Heap of Links

"It’s time that faculty members honored the work that graduate students do by actually scrutinizing it---as opposed to demanding that they produce more and more of it" -- CHE picks up on Velleman's publication proposal
The University of Colorado just bought $47,000 worth of merchandise from a former philosophy professor it tried to fire -- David Barnett's PopSockets are just that good
"Gavagai" -- an "extraordinary movie" -- but it's unclear what its message is
Philosophy Talk, the radio show, names new hosts -- John Perry will become "host emeritus"
"We avoid the interference available to our digital providers only insofar as they are willing to be indulgent" -- Philip Pettit (Princeton/ANU) on online freedom
Philosophobia: a new philosophy podcast -- from Steve Tatlow (Durham University)
"We seem to have forgotten that private government exists; we believe, incorrectly, that 'the state is the only form of government'" -- the next hot topic in political philosophy, I'd bet, courtesy of Elizabeth Anderson (Michigan)
"How to leave Classics" (or philosophy?) "and thrive in the marketplace" -- the artificial scarcity of academia has "impinged ability to understand themselves and their possibilities" (via L.A. Paul)
Awesomeness and suckiness -- a conversation with Nick Riggle (San Diego) at the WMFA podcast
What kind of person was Gottlob Frege? -- What little information we have doesn't paint a pretty picture, says Ray Monk
How much would each researcher receive if competitive government research funding were distributed equally among researchers? -- a fair amount, according to a snapshot analysis by Krist Vaesen & Joel Katzav
The Origins and Implications of White Nationalism in the U.S. -- a faculty panel at Brown University
A philosopher looks at the self-help slogan "live in the present" -- there's an insight in there, says Kieran Setiya (MIT)
Minds Online starts today -- it's an open access, online conference on topics in the philosophy and science of mind
Teaching philosophy via Harry Potter -- "You can bring your wands, but you can't use them on exams," says professor Carolyn Hartz (St. Cloud State)
"I think it was like ‘Pass me the cornflakes, Hilary, now let’s get back to talking about Dewey.’" -- a profile of the marriage of Hilary and Ruth Anna Putnam, on the occasion of a new collection of essays by them
Donald Trump and American plutocracy -- an interview with Hans Sluga (Berkeley) - starts near the 8:00 mark
The pop music of philosopher Ben Bramble (Trinity College, Dublin)
Aesthetics for Birds, the philosophy of art blog, significantly increases its staff -- goal: "much broader, more diverse, and more frequent content"
When a troll trash-talks an academic expert without realizing he's doing so on her Facebook page -- "I have some fantastic news for you..."
Come for the insights relating comedy to philosophy, stay for the joke about cultural appropriation -- philosophy student-turned-comic David Heti chats with his sister, Sheila
New scholarly podcast about the Late Antique, Medieval, and Byzantine eras -- three episodes up so far
Grading rubrics for philosophy courses -- Christina Hendricks (UBC) has some examples and is looking for more
Michael Dummett's grammar advice -- graded by linguist Geoffrey Pullum (Edinburgh) at CHE
New blog on philosophical questions about imagination and fiction -- check out "Thinking About Fiction" from Kathleen Stock (Sussex)
"I love women" -- empirical psychological research on implicit bias doesn't---and couldn't---live up to its billing, argue two philosophers
When you're a professor, "not only can you get away with being stupid, you wind up with social license to become even more stupid" -- Joseph Heath (Toronto) on absent-mindedness as social deviance
"The reduction of suffering due to disease... is doubtless good. So, one might think that every step we take in that direction consistent with justice, short of extinguishing our humanity, is surely good." -- a philosopher's experience as a patient prompts reflections on the post-human
"When divine reason dropped out of the picture, a deep rupture occurred, which obliterated philosophy’s purpose as it had been conceived by Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and many philosophers after them." -- Carlos Fraenkel (McGill) on the purpose of philosophy
"Research into the ethical dimensions of art receives little support from the world’s museums... despite the fact that ethical questions about art arise on a seemingly weekly basis and command substantial public attention," writes Erich Hatala Matthes (Wellesley)
A list of philosophical questions -- with each linked to a podcast discussing it
12 things to love about philosophical logic -- Greg Restall (Melbourne) introduces a series of posts at his blog
We cannot have perfectly reliable beliefs about what we don’t believe -- Roy T. Cook (Minnesota) on paradoxes of belief
Philosopher gives up emeritus title after his university honors Putin -- Mihály Vajda no longer wishes to be associated with the University of Debrecen
"Philosophers treat the imagination with both despair and delight" -- Amy Kind (Claremont McKenna) on the uses of imagination
The ideas and friendship of Hume and Smith -- discussed by Dennis Rasmussen (Tufts)
"Being an octopus might be more like being a human than we have tended to think" -- Amia Srinivasan on the octopus research of Peter Godfrey-Smith and Sy Montgomery
How often do articles in (non-English) European language journals cite English-language vs. same-language works? -- the latest in a series of language analyses of philosophy articles, at The Splintered Mind
What is it for something to be alive? -- it's not an easy question, as Marc Lange (UNC) explains
Don't fight hate -- says David Livingston Smith (New England)
The uses and abuses of idealization -- an interview with Kwame Anthony Appiah (NYU) in Prospect Magazine
Emerging pop singer Brynn Elliott is a philosophy major -- "she took a course on Albert Einstein and wound up writing a whole concept album for an assignment"
Does the peeping Tom who is never discovered harm his victims? -- David Boonin (Colorado) takes up the question at "What's Wrong?"
The charge that a professor who publicly criticizes a group can't be trusted to fairly grade members of that group -- it comes at a steep cost
A report on a philosophy camp for teens -- from Fred Guy (Baltimore)
"In support of a recent tenure case, our department gave the acceptance rates at journals as evidence of their significance" -- P.D. Magnus (Albany) on the problem with that
Advice for students: "think for yourself" -- a group of professors warn students about the "tyranny of public opinion" (via IHE)
A symposium of sociologists on Charlottesville -- in Contexts Magazine
American Historical Association statement on Confederate monuments (via IHE)
What it feels like to be in Houston -- Anne Jacobson (Houston), flooded in but fine, reports
Should epistemology be part of the pre-college curriculum? -- it's "something all other subjects contain but do not properly address"
Which item in your office would you save from a fire? -- various academics respond
Onora O’Neill on trust, politics, and philosophy -- Nietzsche and Moore are problems, says the "unrepentant, card-carrying old Kantian"
"We need to pry apart the equation of personhood and property at the core of white supremacy" -- Lisa Guenther (Queens) and Abigail Levin (Niagara) unpack "you will not replace us"
Hume on punching Nazis -- look at the bigger picture, he would counsel
Philosophy is about questioning assumptions -- so philosophers should attend to one of the big ones, says Jennifer Scuro (New Rochelle): ableism
A link to more philosophy links -- at Omnivore (via Saba Bazargan-Forward)
Rousseau was "a diligent student of... the moral psychology of the wealthy" -- what would he say about Louise Linton?
A relatively new online philosophy magazine -- "Epoché" aims to "use the wealth of concepts present in the labor of philosophy, ancient, modern, and new, to provide fragments of clarity, moments of pause"
"If a bit of generosity in our teaching can help [our students], if a bit more patience with their challenges can make the difference between hard-won success and crushing struggle, then it’s our duty as teachers to provide it" -- on so-called snowflakes
Finland's black metal music scene is into philosophy -- for example, the band Verge is partial to a Williams-like critique of Kant
Statue removal efforts hit philosophy -- conservatives in Turkey want a statue of Diogenes taken down
The surprising significance of two random-looking shapes -- on fruitful classification in mathematics (for your "reality is counterintuitive" file)
How Kant's ethics goes wrong, in 1000 words -- Nomy Arpaly (Brown) on Kant and well-being
The latest on the lawsuit against Laura Kipnis -- a memo in opposition to her motion to dismiss has been filed
Black children who appear in juvenile court in the week following a loss by the area college's football team get harsher sentences -- Erin Tarver (Emory) on that and other morally salient aspects of college football
Should journals publish work by graduate students? -- the discussion continues at Inside Higher Ed
"Their willingness to engage near-death experiences with philosophical seriousness is... courageous and, institutionally speaking, path-breaking" -- philosophers look at the possibility of life after death
Racial explanations: "taboo" in philosophy? -- no, not now, but in the first half of the 20th Century; Schliesser on Bright on race and logical empiricism
Steps towards measuring the virtues -- on developing a scale of intellectual humility
"What do we want?" "To question everything!" "When do we want it?" "Well, actually, what if time is an illusion?" -- philosophers go on strike (EC)
As you plan for the upcoming semester -- don't forget to plan for having a life outside of work
"It would be foolish to pretend that there aren’t obvious biological differences between human beings and that these differences are tied to certain geographical regions... but there’s a big difference between race and diversity" says David Livingstone Smith (New England)
Philosophers at theme parks -- in The New Yorker (via Tanya Kostochka)
"The enormous, singular joke of our epoch is not funny" -- Justin E. H. Smith (University of Paris) on theories of humor
A philosophy PhD who struggled with depression as a grad student will be giving a talk at their school on it -- what should they say?
What is it like to be a dog? -- a question at the intersection of law, brain science, and philosophy
"The surfer is thus something of a new model of civic virtue. The real troublemaker is the workaholic." -- Aaron James (UC Irvine) philosophizes about surfing
New philosophy blog of interviews with early-career legal and moral philosophers -- from Lucas Miotto (Edinburgh)
The "real meaning of life" for philosophers (EC)
Lessons from a lack of interpretive charity -- and what Nancy Maclean and the public choice theorists she criticizes have in common
A twitter feud over race and Roman history, fueled by scientism -- Massimo Pigliucci (CUNY) explains the mistake
On the value of studying "minor" figures in the history of philosophy -- how to address those who are skeptical
A student draws portraits of philosophers in the style of "cute anime boys"
The Franz Kafka video game -- now available for your iPhone, etc.
"I'm contacting an author whose manuscript was due in 1987. A full 30 years ago. ...The rest of you can feel better now for being a little late."
"I know what a philosophy class looks like... I had never seen a class this dumbed down" -- refusing to lower standards, one philosophy instructor quit and another was fired (via Debra Nails)
Philosophy has "a very high nuance rate in the first few decades of the twentieth century, which then sharply declines, and rejoins the upward trend in the 1980s" -- Kieran Healy (Duke) on "nuance" over time in several disciplines
At the intersection of metaphysics and political philosophy -- David Strohmaier (Sheffield) on the ontology of nation-states, at his philosophy blog
"Even philosophers whose work is in areas of real public interest, such as applied ethics, can struggle to get a hearing above the noise of pundits, preachers and politicians" -- what should philosophers do to better influence public debate?
Nomy Arpaly (Brown) now has her own blog -- it's called "The View From The Owl's Roost"
Two philosophers shortlisted for the 2017 Royal Society Science Book Prize (via Holly Lawford Smith)
Relying primarily on law enforcement to address structural problems tells the disadvantaged: we "don't really care about them" -- Tommie Shelby (Harvard) on calls for tougher policing
Daniel Dennett (Tufts) and David Papineau (KCL) debate on the pages of TLS -- with an introduction from Tim Crane (Cambridge/CEU)
Philosophy journal corrects the official record regarding articles by Bruce Le Catt (via Michael Dougherty)
First generation college students are the most likely to major in the humanities or social sciences --A look at liberal-arts graduates and the "five factors... that can spur long-term success for anyone from a non-elite background"
Race and philosophy -- an interview with Charles Mills (CUNY)
Thank you for calling the philosophy helpline "For Descartes, please press (1,0,0). You have pressed it, therefore you will be connected to him. But who is it that is really doing the pressing?"
A long, organized, descriptive list of digital tools for researchers -- for a variety of types of tasks
"For the sake of my empire, I have robbed Montesquieu without mentioning him by name... I hope he will pardon me this plagiarism for the good of 20 million people" -- how Catherine the Great borrowed from Enlightenment thinkers to create "one of the most remarkable political treatises ever"
Wittgenstein fan tags monument in Chicago -- I suppose the spray paint does make a kind of "shhhh" sound
A good, online, interactive game theory game -- a cool teaching tool (via Victor Kumar)
Sometimes it seems that doing the right thing is impossible -- because sometimes it is, says Lisa Tessman (Binghamton)
There will be no new posts at "Philosopher" -- but creator Meena Krishnamurthy (Michigan) says existing posts will remain up
Some questions in the philosophy of wine -- a conversation with Barry Smith (U. of London)
Deaths in the Iliad: an infographic -- including "stand-out performances in battle" (via Daniel O'Connell)
Is a reason to perform some act always a reason to perform that act rather than some other one? -- Justin Snedegar (St. Andrews) talks with Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)
That "aha" moment when you come to think you know something -- what has happened in your mind? Scientists experiment to try to figure that out
Ways in which the concern that something is "just not feasible" goes awry -- Nicholas Southwood (ANU) with some rather good points
For the first time in the U.S., scientists have created genetically modified human embryos -- new technique allowed scientists to avoid problems of earlier efforts
A Facebook page has been set up to continue discussion of the Pregnancy ≠ Childbearing Project -- organized by philosopher Jen Scuro (New Rochelle)
"A warning from Aristophanes to Socrates on the precarious position the philosopher is in" -- in Forbes
"Why is the bathroom ground zero?" -- Jean Kazez (SMU) on the Texas bathroom bill
It's useful to distinguish between "being to blame for bringing about an event and being a bad person" -- Robert Hartman (Gothenburg) on moral luck
The science of redefining the kilogram -- since the original has "gained weight"
A journey with Rorty -- one of several essays on him in the LARB (see "related" for others)
Beyond the "naive view" of the problem with fake news -- from Neil Levy (Macquarie)
The philosophy of free speech at work when people protest certain speakers -- Jason Stanley (Yale) at The Philosopher's Zone
French psychoanalysist, philosopher, & essayist Anne Dufourmantelle drowns in attempt to rescue children -- she is the author of, among other things, "In Praise of Risk"
"Part of the reason for Cold War philosophy’s continuing dominance is that... it has never been directly confronted on a philosophical level" -- an interpretation of the role of rational choice theory in philosophy and culture
"It is very difficult to change the mindset of adult human beings" -- Massimo Pigliucci (CUNY) on why we need more philosophy and science books for children
"it is still an open question whether there is fundamental ontology and laws and if there is whether they can be found by the methods of physics" -- an interview with Barry Loewer (Rutgers)
A volume on ethical and social issues arising out of the 2016 US presidential election and the Trump administration -- from the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal
Which heretic are you? -- a quiz based on Steven and Ben Nadler’s graphic novel account of the seventeenth-century thinkers (via Rob Tempio)
"According to one study, 22 percent to 57 percent of faculty members, depending on the campus, reported being stalked by students." -- some information and advice from a professor who was stalked by a student
Settling that Russell thing once and for all (don't miss the mouseover text)
"Two major methodological challenges arise equally in contemporary cosmology and particle physics" -- Michela Massimi (Edinburgh) in The Guardian
"American public discourse doesn’t give us helpful ways to talk about the dictatorial rule of employers" -- Elizabeth Anderson (Michigan) on how we're governed by our employers (Vox)
The homes of German philosophers -- some photos
Should policy-relevant researchers stay out of politics? -- thoughts on academic research, political change, and the connection between them
The trailer for the Amartya Sen documentary -- and India's Central Board of Film Certification's censorship of certain words in it
When philosophers invent problems (SMBC)
"Is life a worthwhile risk?" -- Rivka Weinberg (Scripps) on the environmental factors relevant to that question
"The objects it creates might only be virtual, but the challenges it raises are all too real" -- the ethics and politics of augmented reality
"When you ask why he didn’t show up to your party, he says there are four causes" -- if famous philosophers were your friends
Which students study the most? -- philosophy majors are third on the list
"A Columbia classmate... challenged Danaher to a bout in the philosophy department. [He] locked the door, grabbed him in a headlock, and threw him to the ground..." -- how a grad student in philosophy became a master of Brazilian jujitsu (via Paul Bloom)
"Kant is even wondering if suicide, which he definitively considered wrong under any circumstances... might not be justified in the Age of Trump" -- famous philosophers on the current US president (via @Twhite92Boone)
The ontological argument -- for the existence of Batman
A philosophical novel based on Descartes' Meditations -- and the story behind it
"The self comes into being with the first act of attention" -- Carolyn Dicey Jennings (UC Merced) on the possibility of a substantive self
"Is that your philosophy of life?" "No." Sigh.
What's wrong with a new book about the history of libertarian ideas -- besides the history itself
Thoreau's neighbors -- Walden as refuge for outcasts
A primer on Althusser -- via an interview with William Lewis (Skidmore)
A brief history of beauty (via Aesthetics for Birds)
How to answer the "parasite" objection to a universal basic income -- Hillel Steiner (Manchester) at the relatively new site "Know It Wall"
Russell Brand discusses philosophy with Simon Critchley (New School) -- on Brand's "Under The Skin" show
"I think of the laws of any country as akin to the formal rules in a game like soccer or tennis" -- an interview on sports and philosophy with David Papineau (KCL)
"Dangerous Ideas": a humanities course -- co-created by philosopher Debra Satz (Stanford)
"Nature itself is non-local" -- Eddy Chen & Isaac Wilhelm (Rutgers) use an antalogy to explain a puzzle in quantum mechanics
"I now wish that I had strived for a proper liberal arts education" -- leading Silicon Valley engineer worries that she and other techies "haven’t spent anywhere near enough time thinking about these larger questions of what it is that we are building"
Emerging technologies for treating mental illness are a form of "mind control" -- raising questions that an interdisciplinary team of philosophers, psychologists, and engineers are taking up
These philosophers are doing their part to keep philosophy cool (via Colin Ruloff)
The philosophical French president -- he studied under Ricoeur (via John McCumber)
Five short takes on Kipnis' Unwanted Advances plus a response of a sort from the author -- the one by Friedman is especially on point & goes unanswered by Kipnis (via Matt McAdam)
How to talk to famous professors -- including "five time-tested approaches"
"Could we still claim our mantle as true philosophers if we, as a matter of policy, uncritically made use of our inherited concepts?" -- Liam Kofi Bright (CMU) on the idea of and motivation for decolonising philosophy
Why philosophy majors would make great entrepreneurs -- by entrepreneur Nicholas Miller (elaborating on a previous piece in The Observer)
Socrates' idea of a perfectly just city -- discussed by MM McCabe (KCL) on BBC Radio
"I certainly don’t have any plans" to eliminate the Center for Thomistic Studies -- says the new president of St. Thomas, Houston
The "private government" that rules over most of us -- an interview with Elizabeth Anderson (Michigan)
Good and bad arguments -- Trudy Govier (Lethbridge) talks with Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt) at Why We Argue
Are natural laws necessary by virtue of being natural laws, or are they natural laws by virtue of being necessary? -- an interview with Marc Lange (UNC Chapel Hill)
People's "ex post evaluation of well-being is generally higher when identical consequences result from a high-risk situation than from a low-risk situation" (via MR)
Philosophy is solved -- by freshman philosophy student (EC)
"Your cognitive capacity is significantly reduced when your smartphone is within reach -- even if it's off" -- and even if you think you're paying it no attention
Derrida and analytic philosophy -- does "Derrida undermine... the ground beneath the projects analytic metaphysicians pursue"?
What it's like to chair a philosophy department -- reflections from Ronald Sundstrom (San Francisco)
Schopenhauer has a bad flight (via Micah Bailey)
On seeing a color you couldn't imagine before -- Neil Sinhababu (NUS) tries on color-correction glasses
What it is like to be a philosopher consulting for a tv sitcom -- a discussion with Todd May (Clemson) about his work with the creators of "The Good Place"
The Institute for Art and Ideas offers several free online courses taught by philosophers -- the latest is "Evidence and Ideology" with Nancy Cartwright (Durham, UCSD)
A defense of majoring in philosophy -- in The Washington Post
Is the "open-endedness" of modern life a problem to be solved? -- Patricia Marino (Waterloo) raises the question
Archaeologists discover fully intact 17th-Century belief system -- in an Ohio Congressman
How a medieval bishop clamped down on Aristotle scholars and spurred multiverse theory -- in our world, at least
Some perspective on human knowledge and the earning of a PhD -- an illustration (kind of an internet-age classic)
"In response to growing anti-intellectualism and hostility towards philosophy, a crack team of the deadliest philosophers ever assembled was formed..." (EC)
The sex life and sexual ideas of Augustine -- in The New Yorker
"A star may have an internal life that allows it to 'feel,' but whatever that feeling is, it is much less than the feeling of being an E. coli" -- when panpsychism makes NBC news
The original "brain in the vat" example and perhaps the inspiration for Nozick's experience machine -- an excerpt from "A Philosopher's Nightmare" by Jonathan Harrison (1966)
Would you sacrifice a human life to save the Mona Lisa? -- a case for "yes"
"Writing advice to my students that would have also been good sex advice for my high school boyfriends" -- from Helena de Bres (Wellesley)
New mini-philosophy course based on Game of Thrones at University of Glasgow -- unfortunately not called "I drink and I know things"
"Darwin's idea that the struggle between species was an engine of creation... undermined transcendentalist assumptions that nature was inherently good" -- how Darwin influenced Thoreau
Before you teach your students the Monty Hall Problem -- teach the Mosteller Hall puzzle
The colonialist and utilitarian origins of liberal freedom as non-interference -- plus a look at republican freedom as non-domination, in an interview with Philip Pettit (via Nigel Warburton)
"Public universities have sunk into economic frailty over the last decades" -- who or what can save them?
"We are living in a golden age of sexual creativity" -- a description of the porn-enabled "erotic renaissance that is... unprecedented in human history" (text only, but explicit)
What is a good death? -- reflections from Luc Bovens (LSE)
The technological wherewithal of a species is not the same thing as intelligence -- which is something we should remember in our search for intelligent life
Five volumes of Bentham's correspondence are now available in open access form -- here's the link to the first (via Phil Baker)
Philosophy job market mentoring program -- time for those interested in receiving and providing mentoring to sign up
"By focusing on the lives of creatures like ants, it may be possible to formulate a version of the problem of evil which, in certain ways, is even harder to solve than traditional versions" -- Dustin Crummett (Notre Dame) discusses the problem
The graphic (novel) account of Spinoza's Theological Political Treatise -- from Ben Nadler and Steven Nadler
Philosophical theses you have never seen because they're extremely weak -- though they are frequently funny
"Our talk was kindling too damp to light, / so we accepted the cold of silence..." -- go be wrecked by the poetry of Brook Sadler (USF)
Explaining philosophy with humor -- Tom Cathcart and Daniel Klein on the Philosophy Bakes Bread podcast
"Things that ought to be impossible actually aren’t" -- the study of "near-miss mathematics"
Compatibilism: a parable -- don't get too excited
Why "open access" is slower to catch on in the humanities -- a post by Peter Suber, director of the Harvard Open Access Project
"Public-facing" philosophy can shape "peer-facing" philosophy -- it's not just a one way street from the academy to the town square, says Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam)
Pyramids and Tubes -- Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) compares different shapes academia can take
"I graduated with a B.A. in philosophy and it was by far the best major I could have taken in college" -- NBC News correspondent Katy Tur
The extended cognition of spiders (via Robert Long)
"Morality is a cultural construction in something like the way bridges are" -- they must be designed "according to what would adequately fulfill their function and the nature of materials that" says David Wong (Duke)
So you want to be a public philosopher? -- Carrie Jenkins (UBC) has some ideas, advice, and strategies for you
With so much information about philosophy programs and philosophers now readily accessible, do we still need rankings? -- David Sobel (Syracuse) raises the question
Defending liberal toleration as a response to moral and social diversity -- Peter Balint (UNSW Canberra) in conversation with Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)
Might we benefit animals by eating them? -- a lecture by Jeff McMahan (Oxford)
"The entire country is starting to seem like the character from 'The Matrix" who preferred his life in the constructed reality to life in the real world" -- Michael Lynch (U Conn) on our "common reality"
Ask Barry Lam (Vassar), creator and host of the excellent philosophy show Hi-Phi Nation, anything -- today on Reddit
Enhancement, transhumanism, disability, and biopolitics -- a symposium on The Bioethics of Enhancement by Melinda Hall (Stetson)
Does voter ignorance undermine democracy? -- Ilya Somin (George Mason) and Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt) discuss
Noam Chomsky, the"American Socrates" -- interview, information, illustration, a musical tribute (?) and more
"The crucial distinction between engaging in debate and suppressing it" -- it's weakened "when thoughtful, civil, quiet protesters get tarred with the same 'safe-space snowflake' brush as their violent, disruptive, or censorious counterparts"
"Carnap’s complete mishandling of Heidegger’s philosophy helps us to see what goes wrong in any attempt to create a perfect language" -- "language’s power to bewitch is also its creative power to present startling new ways of looking at the world," says Charlie Huenemann (Utah State)
Spinoza’s heresy over the nature of God -- the "symbolic core" of a new novel, The Weight of Ink, by Rachel Kadish
The opportunity costs and side effects of "expecting increasing technical facility in whole parts of the discipline" -- commentary on the call to train philosophers in statistics and other formal methods
Better than straight lecturing is "active-learning," in which "students pivot quickly from a short lecture to solving a specific problem" -- Stanford physics professor and Nobel laureate Carl Weiman wants to improve undergraduate teaching
A new blog with a focus on African philosophy -- from Omedi Ochieng (Denison)
"Be open to surprises" -- a brief interview with Christopher Hamilton (KCL) on our era of app-enabled love
"Anyone who reads beyond the scandalous title will immediately recognize that the book is a critique..." -- Jacob Blumenfeld (New School), translator of "Communism for Kids"
"In contrast to the values of morality, which depend on and encourage our similarities to each other, values like friendship (or beauty) depend on and encourage our differences" -- a rich and wide-ranging interview with Alexander Nehamas (Princeton)
Is "honorable service at the senior political level under Donald Trump" possible? -- an informed and in-depth look at the question from Quinta Jurecic (Brookings)
Why is there beauty in nature? -- because it's adaptive? Richard Prum (Yale) thinks we shouldn't assume so.
"Ferocious pleas for comity can also serve as an evasive maneuver---a way to dodge important debates about the favorite habits of a discipline" -- Daniel Engber in Slate on recent controversies in philosophy and psychology
"Too much moral philosophy operates on the conceit that morality resides in the territory of discrete choice and decision" -- but habits, instincts, reflexes play a role; etiquette can "provide a mechanism by which these too can bend toward justice"
How to prepare for graduate school while poor -- a wiki guide
A philosophy professor will be biking coast-to-coast to raise money for Habitat For Humanity -- go Jose Luis Bermudez (Texas A&M)! (via Kathryn Pogin)
Old Plato was reckon'd Divine / He wisely to vertue was prone / But had it not been for good wine / His merits we never had known -- a 1710 precursor to the Monty Python "Philosopher's Song"? (via Daniel Brunson)
Philosophy instructor arrested for striking a Trump supporter in the head with a bicycle u-lock -- his most recent class? "Introduction to Ethics"
"There’s no evidence that anyone was fooled into believing that this paper was real" --James Stacy Taylor (College of NJ) on how the only folks hoaxed were the so-called "skeptics"
"What if you had the opportunity to become a vampire, irreversibly---and everyone you knew who had become one said 'It's utterly indescribable'" -- how should you decide? L.A. Paul (UNC) talks with Julia Galef at Rationally Speaking
"The reality of the psychological is one of the most important lessons of fMRI studies of the brain" -- Tim Crane (Cambridge) on understanding consciousness and "how we can be"
"This is making my brain all tingly, like that time I put Pop Rocks on a q-tip" -- the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt becomes a philosophy student in the show's 3rd season
"You don’t defeat a slippery slope by jumping off the cliff and taking the shortcut to the bottom" -- Hayek's problem with socialism was that it eventually empowers the "ruthless, lawless authoritarians of the right," argues Jacob Levy (McGill)
How to turn children into "bullshit detectors" -- the experimental work of Andy Oxman (via Timothy O'Keefe)
"I could run... [but] not this time... I'm really good at explaining complicated fuckery" -- Rachel McKinnon (Charleston) describes and responds to online harassment she has been subject to
Pluralism without fragmentation -- Michael P. Wolf (Washington & Jefferson) on Sellars on normativity
Sometimes, when we swear, "it’s just incidental that we’re expressing ourselves using language at all" -- an interview on cursing with Rebecca Roache (Royal Holloway)
Interviews with philosophers, centered around their reading -- Luciano Floridi, David Papineau, Massimo Pigliucci, Angie Hobbs, and others
"Far more is at stake... than the fate of an excellent philosophy program and the lives of its students and faculty" -- Jennifer Frey (South Carolina) on recent threats to tenure
"The Socratics and the Anti-Socratics" -- the Tuvel controversy and competing conceptions of philosophical expertise
"It’s important to be fair and meticulous when reputations are at stake, even if it gets in the way of a good story." -- a review of the Kipnis book at Slate
Philosophy, Stoicism, and the military mindset -- Nancy Sherman (Georgetown) is a guest on a veteran's podcast
Why does philosophy "fall short of accepted practices" in handling plagiarism? -- "the need to retract a plagiarized article on medieval metaphysics... appears less urgent than to correct deficient articles in fields like pharmacology..."
Writing Referee Reports: A Beginner's Guide -- from Lewis Powell (Buffalo)
"Underneath the hyper-charged war of words lies a wonkier but no less significant battle over philosophical method" -- the New York Times reports on the Tuvel controversy
A new, free, online logic textbook -- by Craig DeLancey (SUNY Oswego)
"Could it be that altruism and reciprocity are not in fact grounded in the higher cognitive faculties possessed only by humans and mammals?" -- thoughts from David Schwartz (Randolph College) whose car... well, you just have to see it
What did Tommy Curry (Texas A&M) really say? -- a closer look at the raw material of the recent controversy
Trouble with peer review -- some notable historical examples
The ethics of "awesome" -- an interview with philosophers and former professional rollerblader Nick Riggle (San Diego)
"Which Field Is More F*cked: Philosophy or Psychology?" -- the Very Bad Wizards discuss
Defending the reality of time -- an interview with Tim Maudlin (NYU)
On the lawsuit against Kipnis and the arguments in her book (and see the links towards the end of the post)
"The descriptive and normative are inextricably intermingled" -- Doris, Machery, and Stich on the relevance of psychology to ethics
"Epistemological insiderism" -- a sociologist on the Tuvel controversy, in the NYT
Attending a philosophy conference remotely -- a brief look at the whats, hows, pros, and cons
Philosophy, lactose-intolerance, and the biology of race -- a discussion with Quayshawn Spencer (U Penn)
30 tattoos of Socrates -- really
A rather careful look at a part of Laura Kipnis's book -- at a new philosophy blog, Epistepocalypse
Five senses? Sorry Aristotle, it's more like 22-33 -- Barry Smith (Univ. of London) on avoiding philosophy that's "worthless because it’s not actually getting to grips with how things really are"
A philosophical symposium on "Black Lives Matter" -- in the recent issue of the Journal of Political Philosophy
"There is a cosmic purpose, a reason for existence ...but human beings are irrelevant to that purpose," argues Tim Mulgan (St. Andrews)
Is dark matter more diverse than we've thought? Could there be life made of it? -- learning what we don't really know (an ongoing series)
Plato, the behavioral economist -- "many of his insights are remarkably similar to the descriptions of the cognitive biases found by Kahneman and Tversky"
"What great man influenced him? When they couldn’t find one, they gave up" -- they should have tried looking for the *woman* who influenced Descartes' Meditations
The most entertaining history of the world video (with brief mentions of some philosophers)
"Researchers created a 3D image of Descartes’s brain... by scanning the impression it left on the inside of his skull" -- turns out he had a big frontal cortex
If the professor gives the students higher marks, the students return the favor -- another problem with student evaluations of teaching
"Using paraconsistent logical systems to put together a story about contradictory butt pounding across different universes would be a feat of sexual and logical perversion that I don’t think anyone has ever achieved" -- an interview with the singular Neil Sinhababu (NUS)
A contest to name Crayola's new crayon, based on a previously missing shade of blue -- someone has already submitted "Hume's Blue"
Not nice. Not necessary. Not sexy. -- John Corvino (Wayne State) on racial preferences on dating apps/sites
"Machiavelli’s advice for rulers was ruthless and pragmatic—and he may have intended for it to secretly destroy them" -- he wore "a variety of masks" but his ideas had "remarkable consistency," writes Erica Benner
"There is no subject so imbued with drama, intrigue, and fast-paced action as 17th-century Western philosophy" -- perfect for a graphic novel (a chapter of which you can read at the link)
"Racialized... liberalism has been the problem rather than liberalism as such, but... it is understandably hard to appreciate this considering that the former has been the dominant form of liberalism for hundreds of years" -- an interview with Charles Mills (CUNY)
If you have one thought too many, the many think you're less good -- new social psych research: "participants rated an impartial actor as less morally good and his or her action as less moral compared to a partial actor"
The next president of France was once an assistant to Paul Ricoeur -- do the philosopher's ideas provide insight into how Emmanuel Macron will govern?
"Why is the idea that optimal performance occurs in a state of flow so widespread, if it’s wrong?" -- it sounds appeallingly effortless, says Barbara Gail Montero (CUNY), but doing ballet or philosophy well is not
Rather than complain about political correctness as such, "we might usefully distinguish among five categories of attitudes towards speech," says Michael C. Dorf (Cornell)
Study? Student in duct shuns it, having successfully stolen exam before -- but this time, he gets caught
"Why philosophy majors make the best entrepreneurs" -- five brief reasons from software entrepreneur Nick Miller
The philosophical lesson in the claim that giraffes are taller than ants -- from David Detmer (Purdue)
U. Wisconsin grad students start philosophy outreach program -- "We believe that no matter what you are doing, philosophy can help you do it better"
"Unsubstantiated claims about unspecified harms" -- José Luis Bermúdez (Texas A&M) on the Hypatia controversy
Why are academic philosophers fearful? -- the profession seems punitive, but "it’s punitive in so many different directions, it’s hard to know where to begin"
A map of philosophy -- video version (via @anitaleirfall)
and an image of the whole map
"Crucial to bridging the divides that we have is a willingness to engage with people... who don't think like us" -- Karen Stohr (Georgetown) talks about talking politics
"There are important things about other people that we are not good at imagining." -- particularly the variety and extent of the harms they suffer, says Adam Morton (UBC)
"One may think that that the functions of analytical philosophy... have in common the encouragement to speak the truth come what may... ...Surprisingly enough that's not true"
"It is an aspect of the human condition in late modernity that we have to live with multiple identities and find a way to negotiate among them" -- a short interview with Seyla Benhabib (Yale)
There are more pragmatists than you might have thought -- all about pragmatism, with Cheryl Misak (Toronto)
An "inclusive bibliography on race, gender, and related topics" -- a Google doc created in response to the Hypatia controversy
"I sometimes pretend that the amygdala of my brain is in my pinky toe" -- on the "backfire effect": your brain's defense against threatening ideas
"Can we accept, morally speaking, say a five percent drop in the wages of some American workers in exchange for a 400 percent gain in the incomes of immigrant workers?" "That’s a question for philosophy. That’s a question for ethics."
Which ideas should have a place on university campuses? -- "one of the most important factors concerns the likely merits of the proposed contribution," says Patricia Marino (Waterloo)
"I would rather do anything else than grade your Final Papers" (only a year old, but already timeless)
"A bully whose behavior is positively reinforced by frightened colleagues quickly becomes out of control" -- what's needed are "moral leaders," says M.G. Piety (Drexel)
Martha Nussbaum's Jefferson Lecture will be livestreamed tonight (May 1st) -- 7:35 Eastern Time
Which philosopher is still important to you today? -- interviews with folks on the street in Germany (in German w/ subtitles)
"Someone who runs to catch a bus is not necessarily a runner; someone who commits a crime is not necessarily a criminal" -- a distinction erased by the Trump administration, argues Jason Stanley (Yale)
There were 704 submissions to the APA's Philosophy Through Fiction contest -- and the winner was just announced
"A large part of the human self-model is grounded in the body, in gut feelings, in inner organ perceptions, in the vestibular sense, and therefore you cannot really copy the human self-model out of the biological body" -- an interview with Thomas Metzinger
"However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life." -- George Orwell's 1940 review of Hitler's Mein Kampf
"This conception of feminism accommodates the fact that traditions, and particular traditional practices, are often antifeminist without suggesting that tradition as such is the enemy" -- Serene Khader (Brooklyn/CUNY) on the "feminism v. Islam" frame
A new series of characteristically wonderful short videos from John Corvino (Wayne State) -- on religious liberty and discrimination (watch past the credits!)
More of our disagreements than you think are reasonable -- so says Kevin Vallier (Bowling Green), who offers three tips to help recognize this
Are you comfortable with the tradeoffs you've chosen? -- perhaps you're using "The Happy Coincidence Defense" or "The-Most-I-Can-Do Sweet Spot"
New: The Australasian Philosophical Review -- the first issue is now out (click on the blue T & F Online button)
"Experts in philosophy or foreign languages will ultimately command the most interest from employers in the next decade" -- according to billionaire Mark Cuban (via Andrew Sepielli)
Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale... about the value of professors?
"I want my mommy" -- teaching philosophy to kids isn't that easy
The ethics of Passover & benefiting from injustice -- should Jews celebrate that God supposedly killed thousands of innocent Egyptian boys, or should they atone for it?
"There is no distinction between the legitimate and black market" when it comes to antiquities -- Liza Oliver and Erich Hatala Matthes (Wellesley) on the ethics of acquiring ancient art
"Every morning before I get up I read my email on my phone, and am delighted if I can turn down three or four invitations... before I even get up" -- Martha Nussbaum answers some questions
"We need to find a way to formally recognize the skills, the work, the talent, and the contributions to the profession of our present-day philosophical 'distillers'" -- on making philosophy understood to the general public
"The audience is moved, but also (in Plato’s sense) self-moved, to the extent that they are led to think for themselves" -- Tushar Irani (Wesleyan) on how "good rhetoric also does the work of reason"
More on that "negative mass" fluid mentioned last week in the Heap -- perhaps not as wild as we might have thought (via Alex Grzankowski)
"I’m hoping to do my small part to make the movement endure more." -- Chris Lebron (Yale) profiled in The Chronicle in regards to his book on Black Lives Matter
Undergrads can now major in philosophy at UT Dallas -- previously it was just available as a minor
Controversy over "Communism for Kids" -- translated from the German by philosophy graduate student Jacob Blumenfeld (New School)
"You don’t need to feel like you’re succeeding" -- and other ways to figure out whether academia is for you
A Facebook group for those interested in philosophy of body practices, including yoga, martial arts, qigong, etc. -- organized by Lisa Miracchi (Penn) and Steven Geisz (Tampa)
"A joke is basically syllogistic" -- comedians Kenny and Keith Lucas, aka the Lucas Brothers, read a lot of philosophy
Article attributed to disabled man Anna Stubblefield was found guilty of sexually assaulting is retracted -- but not, perhaps, for the reason you might think
"Machines will become morally much better than we are, or morally much worse. But the point is that we won’t be able to tell which is which" -- Regina Rini (NYU) with some fascinating thoughts about the future of morality
In philosophy of science, will increased scientific specialization crowd out the philosophy? -- Celso Neto (Calgary) on the future of philosophy of science
"I hadn’t even noticed she was being talked over" -- a philosophy undergrad reflecting on her professor calling out interruptions
"One can’t inquire unless one has a target to aim at and that, in turn, requires knowing what one is inquiring into---the very thing [one doesn't] know. -- Gail Fine (Cornell) on the Meno paradox
Physicists develop a fluid with "negative mass": the harder you push it away, the faster it accelerates towards you -- file under: reality > intuition
"Just because the jokes you tell never change, doesn't mean that nothing does" (EC)
"Few people are capable of characterizing their own research to professional peers" -- reflections on the academic cover letter
Science popularizer Bill Nye changes mind about philosophy -- "Bring it on," he says (◔_◔)
"A messy and perhaps inelegant conception of how psychological kinds stand in relation to other scientific kinds" -- Thomas Polger & Lawrence Shapiro on why multiple realizability isn't complicated enough
"Your brain acts as if your future self is someone you don’t know very well and, frankly, someone you don’t care about" -- brain imaging and the bias towards the near
"Death does not solve the problem of life’s cosmic meaninglessness and will often... diminish the kind of meaning that is attainable" -- a brief interview with David Benatar (Cape Town) on The Human Predicament
You don't need to be a dirt-loving tree-hugger to act in environmentally friendly ways -- Ben Hale (Colorado) in conversation with Carrie Figdor (Iowa)
"What we see is constantly informed by what we know and what we were thus already busy (both consciously and non-consciously) expecting." -- Andy Clark (Edinburgh) on brains as "prediction machines"
They work. But we don't know quite how. -- on our understanding of current artificial intelligence
Kurt Vonnegut's writing advice -- culled from several sources
What was the universe like before The Big Bang? -- some speculation from Sean Carroll and others
A closer look---without an actual look---at evidence excluded from the Stubblefield trial -- at Slate
"Philosophy generates lots of theories but little consensus" -- but "this insight provides a way to break the philosophical stalemate" (via Simon C. May)
On hoping that you are living a worthwhile life -- reflections from Luc Bovens (LSE)
Mini-interviews with philosophers, now arranged by theme -- 400 of them!
Moroccan gov't to revise philosophy textbooks in response to philosophers' charge that they "distorted" philosophy towards Islamic extremism
"Public intellectuals are necessary to filter the quality thinkers from the charlatans" -- Daniel Drezner (Tufts) on public intellectuals, thought leaders, & the marketplace of ideas
When did modern philosophy begin? -- Steven Nadler (Wisconsin) on A.C. Grayling's The Age of Genius
Fascinating questions about and insights into the morality of war -- from Saba Bazargan-Forward (UCSD)
"There is no evidence that people are actually concerned with economic inequality at all... Rather, they are bothered by something that is often confounded with inequality: economic unfairness"
Philosophical questions about emoji -- at Aesthetics for Birds
A new large study on the differences between male and female brains -- "the researchers themselves aren’t sure which sorts of size differences do and don’t matter"
Consequences, rights, and uncertainty -- a publicly-oriented discussion w/ David Owens (KCL), activist Gita Sahgal, and Sebastian Farquhar (Ctr. Effective Altruism)
Cross-cultural study shows limited generalizability---and occasional reversal---of "Knobe Effect" -- "results highlight the importance of factoring cultural context in our understanding of moral cognition" (via Daniel Brunson)
The hard problem of matter "Like the hard problem of consciousness, cannot be solved by experiment and observation or by gathering more physical detail" (via Robert Long)
What can we learn about the self from studying leaves? -- perhaps that the self is itself a society?
"Base-rates of Negative Traits: Instructions for Use in Criminal Trials" by Federico Picinali (LSE) is the Journal of Applied Philosophy's 2016 Best Article Winner
About 1/3 of PhD students are at risk of developing a psychiatric disorder -- but these risks can be offset by having an inspirational advisor and being able to envision one's PhD as a good career move
Do you know about Unpaywall? -- a browser extension to "instantly deliver legal, open-access, full text as you browse"
“We seem to intuitively understand that if we can get ourselves to believe something first, we’ll be more effective at getting others to believe it” -- the evolution of self-deception (via Gerald Dworkin)
A philosophy professor and his students create an interactive film -- "Black Coffee" premieres April 21st
"By replacing the human driver with its AI driver, automakers are taking on a lot of moral and legal responsibility " -- so what are its design principles for ethics?
"Let’s see how art and philosophy can create a championship for the meaning of things" -- an interview with Mériam Korichi, the creator of Night of Philosophy
"A perceptual experience may itself be irrational, because it is brought about by irrational influences" -- Susanna Siegel (Harvard) is blogging this week at Brains about rationality and perception
"To grieve and mourn, one does not want those who will too ably measure and make tidy life’s alarming collapses... One wants philosophers who fall apart, who come undone with weeping, talk to graves, and cry out for the return of souls that don’t exist."
The popularity of different philosophical topics -- as measured by number of downloads of its corresponding "Crash Course" episode
"There is much less of a connection between reasons and rationality than many people assume" -- an interview with John Broome (Oxford)
"Significant progress has been made in creating a body of philosophical work dealing with and oriented by the Africana experience in modernity... The task now is to de-ghettoize it and get the Euro-American establishment to face up to the challenge it raises," says Charles Mills (CUNY)
There are better strategies for getting rid of people's cognitive biases than teaching them critical thinking -- use "contextual debiasing" to alter "extra-psychic, environmental, and social structures"
In defense of fanciful thought experiments -- Patrick Lin (Cal Poly) at Forbes
Norms in the wild -- Cristina Bicchieri (University of Pennsylvania) talks about group behavior and social norms with Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)
The philosophy tool kit -- Alan Hájek (ANU) with a primer for non-philosophers on what philosophical reasoning is like
Philosophers on the biology of desire and addiction -- a symposium at The Brains Blog
Each class is 7.5 hours long. "You will put your cell phone in a box when you enter the class... There will be absolutely no napping." -- a course on "existential despair" at the University of Pennsylvania
How to write a doctoral dissertation -- advice from Robert Paul Wolff (from a few years back)
Hateful language, lack of imagination, and the politics of fear -- David Livingstone Smith (University of New England) and Kwame Anthony Appiah (NYU) discuss
"There are philosophical mistakes in the way we think about motherhood, which influence how we treat pregnant women and new mothers" -- Fiona Woollard (Southampton) on the philosophy of early motherhood
The Bentham Seminars -- now available for download
"The self is empirically tractable," so it should be getting more attention in psychiatry -- thoughts from Şerife Tekin (Daemen College)
Vice President Mike Pence is at dinner with his wife when something fissiony happens -- Patrick Stokes gives us the details in a piece that is very well done. And that's rare.
"I’d say we need not only drones but also Big Bird, and poetry and philosophy" -- the NYT's Nicholas Kristof goes to bat for philosophy and the humanities
Do ants do things for reasons? Keshav Singh (UNC) takes a close look
He was rushed to the emergency room, anesthetized, and put on a ventilator; when he woke, still intubated, he gestured for a pen and paper to write down his thoughts on a student's thesis -- Jeff McMahan (Oxford) has written a beautiful obituary of Derek Parfit (via David Sobel)
Biggest threat to higher ed? "Too much emphasis on comparative achievement, not enough on the pleasure of learning or the importance of doing at least some things really well." -- an interview with Baroness Onora O'Neill (Cambridge)
What to think when you're accused of ableism -- well, it's probably partly true, says Eric Schwitzgebel (UCR)
The "Philosophers' Ships" -- Lenin's name for the boats by which he exiled philosophers and other academics, students, journalists, and other intellectuals
Asking Matthew Liao anything about asking him anything -- at the Blog of the APA
"Asymmetrical polarization" -- political polarization happens, but not evenly across the political spectrum
"Founded in 2012 with a single course on Aristotle and Plato in the back of a New York City bar..." the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research brings philosophy and other subjects into the everyday lives of working adults
1 out of every 46 Americans are in prison, on parole, or probation -- Chris Surprenant (New Orleans) discusses mass incarceration
All ravens are black... or are they?
Do species have intrinsic value? -- Ross Barham (Melbourne) thinks Schopenhauer might help with that question
Procreating is likely the most carbon-intensive activity an individual can engage in -- how should that factor into our decision to have kids? A discussion with Travis Rieder (JHU)
"For subtle reasons, it’s not possible to count the intersection points all at once" -- to learn why, get paper, scissors, tape, and a pencil; we need a Möbius strip
An interview with hip-hop artist and philosophy major Olmeca -- by two philosophy students at the Univ. of Puget Sound
Are colleges suppressing free speech? -- a discussion with Jason Stanley (Yale) and Samantha Harris of FIRE
"This gathering will bring together / Pioneers in the field of / “Wellbeing.” / We remind you that this is / a Legitimate scholarly field / And not something that / Someone / Made up." -- a poem about your university's brand new institute's conference
A trolley case in the idiom of ancient Chinese philosophy -- and how Mo Zi would respond to it
What is an explanation? -- and other interesting questions put to Brad Skow (MIT)
Philosophical counseling and its discontents -- a former practitioner looks at some new criticisms
Philosophy, Nazism, and Evil -- a discussion at The Forum
A 700+ page historical novel about Socrates and ancient Greece -- written in Spanish
"I know it’s counter-intuitive to advocate overriding those who have been wrongly overridden" -- Kate Manne (Cornell) on reporting sexual assault and harassment
"There are few times in life, when a person can feel as powerful as God" -- like when you're farming your ants (a brief program at the Daily Ant by Barry Lam)
We now have the ability to digitally scan and 3D-print works of art -- Erich Hatala Matthes (Wellesley) discusses the questions this raises
"It is an offense against the law, and typically morality as well, for one to willingly and knowingly be in receipt of stolen goods" -- Graham Oddie (Colorado) on the Gorsuch nomination (via David Boonin)
The philosophy of ruins -- the work of Elizabeth Scarbrough (FIU)
"Bespoke transformative experiences that radicalize viewers" -- Mark Alfano on transformative experiences, personal identity, and YouTube
"If people feel that arguments are more virtuous than anecdote..." -- then they may never tell you why they find that bad argument compelling, so ask
In praise of hierarchy -- a forum with Angle, Appiah, Baggini, Bell, Berggruen, Fraenkel, Risse, Romano, Tiwald, Wang, and others
An open-source "intro to reasoning" text -- what should be added to it?
What it will take for philosophy departments to give teaching more than just lip service -- thoughts from Steven Cahn (CUNY)
The role of philosophy in the creation of the computer -- in The Atlantic (via Daniel Fogal)
"The issue most often cited by Arabs as their first step on the road to disbelief was the apparent unfairness of divine justice" -- atheism in the Arab world
"Complete standstill. Unending torments." -- Kafka on how the writing's going (an excerpt from his journal)
That liberal democracy provides few outlets for outright domination sows the seeds for backlash -- when Fukuyama used Trump as an example 25 years ago, did he know how right he'd be?
"I have taken a great deal of pains (and it really has been painful) trying to get hold of his ideas, but with the feeling all the time that they were slipping through my fingers" (Hare on A Theory of Justice) -- Should authors respond to reviews of their books?
Do soldiers have a "diminished moral status that makes killing them less morally bad than killings outside of war"? -- Helen Frowe (Stockholm) discusses the question
Cynics these days -- John Kaag (U Mass Lowell) on how "modern cynics truncate, or pointedly misunderstand, the full scope of cynicism as a school of thought"
How rational is our rationality? -- an interview with Miriam Schoenfield (Texas)
"Yoga is the practical element of a complex philosophical worldview" -- says Lisa Miracchi (Pennsylvania)
What rights, if any, do people considered outsiders have? -- at least rights against arbitrary treatment and discrimination, argues Adam Hosein (Colorado)
Aristotle the advice columnist -- at The Point
Consider the ant -- in case you were thinking about, say, eating them, says Cheryl Abbate (Colorado)
Think of philosophy for kids as a kind of inoculation against indoctrination
Middlebury's protesting students respond to their professors (via John Protevi)
Trump wants to remove funding for the NEH -- here is an easy way to call or email your representatives about this
"You can fake protest" -- Eric Schliesser on the faculty complaints "about students who have not yet resigned themselves to a life of quiet despair"
Edgar Allen Poe was "at once more rationalistic and more pathological" than the Transcendentalists -- Using Emerson to understand Poe
The simulation argument is based on evidence from the purportedly simulated universe -- does that weaken the argument by making it paradoxical or strengthen it by injecting further doubt into any counterevidence?
Time, philosophy of action, free will, and more -- an interview with Roman Altshuler (Kutztown)
The "uncanny valley": people tend to find replicas of humans that are almost-but-not-quite-human-enough-looking creepy -- and it turns out there's also an "uncanny valley of the mind"
"Is Reason a Neutral Tool in Comparative Philosophy?" -- a forum with Jonardon Ganeri, Mustafa Abu Sway, Paul Boghossain, Georgina Stewart (via Omnivore)
The "Passions of Philosophers outside Philosophy" (PoPoP) series -- philosophers share their non-philosophy hobbies at the Philosophers' Cocoon
A philosopher's arguments against bans on faculty-student relationships -- in Times Higher Education
"Math seems difficult and a teacher is there to make it seem simpler, but in the humanities, it's often necessary to start by taking something that seems simple and showing students how difficult it is." -- humanities teaching is hard
"Information respect" and shopping -- philosopher Evan Selinger (RIT) asks communications prof Joseph Turow (Annenberg) a few questions
A collection of influential essays by J.L. Austin (et al) from Aristotelian Society publications -- accessible for free (for the month)
Happy 2588th birthday, Lao Zi, we got you a 5 ton cake -- more "whoa" than "wu wei"
An economist looks at the emergence, consequences, and remedies for market power in scholarly publishing, in a new free book (via MR)
What can a philosopher tell you about toxic chemicals? -- ask Carl Cranor (UCR)
The real difference between analytic and Continental philosophers (via @MetaEpistemic)
The life and death of the Library of Alexandria -- the vision and creation of two students of Aristotle
"If you work at a college campus, you know that these sweeping denunciations are not accurate" (as I said in the Charles Murray post, beware the availability heuristic)
Can Kierkegaard help us understand Trump? -- Katalin Balog (Rutgers-Newark) thinks so
"Exercises in systematic, dishonest misunderstandings of the claims made by their supposed targets" -- Samir Chopra (Brooklyn) on recent remarks by Dennett and Williamson
The group writing retreat -- an approach to getting the words out
"If we praise forgiveness as a response to wrongdoing, as many do, we should also actively combat the influences that undermine the ability of some to forgive freely." -- Luke Brunning (Oxford) and Per-Erik Milam (Gothenburg) on forgiving Dylann Roof
When a student cries -- remember that "not all tears are equal"
Ram Neta (UNC) discusses ants and philosophy -- at The Daily Ant
The libertarian case for "safe spaces" -- they're manifestations of freedom of association
Think it's bad that "literally" now sometimes means "figuratively"? There's worse news: "literally" doesn't "literally" mean "literally" in the sense of "literally" you have in mind.
Sartre vs. Camus -- the artful animation of the conflict and friendship between the two philosophers
The search for the first recipient of the MIT Media Lab Disobedience Award has begun "The award will go to a person or group engaged in what we believe is extraordinary disobedience for the benefit of society"
What Plato's Republic tells us about today's politics -- and the attempt to make the people "drones without stings," from Jill Frank (Cornell)
Are creativity and psychopathology intimately related? -- there's empirical research that suggests they are
"The aim of historic restoration is not to recover material authenticity, but to restore our relationship with the past" -- argues Erich Hatala Matthes (Wellesley)
A mini-conference on inclusion and diversity in philosophy will be taking place at the Pacific APA
"A Vote Of No Confidence in Trump's Epistemic Abilities" -- a petition directed at Paul Ryan and the RNC (via PhilPercs)
A new resource for students of the intellectual traditions of South Asia -- a "prosopographical database"
Should social policy focus on structures or on individuals? -- a forum with pieces by Alex Madva, Saray Ayala-Lopez, Sally Haslanger, & Jenny Saul
The multiverse and the problem of evil -- thoughts from Dean Zimmerman (Rutgers)
21 versions of the basic computer game, "Snake," each with its own philosophical theme -- some are clever and amusing
"The neglect of the history of philosophy journals is a neglect of central philosophical questions" argues Joel Katzav (Queensland)
When Oxford philosophy was dominated by women, rather than men -- an account from one of those women
Is an econ course for high schoolers called "Philosophy 101" just free-market propaganda? -- the course is offered by University of Arizona's Center for the Philosophy of Freedom
Would Socrates have survived Twitter? -- Madeline Donnelly (McMaster U Library) on intellectual freedom (brief video)
Could the next scientific breakthrough come from the past? -- old texts have provided "scientific ideas addressing current thinking in fresh ways"
Afghan refugee Alidad Shiri was just a boy of 10 when he set off alone on a four-year odyssey to Europe. Now aged 25, he is about to graduate with a degree in philosophy from the University of Trento.
A "Video Games & Philosophy" week-long program for high school and junior high students -- offered by the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point
When does an action harm someone? -- join the discussion at PEA Soup
"Unwarranted distrust that is predicated on prejudice is pervasive phenomenon whose moral complexity theorists have yet to reckon fully with" -- Jason D'Cruz (Albany) is working on it
Textual evidence confirms that a 2015 discovery is the earliest known image of Confucius (via Smithsonian)
"If philosophers were required to write science fiction, people might actually understand what they were saying" -- but perhaps any philosophy that can be summed up in a jettisoned escape pod belongs in one
Finance and trading strategies based on the ideas of Thales? (possibly for the abuse of philosophers file)
What does singer-songwriter José González listen to "to keep him sane when he's on the road"? -- a philosophy podcast (NYT)
Giant neuron around the circumference of mouse brains found -- along with giant speculation about its significance
The APA's board of officers votes to reappoint its chair, vice chair, and the organization's executive director: Cheshire Calhoun, Richard Bett, and Amy Ferrer
A social contract theory for a diverse world -- Ryan Muldoon (Buffalo) talks political philosophy with Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)
"Some of the things that make for good philosophy also make for bad public philosophy" -- Barry Lam (Vassar) interviewed about his work on Hi-Phi Nation
Finding value in moral reasoning based on false premises -- thoughts from Elizabeth Anderson (Michigan)
"Intelligence has been used to justify privilege and domination throughout more than 2,000 years of history... is it any wonder that the imminent prospect of super-smart robots fills us with dread?"
Interviews with philosophers and others working on "consciousness and its altered states" -- from the Alius research group
Thoreau's Walden: the video game -- “It’s an attempt to make a game that has a kind of stillness at its core” says the game's developer
Physicist Sean Carroll and Buddhist scholar Alan Wallace have a chat about the nature of reality
Peter Singer answers twenty questions -- in the Journal of Practical Ethics
Philosophers write about ants -- a new weekly series at The Daily Ant blog (via Kathyrn Pogin)
Is mathematics going to "blow up"? -- incompleteness, infinity, and emulation theory
The tools for improving rational discourse have become tools for subverting it -- Scott Aikin and Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt) on the "Owl of Minerva Problem"
Intellectualizing your anxiety into a sense of superiority (don't neglect the mouseover text)
Poisoning the wells of reasoned public discourse -- Alexander George (Amherst) on our "forger in chief"
It's a job in philosophy, but it looks pretty bad -- should you take it?
The philosophy of Westworld -- the latest Wisecrack video (spoilers)
"Nevertheless, She Persisted" -- ancient philosophy edition
Thoughts on grounding from The New York Times marketing department (via Daniel Kokotajlo)
Russell Hardin (NYU), a political scientist and theorist whose work influenced many philosophers, has died
"The 'golden trio' of behaviours for female orgasm," according to empirical work by philosopher-biologist Elisabeth Lloyd (Indiana) (via Feminist Philosophers)
How long can love last? -- Naomi Goulder (New College of the Humanities) and others discuss love and time
To handle "toxic speech" we may need more than just more speech -- we may need the rhetorical analogs of antidotes and vaccines, says Lynne Tirrell (U Mass Boston)
Tim Robbins will play a philosophy professor in a new HBO series -- from the creator of Six Feet Under and True Blood
A statue of György Lukács will be removed from the park in Budapest where it has stood for 32 years -- a victim of anti-semitism in contemporary Hungarian politics
"A brief defence of paying attention to... biographical details of the authors we study" -- a case for "moderate historicism" from Liam Kofi Bright (CMU)
"I do not want the omnipresent ability to communicate with anyone who is absent" -- Philip Reed (Canisius) on why to not have a cell phone (via John Schwenkler)
Does this little argument about consciousness bug you? -- why?
"We all need worthy opponents to challenge us in our search for truth. It is absolutely essential to the quality of our enterprise." -- John Etchemendy (Stanford) on the "intellectual monocultures" that have taken over certain disciplines
Influential economist Kenneth Arrow has died -- known for his "impossibility theorem," among other ideas
The "mash-up" song genre raises questions in aesthetics, metaphysics, law, and music theory -- and makes for an excellent episode of Hi-Phi Nation
Why are we so committed to the idea of moral responsibility? -- a symposium on a skeptical take
A new opera featuring the ideas of Plato, Aristotle, Wittgenstein, and others -- it gets a surprisingly rave review from Alex Ross in The New Yorker
How ridiculous is it to ask about whether plants have minds? -- surprisingly not that ridiculous, says Chauncey Maher (Dickinson) in the first of a series of posts on the subject
Is it a cake or a cookie? -- food for thought
Work-life balance in academia -- some coping mechanisms
Are university presses publishing fewer humanities monographs? -- or is more aiming for "the broadest possible readership" just pushing books out of the monograph category?
Utilitarianism, liberalism, and the alleged need for campus conservatives -- John Holbo (NUS) continues his trenchant critique of Jonathan Haidt's "heterodoxy"
The pattern underlying several well-known paradoxes -- and some new ones, too
At the moment, nothing is funny -- so J.E.H. Smith's project on gelastics (experiences of the funny), described here, will have to wait
Monumental agency -- on "the challenge of attributing rational planning and action to a very large and distributed organization"
A new edition of a free and creative-commons textbook on logic and critical reasoning is in the works -- from Brendan Myers (Heritage College)
The "slow professor movement" aims at "reclaiming the intellectual life of the the university"
"the gap between / the words I said / and those I remember saying // is just wide enough to contain / the remains that remain / of what I assumed I knew" -- great interview with philosopher and poet Troy Jollimore (CSU Chico)
A philosopher, surprised at the persistence of caste bias in the UK, takes it up as a research subject -- Meena Dhanda (Wolverhampton) on her own form of socially engaged philosophy
All about Habermas -- a review of a new biography of the philosopher
Peter Singer on what it means to do philosophy -- and related topics. And surfing.
"It does take courage" to be a conservative student on a liberal campus -- "but don’t compare disagreement with your ideas to suppression"
"You've been self-treating your depression all these years with philosophy" -- an interview with Whitney Mutch (Alabama)
A discussion of artificial superintelligence, consciousness, and related topics -- Nick Bostrom, David Chalmers, Ray Kurzweil, Elon Musk, and others
Trump's Razor -- move over, Ockham
Women in early analytic philosophy -- four articles in a special issue of the Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy
Are complex phenomena “nothing but the sum of their parts”, or are they “more than the sum of their parts”? -- Carl Gillet (NIU) discusses his book on this debate with Carrie Figdor (Iowa)
Charles Taylor (McGill) tempers his secularism after mosque shooting (was the choice of photo cleverness or just luck?)
"Research for All" is a new journal for ideas for bringing academic research and the public together -- it's more than just informing the public of your findings
"What sets off the siren on my charlatan detector is the consciousness with which Wittgenstein inhabited the role of the genius" -- Crispin Sartwell (Dickinson) on Wittgenstein's "genius"
WhatTheFuckJustHappenedToday.com -- helpful
Is human nature fundamentally good? -- a sketch of an argument from Eric Schwitzgebel (UCR)
Ethics in the news and culture -- have you checked out The Prindle Post lately?
"The fact that you’ve become an expert in philosophy does not impair your ability to become an expert in something else---the exact opposite is true" -- an interview with Zachary Ernst, software engineer & former philosophy prof
PhilPapers has a new look -- and is more mobile-friendly
Thomas Pogge, trigger warnings, and the space of reasons -- Daniel Tippens on the conflict of moral and epistemic values
"Why Monogamy is Marvelous," "Could Trump Be His Own Valentine," "To Swipe or Not to Swipe" -- and other philosophical Valentines Day articles at The Critique
OUP's Peter Momtchiloff and Bloomsbury's Liza Thompson discuss philosophy publishing (via Matt McAdam)
Christopher Kelp (KU Leuven) & Miriam Schoenfield (NYU/MIT) are winners of the Young Epistemologist Prize -- awarded by the organizers of the Rutgers Epistemology Conference
One minute time machine: a love story of sorts -- video, possibly NSFW for sexual language (via Massimo Pigliucci)
The humanities depend on "a revolving door of new Ph.D.s who work temporarily for unsustainable wages before giving up and being replaced by next year’s surplus doctorates" -- exploitation in academia
"Willpower may simply be a pre-scientific idea... born from social attitudes and philosophical speculation rather than research" -- maybe we should dump the very idea of it
A Marx-Engels bromance movie? (via Nolen Gertz)
What's going on with the proposed elimination of the philosophy major at Eastern Illinois? -- an update
17 universities file amicus brief against Trump's EO on immigration: Brown, Carnegie Mellon, Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Emory, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Northwestern, U Penn, Princeton, Stanford, Vanderbilt, & Yale
The time when Kurt Gödel went to take his US citizenship test, accompanied by Albert Einstein and Oskar Morgenstern -- and Gödel attempted to "prove" the Constitution's flaws allow the US to become fascist (via Martin O'Neill)
Ordinary people, philosophers, and psychologists all seem to reject the definition of "happiness" that scientists use -- "People think there’s more to being happy than just feeling good. Perhaps to truly be happy, you also have to be good."
Philosophy and philosophical implications of quantum mechanics -- very interesting interview with Peter Lewis (Miami)
When a university puts the guest lecturer who has written on the politics of the body in an inaccessible venue -- just the tip of the iceberg of challenges faced by disabled academics
A radio program on Parfit -- The Philosopher's Zone, in Australia
"Pointing out problems that many mathematicians preferred to ignore" -- case study: geometry
Free speech controversy about lecture on free speech at Brown -- it seems the use-mention distinction would have been helpful here
More on what the left can learn from Richard Rorty -- at Vox
"Star Wars and Philosophy": the open-access short course -- offered by the University of Glasgow
Teach curiosity -- it may be society's only hope
A statue of Socrates will be installed in the EU's Court of Justice which houses art from all over Europe
"The secret to happiness is find something bigger than you and devote your life to it" -- says Daniel Dennett
"Isn’t it better to be white and economically forgotten than to be economically forgotten and to be black under the same circumstances?" -- George Yancy on Black History Month
Does Brandom's view imply that "causing pain and deprivation and death...to mute people is not intrinsically evil"? -- an ableist interpretation of Brandom (and Rorty)
Bolstering the power of exit for government employees who cannot in good conscience work under Trump -- a proposal (via Gerald Dworkin)
How do we know that "if some upstream condition A had been different, then downstream outcome C would have happened instead of what actually happened"? The epistemology of historical counterfactuals
"Compared to nihilism, hypocrisy is a vice well worth preserving" -- Jacob Levy (McGill) on why "we should be less worried by hypocrisy than by its absence"
Rosi Braidotti (Utrecht) will be delivering the 2017 Tanner Lectures -- her topic: "Posthuman, All Too Human"
Nussbaum on "Hamilton" (the musical) and political virtue -- with commentary from others, at Boston Review
"The stark difference in the use of democratic vocabulary between Trump and prior presidents" -- a linguistic analysis by David Beaver (Texas) and Jason Stanley (Yale)
How ordinary Americans carried out inhumane acts for Trump -- life in Milgram experiments, first for gov't employees, then for the rest of us
Hume Society issues statement on the Immigration Order -- it is "working to assess the impact of this executive order on our members and participants in our upcoming meetings in Rhode Island"
Most people think they are more moral than others -- what are the consequences of this particular "self-enhancement" effect?
"Why should labs be reserved for the sciences?" -- a professor Germanic studies and cognitive science describes his Experimental Humanities Lab
Trump's bullshitting and why it's so problematic
Should ethics professors be held to higher ethical standards in their personal behavior? -- four "to some extent competing" considerations from Eric Schwitzgebel (UCR)
An interview with one of the "Night of Philosophy" organizers: Ian Olasov (CUNY)
"Uncompromising internalism" about the mental -- an interesting and informative interview of Katalin Farkas (CEU)
"When we embody another person’s action or emotion, we embody the temporal distortions that come with it" -- and that might help us control the subjective experience of time's passage
"Politeness calls for the interaction of the mind and the heart" -- Henri Bergson on the varieties of politeness
"We must each relearn many basic life lessons during our individual lifetimes, lessons that millions or billions of others already learned in their previous lifetimes." Inefficient, no? -- a few big but neglected social problems (via MR)
"911---what's your emergency?" "I work from home"
"It is our job to put intellectual resources in the hands of students who will encounter... deplorable ideas throughout their lives" -- In defense of a Socratic model of teaching, as opposed to Millian and Maoist ones
Jason Brennan (Georgetown) insists on $1000 to review book by author he calls a "crackpot philospher" -- and the author raises the money. (The latest in the series, "Is this the most Jason Brennan thing ever?")
"Instead of a vision of freedom, the founders gave us a framework for an indefinite continuation of their revolutionary struggle over what freedom should mean" -- Gary Gutting (Notre Dame) on patriotism
What good are the humanities? -- a talk by Talbot Brewer (Virginia)
We're more likely to believe good news than bad news -- this doesn't seem like good news
Polyamory and the philosophy and biology of love -- a profile of Carrie Jenkins (UBC)
"Agents appear at doorways, in restaurants, asking for documents, looking for enemies of the people" -- Jason Stanley (Yale) on his family's experiences as enemies and refugees
Charles Taylor interviewed on the Quebec Mosque shooting and Trump's Immigration Order
The art you liked when you were younger is probably not as good as you thought -- but it has a valuable relationship to your "all things considered well-informed aesthetic judgment," says Bence Nanay (Antwerp)
The ethics of artificial intelligence -- Amazon, Google, Facebook, IBM, Apple, and Microsoft are working on it, together
The philosophy of love has been "a frankly embarrassing catalogue of pompous people tripping over their own assumptions" -- says Carrie Jenkins (UBC), whose new book on the subject is reviewed at the LARB
Varieties of ignorance -- Thomas Hofweber (UNC) on ineffable facts
The Journal of Philosophy and modern Indian philosophy in the 20th Century -- and analytic philosophers' silence about marginalization
"The barriers to letting people in thus act as a kind of cage to keep people in." -- we are "squarely in liberalism-of-fear territory now," writes Jacob Levy (McGill)
Truth "is essentially circular; there is no non-circular way of giving an extensionally adequate definition of truth" -- an interview with Anil Gupta (Pittsburgh)
The moral failure that is Trump's immigration order -- Joseph Carens (Toronto) interviewed at Vox
Is desert making a come back in political philosophy? -- Fred Feldman (UMass) talk with Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt))
“Absolutely I feel it works... I haven’t seen it work. But I think it works,” says Trump -- "If torture is wrong, it’s wrong whether or not it works," says John Schwenkler (FSU)
Consent: a bright line, but a low bar -- Patricia Marino (Waterloo) on avoiding "an awful way to interact with the people you care about"
Writing about philosophy for non-philosophers -- an interview with the journalist with the philosophy beat at Quartz
"Do you consider yourself lucky because good things happen to you, or do good things happen to you because you consider yourself lucky?" -- luck, psychology, and the good life
Reflections from philosophers on the Women's March
"Academia has become an ever-present third party in our relationship, for better and for worse" -- academics and the personal relationships
"Most often, we do not stop to distinguish the typical from the acceptable, the infrequent from the deviant... Combating this tendency in ourselves and others is — perhaps now more than ever — something to be vigilant about."
The "Lego Brain" challenge to physicalism -- from Gordon Hawkes (Calgary)
Philosophical writing by current and former students on current affairs and philosophy -- "Undercurrent Philosophy"
"Continental philosophy needs to honestly appraise the nature of its relation to the scientific civilization it purports to decode and guide, lest it become mere fantasy, or worse yet, conceptual religion."
List of the Alt- and Rogue- Twitter handles of gov't agencies whose official social media Trump shut down. Follow them. -- from Mark Alfano (Delft)
If Descartes' robot "daughter" had written history, what could we have learned about the relationship between humans and machines?
Cornell philosophy PhD student Philippe Lemoine has a new blog -- focused mainly, so far, on political issues
"When it is not possible to be factual and balanced at the same time, democratic institutions risk collapse" -- Eric Schwitzgebel (UCR) in the LA Times
What is a sexual orientation? If it involves sexual desires, what's a sexual desire? -- thoughts from Esa Diaz-Leon (Barcelona)
"He is a baboon flinging shit at the liberal tradition and the liberal order" -- libertarianism and Trump
The trolley graveyard (maybe not what you're thinking)
Alternative facts and Quinean holism -- Alan Jay Levinovitz (JMU) at Vox
A step-by-step interactive walk through of Plato's Euthyphro -- via Don Barker
The ontology and value of internet memes -- case study: Pepe the Frog
Do I torture the terrorist, or let my baby be blown up by the bomb that he had rigged the baby with... ...my baby, whom he had left at some remote location while himself winding up in a situation where he could be tortured by me?
"Evolution did not design us to solve or even recognize this kind of problem" -- Dale Jamieson (NYU) on climate change
Are you an "independent agent?" Perhaps a "synergistic citizen"? Or...? -- a taxonomy of post-tenure professors
"We need to ensure that our new smart technologies will be at the service of the human project, not vice versa" -- how do we get to a "good AI society"?
The displacement of refugees is assumed by most to be "exceptional and temporary," but it's not -- and so it deserves a more thorough treatment from moral and political philosophers, argues Serena Parekh (Northeastern)
A year's worth of philosophy podcast episodes -- listed in reverse chronological order
What is mathematical explanation and what are its limits? -- Charles McCarty (Indiana) explains (via Omnivore)
Why did Indian philosophy stop appearing in Mind and Phil Review? -- Joel Katzav (Queensland) investigates
"The problem is philosophers who read only philosophy written and published in English" -- on the hegemony of the English language in contemporary philosophy
"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 tension at the heart of Jonathan Haidt's problem with liberal college campuses -- a good analysis from John Holbo (NUS) at Crooked Timber
The first episode of the new Hi-Phi Nation podcast is out today -- on the wishes of the dead
"A Proof of the Reimann Hypothesis Utilizing the Theory of Alternative Facts" by Donald J. Trump
"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)
Digital humanities fellowship for philosophers -- from the American Philosophical Society
Donald Trump as Lockean classical liberal? -- That's what Daniel Bonevac (Texas) thinks
And more articles by philosophers on the election at The Critique
"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
Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy issues statement on Trump -- "American philosophers have always encouraged Americans to make America greater"
Will Trump eliminate the NEH?
"The truth about post-truth" -- Kathleen Higgins (Texas), Jason Stanley (Yale) and others on CBC radio
"What might be called “anti-philosophical” forces do operate within journalism" -- an interview with journalist Joe Humphreys about his work reporting on philosophy
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 taxonomy of philosophy graduate students (at PhilPercs)
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"
"They boldly drink from the same well they've poisoned for everyone else..." -- on "moral grandstanding"
Literally everything you'll ever need to know about semantic bleaching (at the pretty great Merriam Webster site)
"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
MM McCabe (KCL) on her life, work, Trump, and more -- in a short but good interview on BBC Radio 4
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
Philosophy organizations on Twitter -- listed in order of number of followers
Is that Bob Dylan singing about trolley problems? -- No, it's Wayne Norman (Duke)
Forbes Magazine's best science book of the year is by a philosopher -- "How Physics Makes Us Free" by Jenann Ismael (Arizona)
"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
Philosophers discuss implicit bias and the recent critiques of the IAT -- at The Brains Blog
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
"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.'"
The do's and don't's of defending tenure -- at IHE
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"?
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)
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
"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)
"More fundamental disagreements are actually better for us than simply a disagreement between interests" -- Ryan Muldoon (Buffalo) on diversity and disagreement
"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 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
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
A motorcycle accident, opioids, and bioethics -- Travis Rieder (Johns Hopkins) on the broader lessons of his withdrawal experience
Students aren't the main advocates for restrictions on academic freedom -- politicians are
"The answer to the question 'will the people tolerate authoritarian rule?' is yes, absolutely" -- Tom Pepinsky (Cornell) on "everyday authoritarianism"
Want your students to email you sparingly and appropriately? -- try including something like this on your syllabus
What goes in those mathematicians' precious wastebaskets? -- that joke, that's what
(this one)
Grad school survival guide -- a new series at Philosophers' Cocoon
Drawings of philosophical thought experiments -- by Helen De Cruz (Oxford Brookes)
What is it like to be a chicken? -- recent research on cognition, emotions, personality, and sociality in chickens (via MR)
Against charity in the history of philosophy -- Schwitzgebel on Adamson
Philosopher wins prize for best book manuscript "on a topic of pressing urgency to disability studies in the humanities"
What can we learn from Rorty's liberal ironism? -- perhaps to be "united against the common danger of cruelty and humiliation"
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
"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
"Things Oughta Make Sense," says Louise Antony (U Mass Amherst) -- the 2016 APA Eastern Division Presidential Address
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
Mattel named its creepy kid version of Amazon Echo "Aristotle" -- maybe they should have gone for "Bentham"
Schopenhauerian existentialism for dads? -- it can generate "something that optimism typically forbids: meaningful empathy" for children
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?
How are we doing in comparison to Thomas More's Utopia? -- hard to say, as we don't know how seriously he meant it
Reasons for antinatalism: Benatar's arguments, environmentalism, the Trump presidency -- plus thoughts from "probably the world's first and only antinatalist webcam model"
"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"
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)
The ethics of big data -- a collection of links at Omnivore
Reddit's upcoming "Ask Me Anything" interviews with philosophers -- mark your calendar
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"
Ethical issues in treating alcoholism -- a discussion with Gregory Pence (UAB)
Tips from James, Epicurus, and Kierkegaard -- on how to keep your New Year's resolutions
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
Philosophy, racial inequality, and elementary school students
"Try to show how changing facts does not necessarily mean changing worldviews" -- and other advice for helping facts play a larger role in disagreements
A paper sculpture of Dan Dennett
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
"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..."
Against Santa -- David Livingstone Smith (University of New England)
"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
True history of real trolley problems -- and the Brooklyn Dodgers
On the effect of "direction of change" on personal identity intuitions -- it seems to matter whether the changes are improvements or deteriorations
Dirty Secrets of Consciousness: (1) we can't define it -- a talk from David Chalmers (NYU)
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)
"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"
Cursing in class -- "an advanced teaching technique"
Rogue One: an engineering ethics case study -- when the Force is not enough
"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"
"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?
Bye irony, hello "calm, diligent, and joyful" efforts to defend principles -- Christy Wampole (Princeton) at The Stone
You gave one lousy answer to one question in your job interview -- how bad is that?
Eternal recurrence wouldn't be so bad if you lived here -- a house in Venice where Nietzsche lived is for sale
Brains as prediction machines -- Andy Clark (Edinburgh) in conversation with Carrie Figdor (Iowa)
"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
"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."
The Myth of the Unpalatable Did you know that Wilfrid Sellars is credited as the originator of the "Incompatible Food Triad" problem?
"When threats replace reasoned debate, truth is replaced by power." -- Jason Stanley (Yale) on democracy and the preservation of freedom
How many philosophy jobs have been advertised this season? -- turns out The Smoker is not extinguished
"What Good Are The Humanities?" - a lecture by Talbot Brewer (Virginia) -- live-streamed Wednesday, 12/14 at 5:30pm EST
"There are, and can be, no books of wisdom." -- thoughts from Claire Grant (Cambridge) at PEL (via BotAPA)
"Abolishing the Electoral College is urgent. Democracy itself is at stake." -- Kenneth Taylor (Stanford) at Boston Review
The difference between American and British letters of recommendation -- from Jonathan Birch (LSE)
Plato, fake news, and democracy -- David Lay Williams (DePaul) at the WP's Monkey Cage
Bringing some of the history of logic into a Logic 101 course -- interesting idea, suggestions needed
How confused is Westworld about consciousness? -- one take by Berny Belvedere (spoilers)
John Finnis and Germain Grisez ask Pope to affirm that “many human beings will end in hell” -- among other things
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
"When it comes to the contest between depth and superficiality, we are in it together." -- Talbot Brewer (Virginia) on the value of the humanities
“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)
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 two best papers in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science this year (via Elizabeth Hannon)
What makes someone a conspiracy theorist? Joseph Heath (Toronto) has an answer
A non-profit open-access network for humanities scholars to share work
Why do we laugh? -- psychologist Robert Provine is working on that question
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
"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)
"Post-truth": an analysis and an internal critique -- from Scott Aikin and Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)
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"
The "Philosophy" snowboard -- designed by Jeff Koons, with a depiction of the allegory of the cave
"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)
The next move for a long-running substantive philosophy blog? -- the future of Flickers of Freedom
"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)
"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
Billionaires and philosophers -- a get-together
More Rembrandt than any Rembrandt? Or Less? -- questions about some interesting art technology
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)
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
Brain size, lifespan, and evolution -- Peter Godfrey-Smith (CUNY) on what we can learn from octopuses
Plans for a database of work by women philosophers for use in undergraduate courses -- at the University of Calgary
"The window of liberal democracy is closing, and the time for its vigorous defense is now." -- Jason Stanley (Yale) on the instability of democracy
The person behind Existential Comics -- an interview with Corey Mohler
How philosophy can address the problem of climate change -- Kieran Setiya (MIT) answers three questions
Threats to the freedom of student media -- "the advisers feared for their jobs" (via IHE)
Causation by omission for the better
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
A philosopher on the "professor watchlist" speaks out -- he will continue to teach "high stakes philosophy"
How fast can you think? -- Barbara Montero (CUNY) tells us
The social philosophy of music's economics -- thoughts from Peter Godfrey-Smith (CUNY)
A feminist Thoreau? -- Anne LaBastille's "argument for the availability of nature, and the wild, to the woman who chooses it"
"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
More on the anti-authoritarian academic code of conduct -- at Inside Higher Ed
The philosophy and psychology of assholery -- today (Tuesday) at 1pm Eastern time on WNPR
New philosophy and culture blog: Ad Populum -- from Nils Stear (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) and guests
Optimism and objectivity in judgment: the case of the infamous dress
Is it ethical to punch a Nazi?
Counterpoint to ↑
Philosophers discuss evil -- Peter Dews (Essex), Rebecca Roache (Royal Hollaway), and others
"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
For a regime of free speech to be tolerable, people must speak up argues Carol Hay (UMass Lowell)
Newcomb's problem discussed in The Guardian -- you can let them know if you're a one- or two-boxer
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)
New careers for moral philosophers
About Wisecrack, the LA startup behind "8-bit Philosophy" and other "unexpected entertainment that informs"
When Ryle refused to allow a review of Gellner's "Words and Things" in Mind (via L.A. Paul)
Don't get distracted by Trumps buffoonery says Carol Hay (U Mass Lowell)
What does diversity mean to you? -- a survey
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)
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)
Are we living in Carl Schmitt's world? -- a collection of links
"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
"The most insightful and eloquent defenders of Trump foresee a bad and bloody ending to his rule" -- Schliesser doing the dirty work
Can philosophy heal a "post-truth" society? -- the president of Ireland thinks so (via Joel Walmsley)
What is the most important contemporary philosophy book that is out of print?
Tocqueville on Democracy in America -- a conversation at Brown University with the PEL folks
A solution to the Gettier problem? -- the work of Duncan Pritchard (Edinburgh) covered in Nautilus
Former philosophy grad student continues to contribute to the discipline by starting his own coffee roasting business
"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)
Assistant professors: write up the CV you want to have when you go up for tenure -- and other tips for tenure-track success
"Soul-crushing, freedom-undermining, waste of human potential" -- against work
Tips on doing an evaluation of your colleagues' teaching -- from Russell DiSilvestro (CSU Sacramento)
The hobo's enchiridion -- "established at the Hobo National Convention of 1889."
"How I Failed Ethics," a new song by The Magnetic Fields (via Seth Mayer)
Reflections on Trump-supporting intellectuals -- from Eric Schliesser
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)
"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
We're smart because we're dense -- it's not a paradox, it's brain science
"Redress philosophy’s unphilosophical parochialism" -- on philosophical engagement with Buddhist thinkers
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
Ignorance and the election -- a discussion among four philosophers
“Kids, you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is never try.” -- in defense of teaching a Simpsons-themed philosophy course
"Post-truth" is Oxford Dictionaries' word of the year
Vagueness basics by Timothy Williamson (Oxford) at Aeon
What does it mean to "normalize" Trump? -- thoughts from Joshua Knobe (Yale)
If you keep close tabs on current pop culture and love philosophy then you'll like Philosophy Memes for Fantastic Philistines
Three ways to be not quite free of racism -- a taxonomy by Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside)
Telling humans from robots -- philosophers and others on questions raised by Westworld
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)
"If western culture were real, we wouldn’t spend so much time talking it up" -- Kwame Anthony Appiah (NYU) on cultural myths and cosmopolitanism
Should you work for the Trump administration? -- Guess who says, in effect, "be the George"?
Scientists have been making and using human "minibrains" in a device about the size of a cell phone
An "Ask Me Anything" with Stephen Puryear (NC State) -- today (Monday) at noon, eastern time
David Papineau and Eleanor Gordon Smith discuss women in philosophy -- at the Philosopher's Zone
Wikipedia's own (secret?) page on how all first lowercase links in Wikipedia ultimately lead to philosophy (via David Velleman)
Regret isn't just about the past -- thoughts from Gordon Marino (St. Olaf)
G. A. Cohen did not want to be like Leonard Cohen -- at least not in college (via Michael Otsuka)
Post-election college paper grading rubric
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)
Day 1 in Trumpland -- a collection of links
"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
Teaching logic using presidential debates -- Michael Titelbaum (Wisconsin) tried it
Dance, followed by philosophy -- in NYC next March
The good in illness -- thoughts from Ian J. Kidd (Nottingham)
Leave aside moral limitations on lying. What are the natural ones?
Which philosopher will be the sensible, non-nonsensical answer to Žižek? (via Stephen Grimm)
Schopenmeower (EC)
When it's rational to judge yourself as better than others, and when it's not -- the research of Ben Tappin (Univ. of London)
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
Philosophy of race, and race in philosophy -- an interview with Ron Mallon (Wash. U. St. Louis)
How often professors are described as "genius," "strict," or "sexy" in RMP evaluations -- data across disciplines and gender
"This campaign season has been an indictment of our understanding of mass communication" -- Jason Stanley (Yale)
What we're asking when we ask "why?" -- thoughts from Bradford Skow (MIT)
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?)
Voting paradoxes: a very clear video introduction (via MR)
Interviews of philosophers and scientists on the relationship between philosophy and science (via Richard Pettigrew)
We don't have five senses -- Aristotle was wrong, says Barry C. Smith (Univ. of London)
"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)
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)
"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
"Wait, it wasn't cool?" -- apparently philosophy is cool again
The Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues starts podcasting (via What's Wrong)
From ancient China, an alternative to Aristotelian accounts of virtue -- the philosophy of Mengzi
Logician, personal assistant to Trotsky, and art world philosopher -- Jean van Heijenoort had an interesting life
The algorithm that sorts science from non-science at the largest online repository of scientific papers
How pop culture mangled Nietzsche -- a video
Two ideals of openness in philosophy -- and how they sometimes conflict
What is explanation? -- discussed by Nancy Cartwright, James Ladyman and an "outspoken metereologist"
Over 150 attacks on academics -- 16 months of data collected by Scholars at Risk (via IHE)
"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
The median humanities PhD earns 25% less than the median PhD across all fields -- and further data on PhDs and earnings
You were reading a book by Thomas Nagel. We made eye contact and you smiled. -- the view from the G train
"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?
"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
A public service announcement
New project to collect data on the careers of humanities PhDs (via IHE)
How to address the concerns of students who are skeptical about the philosophy -- tips from Nickolas Pappas (CUNY)
Clarity is an important norm for philosophy but "with all expert practices there are risks that their norms can become oppressive."
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
Meet your new digital self, for use now and after you're dead -- "Replika" is just the beginning
Peter Singer wins 2016 "Fight Against Stupidity" award
The real lessons of Echo and Narcissus (not new, but excellent)
Sleep is the new sex? -- Cressida Heyes (Alberta) on her work on philosophy of sex and love
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
"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
Lady Philosophy was busy, but David Lewis had some time to talk with Boethius (EC)
"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"
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"?
Telling personal stories in philosophy class
Mercedes-Benz decides its autonomous cars will prioritize saving the people they carry -- goodbye Trolley Problem, hello Prisoner's Dilemma... or Invisible Hand?
"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)
Advice you'd give your earlier self about your current philosophical work -- a new series at PEA Soup
Some days, this is exactly what it is like to be a blogger (via Eszter Hargittai @ Crooked Timber)
A hiking and biking and philosophy excursion -- outreach sponsored by the North Dakota Humanities Council
What it's like to be a philosopher with A.D.D. -- and what the profession can learn from that
"Certainty is static. Doubt propels." -- a conversation with Joanna Kavenna, "champion of the contemporary philosophical novel"
Newly released letters by Heidegger -- still a Nazi
How the logical thinking of Euclid saved the United States
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
You can accept Heidegger's premises without committing yourself to being a Nazi like him -- because he did not produce logically valid arguments
Resources for teaching and learning about mass incarceration -- a multidisciplinary site
The rules of Paradox Club -- by Alex Baia
How not to treat deaf academics -- a list from Teresa Blankmeyer Burke (Gallaudet)
A collection of crackpots and loons -- jury selection at Existential Comics
Reflections on APA committee service -- from Christopher Pynes (Western Illinois) at LR
The evil god challenge -- an animation from Stephen Law
The world is becoming a better place -- says Peter Singer (Princeton)
The Bernadete paradox and a new variant of it to puzzle over -- from Roy T. Cook (Minnesota)
"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
Hilarious "reverse debate" on consciousness -- Chalmers vs. Rovelli
Using computerized reasoning to tackle a time-travel paradox -- one option: if Marty were his own grandfather...
"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
The word "the" and racist speech -- a linguist takes a look
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
"Professional philosophy has abdicated its role in helping individuals navigate large, existential problems" -- a review of “American Philosophy: A Love Story”
Links on human extinction (at Omnivore)
Return policies of various philosophers -- a list
"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."
When your students say, "Who's to say?" (via Dan Korman)
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"
Advice for journal editors -- including when to not bother sending out a paper to referees
The New York Times on philosophy's recent shitshow
How to have better conversations -- excellent advice here
A collection of syllabi for courses in ethics, broadly construed -- you can add yours, too
A journal editor's wishlist -- by Jennifer Lackey (Northwestern), editor of Phil Studies and Episteme
Then complete an MA in philosophy while playing professional basketball in Europe -- how Matthew Rachar (Brooklyn College) went from basketball player to philosophy professor
The value judgments embedded in PhD programs' language requirements -- along with some data on which languages are approved
Which philosophers will be added to Wikipedia? -- and how can you have a say?
Technocratic ideology, strategic racism, and moral judgments -- Jason Stanley (Yale) on the Flint water catastrophe
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?)
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?
A virtual colloquium for philosophy of religion: nominations welcome -- at The Prosblogion
One reason philosophy might be a good career choice (via Philosophy Matters)
"The Sooty Empiric": a new blog on philosophy, science, empiricism, metaphilosophy, & more -- from Liam Kofi Bright (Carnegie Mellon)
What can you do with a philosophy degree? -- the cover story of the Wheaton Quarterly (via my mom!)
A history of ideas about time travel -- it's nonlinear, of course
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
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)
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
"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)
"Insecurity has its advantages — sometimes it provides unexpected chances" -- John Kaag (U. Mass Lowell) with the story behind "American Philosophy: A Love Story"
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)
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)
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
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)
“There are no natural ‘we’s" -- Chandran Kukathas (LSE) on freedom of movement
The poetry of intergenerational ethics -- verse by Felicia Nimue Ackerman (Brown)
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? -- Time Magazine asks Roy Sorenson (Wash. U. St. Louis)
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
An African philosopher with albinism aims "to critically interrogate deep-seated ideologies in African traditions" -- an interview with Elvis Imafidon
"No significant correlations between [teacher evaluation] ratings and learning” -- a new "astonishing" meta-analysis
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"
"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?)
Related: how dangerous is artificial intelligence? -- a survey of experts
How should blogging fit into evaluation, promotion, and tenure? -- and how does it at your institution?
The explanatory power of panpsychism -- a critical look by Keith Frankish in The Atlantic
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)
How US prisons violate three principles of criminal justice -- thoughts from Judith Lichtenberg (Georgetown)
"On this challenge our contestants have to attempt to call up their internet provider and cancel their account" -- The Stoic Gameshow (EC)
"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
How to tell if you're a jerk -- linked to this before, but it's a good reminder
"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
"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
All about virtue epistemology -- an interview with Ernest Sosa (Rutgers)
"Not just really boring and technical but utterly misguided..." -- Tamler Sommers (Houston) on most of today's philosophy, at Products of the Mind
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)
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
Philosopher tramples ignorant political scientist on Twitter -- nice work, Bryan Van Norden (Vassar)
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)
How much of our behavior is determined by genetics? -- Kenneth Schaffner (Pitt) talks with Carrie Figdor (Iowa)
"Philosophy for our Times" -- a philosophy podcast series
How to give profs a safe space to write up minutiae that would otherwise further clog academic publishing: require them to blog?
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
New developments in robot intelligence
This blog is more important than you think -- the time-dependence claim and blogging
Set up an "Ask a Philosopher" booth -- at the farmer's market, at the mall, at...?
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
"Evidence has overtaken Chomsky’s theory, which has been inching toward a slow death for years" -- Scientific American on a paradigm shift in linguistics
Making a classroom discussion an actual discussion -- thoughts from Harry Brighouse (Wisconsin)
Panpsychism basics -- from Godehard Brüntrup & Ludwig Jaskolla (Munich)
An optical illusion -- argh, our minds (via Alex Guerrero)
The tangled interplay of personal, social, and national self-conceptions -- the work of Saba Fatima (Southern Illinois)
What should be included in a survey about making philosophy courses more diverse? -- a pre-survey
"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
"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
How often do mainstream Anglophone philosophers cite non-Anglophone sources? -- not much
Outstanding papers in aesthetics & philosophy of art -- the 2015 AFB Fab Flock Five
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
"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
"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
What is the self? -- TV show Closer To The Truth interviews Searle, McGinn, Blackmore, Dennett
"Try making nothing less like nothing" -- the science side of the question of how there's something from nothing
Someone do this for philosophers, please -- social psychologist playing cards (via Gregg Caruso)
Should soldiers and civilians be subject to different punishments for "unjust acts of aggression"? -- Cécile Fabre (Oxford) comments (via @philosophybites)
"Aristotle is basically a little bitch" -- the beginning of the school year is a good time to remind you about @myphilprof
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)
On trying to understand artificial intelligences -- fascinating challenges
"Professional philosophers’ intuitions were even more susceptible to the presence of irrelevant options than lay people" -- philosophers are people, too, part 63,702
When not teaching, "what is my lecturer doing?" -- a guide for students by Sara Uckelman (Durham) (via Philosophers Cocoon)
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
Religious studies should be more philosophical -- but not in an "arid" analytic nor a "fuzzy" Continental style
"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
Why philosophers might be good at business -- "philosophy breeds the kind of thinking that leads to innovation"
"Behind the human tendency to make the leap from 'is' to 'ought.'" --the psychology of status quo bias in moral thinking
Philosophical questions about photography -- exposed by Jonathan Ichikawa (UBC)
"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
Knowledge, food, health, and a new eating disorder: "orthorexia, or righteous eating" -- discussed by Nancy McHugh (Wittenberg)
The wisdom of children (via Kevin DeLapp)
(related)
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."
When excellent peers miss the point -- Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) on why "history of philosophy make space for anachronism to ensure historical accuracy"
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
The philosophy of anger -- Martha Nussbaum (Chicago) in conversation with Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)
"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)
A professor goes on hunger strike to protest denial of tenure (via Nick Riggle)
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)
Library porn (click on the photos for more about each library)
Robert Paul Wolff begins a series of video lectures on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason
The virtues of the airplane passenger -- I suppose they're saving the difficult issue of reclining seats to future work (via John Corvino)
For the start of the school year: six novels about campus life recommended by The Guardian
"Life is triggering." Yes it is. And so? -- Kate Manne (Cornell) with a follow-up piece on trigger warnings
An in-depth and terrifying look at the near-future of weapons technology -- distinctions smeared, civilizations destroyed?
Two-thirds of the world's mathematicians hail from just 24 scientific ‘families’ (via MR)
Some fellowships for refugees with PhDs at the University of Konstanz
A look at the work Jana Mohr Lone (U. Washington) has done bringing philosophy to kids (an article and a video)
Students seem to learn more from more attractive instructors -- The researchers don’t think that sexual interest explains the results
"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
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."
Ten underappreciated philosophers of the Islamic world -- an introductory timeline from Peter Adamson (LMU Munich)
"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"
"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.)
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
"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"
Two pedagogical suggestions for making philosophy more diverse -- from Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside)
Combining theoretical skepticism and practical certainty -- Kristen Irwin (Loyola Chicago) on the underexplored ideas of Pierre Bayle
Italy is giving each of its 18-year olds €500 and a year to spend it on cultural goods and events (via Atlas Obscura)
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
What can obsessive-compulsive disorder teach us about autonomy and the mind? -- Robert Noggle (Central Michigan) on OCD and quasi-beliefs
Advice for graduate students on how to read -- not new, but useful at the start of the year
"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
"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 philosophy blog of three high school seniors
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
"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)
What is mathematical beauty? And what is its relationship to explanatory power?
"Spinoza's Dream": the folk concept album -- from singer-songwriter & UC Davis philosophy PhD Dave Nachmanoff
Climate change and the ethics of having children -- Travis Rieder (Johns Hopkins) and other philosophers featured at NPR
A guide for students on how to email their professors -- I'd say email it to them, but do they even read email anymore?
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
The ethics of doping in sports -- a transcript of a debate between Robert Sparrow & Julian Savulescu
Which one of these three stories about philosophers is true? -- a version of Wait Wait Don't Tell Me's "Bluff the Listener"
Whatever happened to philosophy of geometry? -- David Corfield (Kent) looks into it (via Omnivore)
Further reporting on what may possibly be the only portrait Spinoza sat for -- at Smithsonian
Mistakes to avoid when publishing an academic book (via MR)
An easy way to create a "Jeopardy" style game for your course
Affective scaffolding and the inability to feel pleasure -- some interesting phil psych from Alex Miller Tate (Birmingham)
The risks and benefits of publishing in less prestigious journals -- a list and discussion at The Cocoon
"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 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)
"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"
Trolley Problem Memes makes New York Magazine
Hegelian approaches to contemporary issues in crime and punishment -- the recent work of Brandon Hogan (Howard U.)
"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
Judge some self-driving car moral dilemmas and create some of your own -- at MIT's Moral Machine website
Trans experience in philosophy -- Perry Zurn (U Penn) on challenges, issues, projects, and a report from a conference
The University of Chicago now has a "Center for Practical Wisdom"
Precisely how vague are we? -- Richard Yetter Chappell (York) at the intersection of metaphysics & philosophy of action
"'Eudaimonia' is Greek for 'This university Is run by corporate stooges And is doomed.'" -- a poem about your university's brand new institute
The ethics of trying to lose -- thoughts from Robert Simon (Hamilton)
"People may be excessively cautious when facing life-changing choices" -- new research on status quo bias (possible paywall) (via MR)
"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)
Fun broadcast about puzzles on public radio -- with Roy Sorenson (WUStL).
Should Neil deGrasse Tyson stop pontificating about the ideal society? Simple: just see whether the data supports it (via Kelly Truelove)
Following up on that depressing NYT article about friendship: "Take Two" interviews Alexander Nehamas (Princeton)
"In constantly redefining property, capitalism has always engaged in redistribution" -- Elizabeth Anderson (Michigan) on the idea of social insurance
Spinoza, politics, and religion -- a program on the BBC about this "radical"
Three women philosophers of color on the condemnation of Thomas Pogge -- at Leiter Reports
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
"Recent research indicates that only about half of perceived friendships are mutual" (NYT)
How Bayesian are our brains?
I, for one, welcome our new cetacean overlords
The speed limits of thought -- Barbara Gail Montero (CUNY) at OUP Blog
Sort of like "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee" -- but really "Book Lovers in Book Stores Getting Books"
"Disavowing experts goes hand in hand with regressions towards morally dubious stances" -- Helen de Cruz (Oxford Brookes) on moral experts
And who are those moral experts, anyway? -- thoughts from Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside)
Donald Trump, Frankfurtian BS Artist Par Excellence -- Fareed Zakaria in the Washington Post
Otto Neurath, logical positivist, civic happiness consultant -- "Care must be taken to avoid the accidental creation of a lunatic asylum"
"The potential for intolerance lies in the logic of religions" -- Gary Gutting (Notre Dame) on the connection between religion and violence
An easy-to-read introduction to machine learning (via kottke)
"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
Fiction by philosophers -- a "top 10" list in The Guardian
Who were the women of ancient philosophy? ...and history, biography, poetry, etc.
The downsides of public philosophy
Nussbaum on the radio -- on "the need to feel"
Doing philosophy on the side -- advisable?
Game theory and cookies for parents
What is a "hermeneutical impasse"? -- Luvell Anderson (Memphis) explains
Worries about Pokémon Go and virtual reality -- addressed by David Chalmers (NYU/ANU)
"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
A discussion of genetic enhancements, cloning, choice, and Orphan Black -- on NPR with Gregory Pence (Univ. Alabama, Birmingham)
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)
Why physics needs philosophy -- a talk by physicist Carlo Rovelli (Aix-Marseille)
"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
Further background on Pogge's hiring at Yale -- Kagan declines to say what he knew; Larmore effectively killed Pogge's chances at Chicago
Travel question: Bentham's head---carry-on or checked luggage? (via Zac Cogley)
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."
Don't try this in class (EC)
A philosophical look at the mid-life crisis -- The Independent listens to the Philosophy Bites episode with Kieran Setiya (MIT)
"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)
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)
Stolen brain in vat helps man get high -- police hope to locate brain's "rightful owner" (seriously)
"Buttery Friendships" -- the Very Bad Wizards on character, good lives, and friendship
Philosophy major turned police officer uses philosophy in his police work
Roger Scruton wins barrel of Amarone -- a prize awarded to those who "promote the fundamental values of the Venetian homeland"
Philosophers discuss gun control -- Dan Demetriou, Michael Huemer, Lester Hunt, Lance Stell and others (scroll down to "Latest Posts")
The philosophy and physics of time -- a report in Quanta about the "Time in Cosmology" conference at Waterloo
Do people hear "Black Lives Matter" as a quantity implicature? -- Ian Olasov (CUNY) at Slate
Soldiers are subject to a specific kind of exploitation: "moral exploitation" -- argue Michael Robillard and Bradley J. Strawser (via Barry Lam)
The difficulties of self-knowledge -- Alex Rosenberg (Duke) in the NYT's Stone
Zeno vs. Zeno -- luckily, it's not a race (EC)
Philosophy prof uses Kendrick Lamar lyrics on exam, exam goes viral
Best prank to play on an academic -- an example
There aren't any facts -- so argues Arianna Betti (Amsterdam), in conversation with Carrie Figdor (Iowa)
The ethics of not paying your library fines -- should you wait until they (sorry) throw the book at you?
Everything you want to know about neo-Fregean philosophy of mathematics that Richard Marshall was not afraid to ask Bob Hale (Sheffield)
Do black lives matter? -- the Funky Academic takes a philosophical look at the question
Pokémon? Go. -- philosophers discuss the latest game craze
The NYT's "The Stone" seems to be taking a weird approach to philosophy of disability -- Shelley Tremain shares her correspondence with its editor
"The most intense pleasure" art can provide, among other things -- I guess I really should read Proust
Did Hume discover stereotype threat? -- some evidence for that claim, at D&I
A thoughtful review of two recent books on altruism -- by Robert Mark Simpson (Monash)
An election season syllogism contest -- from Danielle Allen (Harvard) in the Washington Post
A collection of links on artificial intelligence, ethics, and related issues -- at Omnivore
What is misogyny? A forum at Boston Review -- featuring Kate Manne (Cornell) and several respondents
"Not quite robot; not quite living organism" -- scientists create a stingray biomachine
What is "swamping" and how should we respond to it? -- remarks from Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse (Vanderbilt)
"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)
Reforming the doctoral dissertation (via Philosophy Impact)
"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
"Most professional philosophers are really philonikers", that is, lovers of victory -- says Joseph Trullinger (GW)
"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
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)
The Pogge sexual harassment story makes the NYT
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
Philosophy departments and others are avoiding events involving alcohol -- so as to avoid "inappropriate behavior"
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)
Scientists think philosophy is one big ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ -- according to one scientist who seems to be making a poor induction (via Kelly Truelove)
The ethics of returning stolen art by professor of art crime (!) Erin Thompson (John Jay/CUNY) (via Jeff Sebo)
The power and predicament of the provocatively dressed woman -- by Jessica Wolfendale (West Virginia)
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
What we cannot know -- science and math edition
It isn't wrong to illegally immigrate argues Michael Huemer (Colorado)
Progress on the Zarathustra comic by John Holbo (NUS)
Values and victim-blaming -- what can philosophers do with this psychological research?
How to prep for grad school if you're poor -- crowdsourced advice organized as a wiki
Suffering vs. Oblivion: the results of a survey -- of particular interest to ethicists (via Robert Long)
The "hardest logic puzzle ever" -- and how to solve it
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."
On academic envy and how to deal with it
...and related to that (via Jacob Levy)
Very few parts of your body last your entire life -- some parts of your brain, and something else (via kottke)
Philosophy and the "crisis in physics" over the lack of empirical data -- at NPR
Distinguishing between public philosophy, punditry, and advocacy -- at Digressions & Impressions
Questions about the Pacific APA -- answered by the departing secretary-treasurer, Dominic McIver Lopes (UBC)
"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 Talk wins award for its Snowden interview -- at the 2016 New York Festivals International Radio Program Awards
"The personality of philosophy": a collection of links -- at Bookforum's Omnivore blog
Forget everything you know about memory -- Daniel Hutto (Wollongong) corrects some misconceptions
"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)
Have you checked out the Ethical War Blog lately?
"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
Chompsky -- the food truck named after you-know-who (via Kathryn Pogin)
Philosophy of perception in Reid and Berkeley, and neglected Italian philosophers -- discussed in an interview with Becko Copenhaver (Lewis & Clark)
€2 coin in honor of Georg Henrik von Wright -- issued by his native Finland
“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
Hobbes vs. Rousseau on human nature -- can science settle this dispute?
Susan Wolf (UNC) defends being a foodie -- on Australian radio
The trials of being a grad student -- depicted in Lego (via Paul Gowder)
Well behaved women seldom make history, early modern philosophy edition -- why Cavendish is better known than Conway
Do's and Dont's of making your philosophy syllabus more diverse -- advice from Katharine Jenkins (Cambridge) and Jennifer Saul (Sheffield)
Philosophers on the EU Referendum -- Alexander Douglas, Véronique Munoz-Dardé, Jonathan Wolff, Lucy O'Brien, Ralph Wedgwood, Paul Snowdon, & Jennifer Hornsby (via Adam Ferner)
A response to Sean Carroll on zombies -- from Richard Yetter Chappell (York)
Useful skills for working alone (via Mario Damen / @manenpaard8)
"How many senses do we have?" is a philosophically interesting question -- Mohan Matten (Toronto) interviewed on that and other matters of perception
The rhetorical strategy of "spitballing" -- explained by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse (Vanderbilt)
"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
"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
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
What exactly is a slippery slope argument? -- Douglas Walton (Windsor) with the analysis (via Omnivore)
Local vegetables, fresh bread, and philosophers -- on doing philosophy at the farmer's market
Can you figure out the television paradox? -- a puzzle from Roy T. Cook (Minnesota)
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?
Causation: contextual and pluralistic -- Julian Reiss (Durham) in conversation with Carrie Figdor (Iowa)
The US Senate has proposed drastic cuts to its Fulbright-Hays program -- if enacted, there will be no competition for the grants next year
Facebook's "IRB" -- how it assesses the social media giant's experiments on you
Edward Snowden's actions weren't civil disobedience -- but that doesn't mean they're indefensible, argues Candice Delmas (Northeastern)
"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
Roger Scruton has been knighted
Providing a high-quality intro to philosophy to high school students -- at a philosophy summer camp
Teaching the analytic/synthetic distinction -- a couple of perspectives 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
"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
Retraction Watch on a 14th instance of plagiarism by Martin W.F. Stone (formerly of Univ. of Leuven)
"Your past self did not consult you when she made the plan to resist temptation" -- Johanna Thoma (Toronto/LSE) on negotiating with yourself
Read the 2015 Journal of Applied Philosophy Best Essay Prize winner -- "Geographies of Meaningful Living" by Cheshire Calhoun (Arizona State)
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science is looking for a new co-editor-in-chief
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)
The third most popular class at Harvard is a survey of Chinese philosophy. It's taught by Michael Puett, interviewed in the NYT
"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
"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)
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
An analytic political philosopher explains what it would mean to "decolonize" philosophy -- and why we ought to
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
Excuse of the day
Philosophers' disdain for bards and poets "leaves out the bulk of human experience" -- Justin E.H. Smith (U. Paris, Diderot) on inclusiveness in philosophy
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
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
APA Executive Director Amy Ferrer reports on this year's divisional meetings -- at the Blog of the APA
13th century Japanese Zen teacher Eihei Dogen should be a better known philosopher argues an astrophysicist, at NPR
A professor goes undercover as a student at a community college and learns a lot about the lives of his students
de Beauvoir, Bourdieu, Foucault, and Merleau-Ponty play Monopoly™ (EC)
"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 limitations of neuroscience's ability to meaningfully explain microprocessors may suggest limitations in its ability to explain brains
What is an achievement? -- thoughts from Gwen Bradford (Rice)
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
Has Aristotle's tomb been found? -- archaeologists at ancient Stagira in Central Macedonia think so (via Daniel J. Brunson)
The science and sociology behind the efforts to eliminate aging and natural death -- a look through the hype
Bullshit: the video -- starring Harry Frankfurt and various artists working in that medium (via Rob Tempio)
"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)
If we care about the future of philosophy we should be paying more attention to how it is taught to most students
Interesting: interestingness is not zero-sum
A new "composite metric" ranking of philosophers on Twitter -- to take into account both philosopher and non-philosopher followers
Progress at the boundary between the finite and the infinite
What Is wrong with the policing of minorities In the U.S? -- philosopher John Kleinig (CUNY) takes a long, hard look, at The Critique
It would be too good if Wittgenstein's return to philosophy was motivated by a literal door handle, right? Yet maybe it was
Philosophy and virtual reality -- a short video interview with David Chalmers (NYU)
"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
A philosophy prof-turned-journalist shares 10 tips for op-ed writing (the Blog of the APA)
"Spinoza, did you drink my orange juice?" "You know, in a way, everything is a single substance, don't you think?" (EC)
"Have attempts to simplify some seriously knotty ideas for broad public consumption damaged the real thing?" -- a discussion of the risks of public philosophy
Dennett "quoted" at Clickhole
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)
"When we act unethically, we’re more likely to remember these actions less clearly" -- "ethical amnesia" blocks memories that threaten our moral "self-concept"
"It is hard to accept that events might be explained by what goes on in the future" says Huw Price and Ken Wharton, but...
Thinking about taking your PhD in philosophy into the non-academic work world? -- some tips here
"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)
Everyone has imposter syndrome -- except for you. (via Rosa Terlazzo)
"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'."
Do the liberal arts need saving? -- IHE on a conference on the topic featuring Talbot Brewer (Virginia) and Martha Nussbaum (Chicago)
The anonymous philosophers of the modern era -- commentary from three non-anonymous philosophers
"Philosophy is one tool... that you can use to engage in human repair" -- Tim Stock (Salisbury) on the value of teaching philosophy to prisoners
How whites get affirmative action in college admissions -- by philosophy grad student Hrishikesh Joshi (Princeton)
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)
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
Under what conditions should you take Peter Singer to McDonald's for dinner?
"I’m not crying for myself any more.... I’m crying for my students" -- Alexandra Bradner on adjuncting in philosophy
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)
"Free market ideology" is not the source of our policy woes -- Jason vs. Jason
A brief video interview of Raymond Geuss (Cambridge) on nihilism -- at FourByThree Magazine
Philosophical, psychological, and other approaches to the study of free will -- in The Atlantic
In need of an administrative position? Get help creating your own here (via CHE)
The latest issue of nonsite.org is all about philosophy and photography (via Philosophy Matters)
MoralResponsibilityBlog -- a new philosophy blog
"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)
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)
Democratic vocabulary obscures a non-democratic reality, argues Jason Stanley (Yale)
WaPo humorist Gene Weingarten rags on philosophers ...for not being sufficiently pedantic?
Have you checked out the Unmute Podcast recently? -- interviews of Nancy Bauer, José Mendoza, Luvell Anderson, Meena Krishnmurthy & others
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
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
Margaret Cavendish is the subject of a new historical novel by Danielle Dutton -- at Vox
Is "The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt" secretly all about ancient Greek philosophy? -- an attempt at a 'yes' answer
True artificial intelligence? Logically possible, but highly implausible -- according to Luciano Floridi (Oxford)
What do we owe living beings... on Mars? -- Kelly Smith (Clemson) considers our options
The Funky Academic -- philosophy and funky music, of course
"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
The right theories, not merely good method, drive scientific advance -- thoughts---and an interactive timeline---from J.D. Trout (Loyola)
Philosopher-rockers The Counterfactuals have a new album coming out -- its first song is pretty sweet
"Learning to settle for less may help us to learn more" -- Peter Adamson (LMU) on the difficulties of studying women philosophers of antiquity
Philosophical ruminations on housework -- from Mary Townsend (Tulane)
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
Maybe Bergson didn't affect what Einstein got his Nobel Prize for, after all -- a careful look from Wayne Myrvold (Western)
"Poetic Naturalism" is what non-anti-philosophy-physicist Sean Carroll calls his view
The good and the right in the Marvel Comics Universe -- Mark D. White (Staten Island / CUNY) answers some questions
Recipe for a philosophy paper -- by Keith Frankish (Open University)
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?
Friendship epistemology nightmare -- a study claims that half the people you consider friends don't feel that way about you
An advertisement for philosophy, starring Curious George -- worth sharing (EC)
The winner of the 2015 Philosophical Quarterly Essay Prize is grad student Matthew Babb (Southern California)
"Professional philosophy has an extreme prestige hierarchy" -- is that part of the explanation for some philosophers' unhappiness?
You're doing it all wrong: Kant episode -- with your host, Allen Wood (Indiana)
The FDA is soliciting input on what "natural" is (until tomorrow)
"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)
"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.
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)
A series of vlogs from Bence Nanay on mental imagery (at Brains)
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)
Someone created a parody Twitter account of Daily Nous and I am so mad that I didn't think of the name first
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"
Former CSU LA philosophy prof reaps millions from horse racing -- "Philosophy is really about possibility," he says
Trolley Problem Memes -- the Facebook page
A philosopher and a journalist are interviewed about their new book -- a game-theoretic guide to parenting
Woody Allen almost met Sartre -- "It can be arranged for a price" he was told
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)
Three philosophy students among the new crop of Gates Cambridge Scholars: Sanna Alas, Nathan Hawkins, & Joseph Wu
What do tenured philosophy professors have to be unhappy about? -- hypotheses from Jon Cogburn
Where in the brain do spontaneous thoughts arise? -- a team, including philosopher Evan Thompson (UBC), investigates
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)
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.
Responding to radical skepticism -- Duncan Pritchard (Edinburgh) in conversation with Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)
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)
An interview with Maudemarie Clark (UCR) on Nietzsche's immoralism --- at FourByThreeMagazine (see link at end to 2nd interview on Nietzsche's politics)
Is philosophy the key to getting teens to "trade image-management for deep reflection"? Charlotte Blease (Leeds, Harvard Med School) thinks so
Charles Taylor (McGill) interviewed on Australian radio
New 3-song EP from Frege called "Got Love" (Gottlob?) -- it's a pretty chill "electro-soul" band
Guessing and assessing the principle that best explains your opponent's view can be a way of changing the topic
"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)
To make progress, one needn't make a difference -- an interview with Julia Nefsky (Toronto)
It's like Airbnb, but for peer review (via Marginal Revolution)
The "CV of Failures" -- including a meta-failure
Czech philosopher has been protesting outside Oxford's Balliol College for days over his "radical reinterpretation of Plato"
Set theory sex joke (via John Schwenkler)
"Contemporary analytic philosophy has this problem to an unusually heightened degree." Kieran Healy (Duke) on rudeness in philosophy
Philosophy, science, and unicorns -- and Good Housekeeping
There's a new prize for work in aesthetics sponsored by The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
In 3 years, Minorities and Philosophy (MAP) has gone from 0 to 60 Chapters (Blog of the APA)
"It’s conscious agents all the way down" -- Donald Hoffman (Irvine) explains why he thinks the world is just in our heads
The inaugural issue of Continental Thought & Theory is out -- it contains over 30 short pieces on "intellectual freedom"
Philosopher as security guard -- a Studio C comic sketch (from a few years ago)
T.M. Scanlon is retiring from teaching -- there will be a conference in his honor on 4/30/16
"One of the three of you will fail this class... The other two probably will as well." -- Epictetus is a hard professor (EC)
A lost song from Boethius' "Consolations" -- set to music and performed
"Doing the knowledge": the "fifth element" of hip hop -- Derrick Darby (Michigan) on how it can lead to a remarkable life (via William Irwin)
How should we understand Socrates? -- an interview with M. M. McCabe (Kings) at Five Books
"Philosopher (F. H. Bradley)": the poem -- by Kelly Dean Jolley (Auburn)
What can be learned from interviewing a dozen disabled philosophers?
A different way to write a philosophy book -- "I faced some resistance"
"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
Philosopher punches Canadian Prime Minister Really.
"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
The party game you've been waiting for: Cards Against HumanitIES
How teaching in prison changed a professor's philosophical views -- Jennifer Lackey (Northwestern) at the Blog of the APA
The biology of beings' boundaries -- fascinating, but be warned: it starts with a disgusting story
Einstein's Nobel Prize was not for his theory of relativity because of Henri Bergson
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
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
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
Are insects conscious? -- some scientists and philosophers think so
The APA's Eastern and Central Divisions get new Secretary-Treasurers: Jeffrey Dunn (DePauw) and Elizabeth "Elyse" Purce