Do children have a right to be loved? -- Matthew Liao (NYU) argues they do
And another: "Feuding physicists turn to philosophy for help" -- in Nature
Philosophy-related winter break activity for the little kiddos (just imagine what could be done with Leibniz's hair)
An account of the recent gathering of philosophers and physicists in Munich -- in The Atlantic (via Robert Long)
Philosophy in the “bad ‘ole days” & other details about the life of Brian Leiter (Chicago) in an interview at What Is It Like To Be A Philosopher?
More on PGR problems: should survey experts and statisticians be involved?
What is it like to be Noam Chomsky's personal assistant?
What's the best way to die? (via Omnivore)
Each year, David Chapman (Samford) dresses up as Socrates and delivers the Apology to his students (may be paywalled)
If you want to send an end-of-term note to your good students encouraging them to major in philosophy, here is a template email
Theologians and philosophers author amicus brief on the abortion regulations case heading to the Supreme Court and invite others to join
"Fundamental neuroethics" and related topics -- an interview with Kathinka Evers (Uppsala)
The globe-spanning life and career of a black, disabled, philosophy grad student and adjunct prof -- an interview with Damion Kareem Scott (CUNY)
Is "order effect" a challenge to the reliability of philosophical intuitions? — some doubts about the research that says so
Dolphins are non-human persons, according to the government of India
The venerable PEA Soup blog seeks new editor(s)
Are plants intelligent? And if they are, then what?
The classic Monty Hall Problem -- a new video about it, with an animated explanation of the answer
Philosophy in middle school -- courtesy of Syracuse's philosophy department
Interested in working with a philosopher (or other academic) in Russia? -- get up to $41k for your project
David Chalmers (NYU) and playwright Tom Stoppard discuss "The Hard Problem"
The death of the humanities has been greatly exaggerated -- "the absolute numbers of humanities graduates have grown and grown. In contrast to the sciences, the relative share of the humanities has held up quite well."
The favorite philosophy twitter feeds of philosophers on twitter
"A novel approach to overcoming barriers to publication" -- what to do when your paper is rejected (via Nick Byrd)
The benefits of having your students get to know one another -- notes from Harry Brighouse (Wisconsin)
Wiley-Blackwell makes a couple of chapters from "The Ultimate Star Wars and Philosophy" freely available (Daily Nous will have some reviews of the new Star Wars movie on Monday)
An accounting of how many and what kinds of academic philosophy jobs there are this year -- at the Cocoon
Privacy as an historical anomaly (via Omnivore)
How to reduce stereotype threat in first-year logic classes -- successful strategies from Vanessa Lehan (York)
Judge denies Anna Stubblefield's motion to overturn jury's guilty verdict
The "field philosophy" of Adam Briggle (North Texas) and his resultant book, favorably discussed in the NYT
Obligatory lies -- commentary---and a quiz---from Gerald Dworkin, in the NYT
The philosophy of style -- an interview with Nick Riggle (San Diego)
Cass Sunstein's year-end list of best books in behavior science includes L. A. Paul's "Transformative Experience"
Only 13% of Authors in Five Leading Philosophy Journals Are Women -- Eric Schwitzgebel (UCR) has the numbers
Is the APA's new journal living up to its editorial statement?
"The most common demands are not always the ones the media covers and public debate focuses on" -- the NYT on the distorted coverage of recent student protests
A lively meeting of physicists and philosophers on the current status of fundamental physics, recounted by a philosopher here
and a physicist here
A cryptographer calls for moral philosophy: "I plea for a reinvention of our disciplinary culture to attend not only to puzzles and math, but, also, to the societal implications of our work" (via MR)
Should we rename institutions that honor dead racists? -- Regina Rini (NYU) takes up the question
Nietzsche: failed Turkish poet
An interview with Nadler about the case
Spinoza still excommunicated from Judaism -- a report from Steven Nadler (Wisconsin) on the recent proceedings
Agricultural schools as growth areas for philosophy
The psychology of luxury and the importance of a good's history -- thoughts from Paul Bloom (Yale), Debra Satz (Stanford) and others at Boston Review
"[My son] asked me, "What do you do when you do philosophy?" I said, "Well, you think about the most important things in the world." And he said, "Like soccer?" -- an entertaining interview with Alexander Nehamas (Princeton)
End of Semester Professor Bingo
"Analytical ethics is especially unsuited for commentary on political, newsy events of the day" argues Eric Schliesser at Digressions & Impressions
"A collision course between some sensible-sounding restriction on who you flirt, date, and hook up with, and the culture of modern life in which every relationship is kind of a work relationship" -- Patricia Marino (Waterloo) comments
"What do philosophers make? Ideas and arguments. And ideas and arguments are what drive human history" -- Eddy Nahmias (Georgia State) in the Atlanta Journal Constitution
Our choice: "between philosophizing that is disciplined, reflective, and sincere, and philosophizing that is haphazard, knee-jerk, and reckless" Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse (Vanderbilt) at 3QD
Good lives, good friends, and gay mormons -- the latest Very Bad Wizards, with guest Valerie Tiberius (Minnesota)
Background culture as moral tie-breaker -- sexual disagreements edition, by Anders Sandberg (Oxford)
Sisyphus meets the new boss (EC)
It is not clear which way of stopping Islamic State is just argues Nolen Gertz (Twente / Case Western)
Jeff McMahan (Oxford) on airstrikes in Syria (via Practical Ethics)
A response to Lichtenberg on altruism (linked below) -- from Richard Yetter Chappell (York)
Puzzles about perception of the passage of time -- discussed by Carla Merino-Rajme (UNC)
"I came to think of philosophy as something any person should do seriously whatever field one was in—but I didn’t think I could make a living doing it. " -- Allan Gibbard (Michigan) in an interview at 3:AM about his work
A philosopher and "powerful voice for the victims of atrocities in Bosnia-Herzegovina" -- the admirable work of David Pettigrew (Southern Connecticut)