Heap of Links

The Heap of Links is a collection of links of possible interest to people interested in philosophy. New links are added on an ongoing basis to the list below, which contains the 2000 most recently added links. The newest 30 links also show up in the sidebar on other pages of Daily Nous, and are occasionally collected in groups of about 7 in the Mini-Heap posts.

An AI ethics assistant “is not going to tell you, ‘You should do that,’ in a concrete moment, but will help you improve your reasoning—to consider empirical facts, to think more logically and coherently” -- Jon Rueda (Granada) on how we might use AI to help make us better people, and some concerns about doing so
“He wants scholars to get real and acknowledge the field’s genuine strengths, which don’t necessarily lie in direct response to today’s political issues” -- the "he" is John Guillory (NYU) and "the field" is literature, but he's addressing problems relevant to philosophy, too
“There is a popular picture of Socrates as someone inviting us to think for ourselves… [That] popular picture is severely incomplete” -- Alex Pruss (Baylor) on Socrates' conservatism
What to say to a friend whose book you haven’t read -- some suggestions
“[The spider] tenses the threads of the web so that she can filter information that is coming to her brain… This is almost the same thing as if she was filtering things in her own brain” -- extended cognition in the animal world
How do ChatGPT and other large language models work? -- philosopher Ben Levinstein (Illinois) provides a "conceptual guide" to them. Here's Part 1.
“Free Will?” — a documentary featuring philosophers and others, released this month -- watch the trailer here
A reflexive puzzle -- (via The Browser)
“Art is artifice plus, one hopes, a hint of genius… Such hints can shine through… in the most unlikely, indeed the silliest places. There is of course no reason why AI should not also be such a place” -- Justin E.H. Smith (University of Paris 7) defends AI art, sort of
“I do not think a degenerated scholasticism is the right historical metaphor for our time and era. I think late antiquity Hellenistic philosophy is where we should see ourselves” -- "We are in a syncretic age. And I believe that is why we will soon be forgot," says Liam Kofi Bright (LSE)
“Ethics are mostly an afterthought for… profit-driven organisations, a compliance hoop they must jump through. Tasioulas and the crew of philosophers he has assembled are arguing that ethics should be foundational” -- The Times profiles Oxford's Institute for Ethics in AI
“Now, how does one inspect the unobservable / With tools meant to detect the world measurable?” -- "Hard Problem of Consciousness" is a new catchy tune by philosophical songstress Hannah Hoffman
Over the past 25 years, the number of students at Wake Forest increased by 40%, but the number of students majoring or minoring in philosophy increased by 300% -- a profile of the philosophy program at Wake Forest touches on, among other things, its strategies for increasing enrollment
The philosophy of comics (comic strips, comic books) -- questions and comments from nine philosophers
The do’s and don’ts of writing about women in the history of philosophy -- from Sandrine Bergès (Bilkent)
How much time does it take you, typically, to referee a paper (not how long it takes between agreeing to referee and submitting the report; just the actual time spent refereeing)? -- share your responses at the Cocoon
“A path to get college credit that begins on a YouTube video” -- does this new collaboration with Arizona State University represent the future of universities, or portend their demise?
“His most significant contribution is his argument that everything is ultimately made of water. It has made a big splash” -- a tenure letter for Thales, by Brad Skow (MIT)
The Gradient covers a wide range of issues regarding artificial intelligence -- recent articles have concerned AI epistemology, the punishment of robots, and the connection between understanding and making the "right mistakes"
“The synthetic creative factor of our knowledge extends… into the very first sense-impressions and even into the elements of logic” -- Friedrich Lange is "interviewed" about his neo-Kantianism, the significance of materialism, and other philosophers, at 3:16AM
“Far from being a fusty academic discipline with no relevance to the ‘real’ world, philosophy was, for him, an existential matter of immediate importance” -- the case for a biography of Bryan Magee
Voters “should expect that an effective candidate will be imperfectly honest at best” -- but liars like George Santos, who are "unlikely to be believed" are "incapable of achieving those goods that justify their deception" says Michael Blake (Washington)
“What does not yet exist is a discipline that treats the workings of government itself as a philosophical subject. This field could be called ‘the philosophy of public administration'” -- Dan Little (UM-Dearborn) on the case for (and questions of) this subfield
“Claude’s writing is more verbose, but also more naturalistic. Its ability to write coherently about itself, its limitations, and its goals seem to also allow it to more naturally answer questions on other subjects” -- meet Claude, one of several alternatives to ChatGPT
“If A beats B and B beats C, A and C have essentially equal chances of prevailing against each other.” Wait, what? -- all about intransitive dice
“What is our universe expanding into?” -- "That’s a great question. The answer, though, is that it’s not a great question," says Paul Sutter (Stony Brook)
“The Department of Personal Inspections is charged with the remit of examining the lives of persons within His Majesty’s territories. You have been chosen for inspection, and judgment will be rendered” -- a short story about akrasia, the gaze of the other, and the examined life, by Ben Roth (Tufts)
“The exercise of common sense involves a drawing back from unforeseen danger… whereas in philosophy we are more interested in seeking out unforeseen dangers in order to then avoid them” -- a history of what philosophers have thought about "common sense" by Stephen Leach (Keele)
“You should always gather more evidence, say women who love gossip” -- Carolina Flores (UC Irvine) and Elise Woodard (MIT) have some fun posting about a forthcoming paper at NWIP
“Exaggerations, half-truths and outright lies will dominate our historical imagination and make it impossible to understand, and learn from, the past” -- Daniel Bessner (Washington) on the decline of the historical profession
“The algorithmic lens while giving us affordances has a certain number of blind spots… that we must be precise… that more data is better… that there is a single uniform truth to be found…” -- Suresh Venkatasubramanian (Brown) is interviewed about developing the US Government's Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights
A philosophy course centered around paradoxes -- taught by Patrick Greenough at St. Andrews
“Contemporary analytical philosophy is in greater part interesting, valuable, and well done” -- Crispin Wright (NYU/Stirling) is interviewed about philosophy and his work on objectivity, truth, vagueness, skepticism, and other topics
“Like Gandhi, he believed that guarding power was bad for the powerful: segregation harmed the white man’s own soul. But from his other great influence Reinhold Niebuhr… King learned to reject a ‘false optimism'” -- Amod Lele (Boston U.) on MLK's improvement on Gandhi
How can we trust science? How does it get at the truth? What about false scientific theories of the past? -- a conversation between Peter Vickers and Jana Bacevic (Durham)
“What’s odd about doubling down on population ethics is that it both encourages us to take an unhealthy amount of interest in the quality of lives of other people’s children and that it encourages us to make calculations that are without any solid ground” -- more from Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) on Will MacAskill and "longtermism"
“If we can’t say exactly how we think, then how well do we know ourselves?” -- Have you thought about how you think? Is it in pictures, in patterns, in words, or in some unsymbolized way? The New Yorker's Joshua Rothman thinks about it, with help from philosophers and others
How students can use ChatGPT to complete the assignments you give them, and what you can do, including strategies for “leaning in” to the new technology -- a video from Mark Alfano (Macquarie)
A petition to have Olympe de Gouges, author of “The Declaration of the Rights of Woman” (1791), memorialized alongside the “great men of France” in the Pantheon -- organized by Sylvia Duverger (Université Paris 8)
Simone de Beauvoir wearing a brooch made and given to her by Alexander Calder
“To hope well is to be realistic about probabilities, not to succumb to wishful thinking or be cowed by fear; it is to hold possibilities open when you should” -- Kieran Setiya (MIT) on the virtue of hopefulness
“Only by assuming a certain constancy between the present and the past can we use the present world as a guide for our historical interpretations… The trick has always been deciding exactly how the present resembles the past” -- Extinct, the philosophy of paleontology blog, is revived---with a new post by its new editor, Max Dresow (Minnesota)
“Tell me just what sort of things are the colors you see / if you’re thinking ontologically…” -- Daniel Groll (Carleton) composed a jingle for a course on color taught by his colleagues
“Ask yourself who will suffer the most if we fail to prevent catastrophic climate change. The answer is the young and those yet to be born—both categories unrepresented in our political systems” -- Peter Singer (Princeton) on eco-activism, civil disobedience, youth, and democracy
“Using the methods of analytic philosophy, we can identify problems in common thinking about motherhood” -- Fiona Woollard (Southampton) provides some examples
“Philosophy has brought more profit to the world than Ceres did who invented the increase of corn and grain, or than Bacchus did that found out the use of wine” -- Richard Marshall "interviews" Isaac Newton
“Everyone has strength; teach in a way that aligns with what you’re good at” -- some general teaching tips from Paul Bloom (Yale)
One robot built with the capacity to “form internal monologues” passed the mirror test, “the most famous test of animal self-consciousness” -- the NYT on robot consciousness, with input from Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) and Robert Long (Oxford), among others
“Contemporary philosophers… don’t think that education matters as a subject of philosophical inquiry, and moreover, they take a rather dim view of those of us who do” -- David Bakhurst (Queen's) hopes this changes
“A big knock on AI is that because it doesn’t really let you understand the things you’re predicting, it’s unscientific. And in a formal sense, I think this is true” -- "But", says Noah Smith, "science is only one possible tool for predicting and controlling the world"
“I didn’t come here to propose a return to illiteracy in order to recover the knowledge of Paleolithic tribes. I regret all we may have lost, but I never forget that the gains are greater than the losses” -- a transcription of part of a 1983 lecture by Italo Calvino on the written word and the unwritten world
Epictetus and Epicurus are “resurrected” using AI language, imaging, and video tools to debate the nature of happiness -- created by Caleb Ontiveros
The subtitle of her first book was “A Little Treatise on the Weakness, Frivolity, and Inconstancy, That Is Wrongly Attributed to Women” -- philosopher Gabrielle Suchon wrote it---in 1693---to help women "protect themselves against servile constraint, stupid ignorance, and base and degrading dependence." Julie Walsh (Wellesley) gives us a tour of her ideas
“What is Black existentialism? To me, Black existentialism means a lot of things, but if I were to use one sentence: it’s hard to be human in the world that dehumanizes you” -- a conversation between Nathalie Etoke (CUNY) and Lewis Gordon (Connecticut)
Is “a quantifiable difference in the complexity of molecules that can be created by living processes compared to non-living ones” a clue to defining “life”? -- and would it help us recognize alien life?
“It is not possible to determine the true identities of Alice and Bob based on the information provided” -- Ned Hall (Harvard) attempts to help ChatGPT solve a logic problem (via Leiter Reports)
“There is a limit to the happiness we can find in maintaining what is generally accepted as a healthy or beautiful body: If you are fortunate enough to live a long life, your body will break down” -- Nick Riggle (San Diego) on "radical aesthetic openness to our bodies... as time and chance inevitably transform us"
“If there’s one thing I would like to leave you with, at the end of it, it’s the spirit of philosophy, and what I believe should be the authentic spirit of it, which I think, I hope that you all incorporate in your own lives. Good luck” -- Richard Bernstein's last words to his last class (The New Yorker)
If you’re using MTurk to run surveys, you probably should consider an alternative -- Florian Cova (Geneva) with an experimental philosophy cautionary tale
A private firm is planning on using genetic engineering to de-extinct the woolly mammoth -- Andy Lamey (UCSD) has some questions
“I had been involved in actions that seemed deeply wrong to me, though perhaps necessary in the conduct of the war, and parts of my soul were at war with each other” -- Paul Woodruff (Texas) on how philosophy helped him put his "soul back together"
“It is a strange thing… that the more time and pains men have consumed in the study of philosophy, by so much the more they look upon themselves to be ignorant and weak creatures” -- George Berkeley is "interviewed" at 3:16AM
“Prohibitions aren’t enough. We need a positive moral vision that guides us towards securing a better future. Ideally, our actions should be guided by what’s truly important” -- Richard Chappell (Miami) on why distinguishing the permissible from the impermissible shouldn't be the main focus of ethics
“We performed a direct comparison between human reasoners and a large language model (GPT-3) on a range of analogical tasks” -- "We found that GPT-3 displayed a surprisingly strong capacity for abstract pattern induction, matching or even surpassing human capabilities in most settings"
The 300th anniversary of the birth of Ukrainian philosopher Hryhorii Skovoroda is commemorated by the National Bank of Ukraine with a new ₴500 banknote -- Skovoroda (1722-1794) was known not just as a philosopher, but as a composer, singer, translator, teacher, and artist
“A.I. [learns] through statistical distribution the best word to use, the distribution of the reasonable words that could come next. I think moral decision-making can be done like that as well” -- an interview with computer scientist (and MacArthur "genius" grant winner) Yejin Choi (Washington) on morality and artificial intelligence.
“Some researchers say it does not make sense to frame something that is a normal biological process as disease. Further complicating things… is that there is no agreed-upon point at which a person becomes old” -- Is old age a disease? Is a "yes" answer "ageist"? Or is the view that ageing is acceptable ageist? Questions about aging at Technology Review
What happened in math, physics, computer science, and biology in 2022? -- Quanta Magazine has published its annual round-ups for each of those fields
“After a five-week strike at the University of California, employed graduate students have ratified a pathbreaking new contract that offers most of them 50 or 60 percent wage hikes within the next two-and-a-half years” -- Nelson Lichtenstein (UCSB) on what can be learned from this "stunning accomplishment"
“Despite what many people might think today, the young Romantics didn’t turn against the sciences or reason, but lamented what Coleridge described as the absence of ‘connective powers of the understanding’” -- Andrea Wulf on how "what happened in Jena in the last decade of the 18th century has shaped us"
Contest: “Give us a transcription of how a dialogue between Socrates and one or more contemporary figures would play out. The topic or the question can be whatever you want” -- and yes there are cash prizes for the winners, you sophists
“Our aim should be to allow each animal to live an active life characteristic of its species, up to some reasonable threshold level” -- "All animals count, and all deserve to live as the animals they are," says Martha Nussbaum (Chicago), interviewed by Evan Selinger (RIT)
The Oxfordshire Blue Plaques Board has proposed a plaque to commemorate Philippa Foot and the house where she lived from 1972 to 2010 -- a decision will be made on the proposal in mid-January
New Work In Philosophy: The YouTube Channel -- videos about recent philosophy
Lecture notes—pretty much a textbook—for a course entitled “Belief, Desire, and Rational Choice” -- from Wolfgang Schwarz (Edinburgh)
One philosophy professor’s experience with a student who cheated by having ChatGPT write their essay -- "proving the paper was concocted by ChatGPT was nearly impossible," said Darren Hick (Furman)
A Medievalist notices that an academic extensively plagiarized his blog in her book, and contacts her to object. The ensuing exchange and investigation reveals she created a fake research center (with fake staff) to receive grants for her & her family -- the blogger's account begins at the linked post and continues in the four posts about the "RECEPTIO-Rossi Affair"
“The best pro-technology visions should disproportionately involve awesome technologies and avoid shitty technologies… If you think AGI is highly likely to destroy the world, then it is the pinnacle of shittiness as a technology” -- Katja Grace on the desirability & feasibility of slowing down the development of Artificial General Intelligence
The cubes look like they are moving. But they are not moving -- what the...?
“I have a no-laptop, no phone policy in all my classes, and have yet to hear good reasons to give that up. Maybe you can give me some” -- Harry Brighouse (Wisconsin) explains
“How does the death spiral of one or more social media platforms impact philosophy?” — reflections from Helen de Cruz (SLU)
“ChatGPT has no interest in you whatsoever. It isn’t curious about your goals or motivated to help you meet them. It lacks the good faith to tell you when your goals are misplaced” -- today's AI doesn't care about you, and that limits its utility, argues Evan Selinger (RIT)
“In one way or another, you are moved to imitate and share the things that speak to you, that seem, in one way or another, to be alive with beauty in a way that makes you feel alive” -- Nick Riggle (San Diego) on beauty
“The use of AI in science presents novel opportunities and challenges. One principle challenge has been how to determine when a given AI model is trustworthy” -- Eamon Duede (Chicago) on why scientific trust in AI is different from its trust in experts, instruments, or methods
“It’s not the pace of life I mind. It’s the sudden stop at the end. Mind you, right now I’m so far behind that I’ll never die” -- an "interview" with Thomas Hobbes at 3:16AM
“An Escher-like array of impossible lines and vanishing points” -- on William Hogarth’s image, "Satire on False Perspective" (via The Browser)
“By making nature the arbiter of our way of life, the Cynics ushered in a moral revolution… But critical theorists today… are understandably suspicious of appeals to nature’s moral authority” -- "The Cynics would applaud their criticism, but they’d also warn them not to throw out the baby with the bathwater"
“We may sometimes want our AI assistants, just like humans, to temper their truthfulness: to protect privacy, to avoid insulting others, or to keep someone safe, among innumerable other hard-to-articulate situations” -- on the complexity of aligning artificial intelligences with human values
“Intellectual history is not so much an enriching source of data and instruction as a prerequisite to know what I am talking about” -- "everyone needs something that is, for them, playing the role of grounding one's modal reasoning," says Liam Kofi Bright (LSE)
“Tellingly, no-one announcing the discovery of the new Hegel manuscripts seems excited that they’re going to make us realise something we didn’t know before about art” -- Tom Whyman on whether more Hegel is good news
“A one-size-fits-all approach to sex [comes] at the expense of the rigor and precision at which precision medicine aims” -- philosophers argue for "sex contextualism" in medical research
“Philosophers cannot work only on problems that interest them; we must work on all the problems that we need to resolve” -- Leslie Green (Oxford) with a moving remembrance of Joseph Raz
Three studies showed that “self-reported physical attractiveness” is “positively correlated with meaning in life” -- "existential significance, or the feeling that one’s life matters, was the facet of meaning that primarily explained the link between attractiveness and meaning in life" (via MR)
“While I’m still on the fence about eyes, I don’t think legs, strictly speaking, exist” -- the question of whether there are more eyes or legs in the world "has profound implications for our understanding of certain fundamental matters at the heart of our ongoing debates about scientific realism," says Justin E.H. Smith
Possibly the first university philosophy course taught entirely in the metaverse: “Philosophy of Space Exploration” -- team taught by Serife Tekin (philosophy & medical humanities ) and Chris Packham (physics & astronomy) at the University of Texas at San Antonio
Philosopher races to new heights -- Alex Pruss (Baylor) has beat the Guinness World Record in greatest vertical distance climbed in one hour on an indoor climbing wall (via Mark Murphy)
“We should keep a perfect indifference for all opinions, not wish any of them true or try to make them appear so, but, being indifferent, receive and embrace them according as evidence and that alone gives the attestation of truth” -- a wide-ranging "interview" with John Locke at 3:16AM
The Waste Land, Ulysses, and the Tractatus each “wed experimental literary aesthetics with highly abstract intellectual projects” -- considering these modernists works together on the centenary of their publication
“If a deep and general knowledge does not make a man diffident and humble, no human means I believe can do it” -- some excerpts from Burke's little-known "Scattered Hints Concerning Philosophy and Learning," with a link to the whole piece, recently republished online
Possibly the world’s second-shortest philosophy paper -- by Joshua Habgood-Coote (Leeds), Lani Watson (Oxford), and Dennis Whitcomb (Western Washington)
“Canadian Hegelianism turns out to be its own philosophical tradition” -- Amod Lele (Boston U.) tells us what it is
Philosophically interesting books for young kids -- a DN list from several years ago
“Not to put too fine a point on it, but in general the project of ‘value lock-in’ is team evil” -- Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) on cultural plasticity, technology and values, the importance of institutions, and what we owe the future
“Now there is no nature in the world because we’re in charge everywhere. The only question is are we going to be benign and fostering stewards or not?” -- Martha Nussbaum (Chicago) interviewed in the NYT
On the “various threads of philosophy that could be tested against sexual experience, reimagining pornography’s lessons” -- Kathleen Lubey (St. John's) on why we should "apprehend the full contents of pornography"
How and why to call on your students -- advice from Harry Brighouse (Wisconsin)
Money: a philosophy course — Andrew Bailey (Yale-NUS) explains the value of his “Money” course to Axios (includes link to his syllabus)
“You need skepticism in order to have a healthy kind of trust, whether in the individual mind or even at the social level” — Sandy Goldberg (Northwestern) discusses trust on the public radio program “On Point”
“I like to draw ’em nice—kinda elegant, I hope – then make ’em silly in faux-retro or disco style” — check out these illustrations of philosophers by John Holbo (NAU)
“Their danger lies… in short-circuiting the development of human writers” - - Richard Hughes Gibson (Wheaton) on AI and writing
“Knowledge is older than all sensible things; mind is senior to the world, and the architecture thereof” -- Ralph Cudworth is "interviewed" at 3:16AM
Warning: the material at this link combines puns, philosophy, and AI art -- created by Adam Keiper
“It helps people govern and express the emotions of contempt, trust, amusement and hope. And these emotions answer to the universal flourishing-related needs of criticism, connection, coping and capability” -- Mark Alfano (Macquarie) and Mandi Astola (Delft) on why a sense of humor is a virtue
“Then I thought that Hegel… would have greatly appreciated this object, which has two opposite functions” -- how Magritte came to paint "Hegel's Holiday"
How technology plays a role in changing morality -- Jeroen Hopster (Utrecht) talks with John Danaher (University College, Galway) about "Pistols, Pills, Pork and Ploughs"
“To say that it is the destiny of antelopes to be torn apart by predators is like saying that it is the destiny of women to be raped” -- Martha Nussbaum on human stewardship of the animal world (may require free registration)
Classic classics -- the classics site Antigone asks 40 writers and readers for their favorite ancient Greek and Latin texts
How to mug Jeremy Bentham -- a dialogue by Johan E. Gustafsson (Texas)
Philosophy is the top major at Cambridge -- in terms of average number of total sexual partners per student, according to Varsity
“At that time, the first half of the seventeenth century, it was still a reasonable project for one man to have the idea that he can lay the foundations of all future science” -- Bernard Williams talks with Bryan Magee about Descartes
“Whatever story you tell about yourself, however simple and straightforward, there is endlessly more to your actual life” -- don't treat your life as a project, advises Kieran Setiya (MIT)
“I have exposed myself to the enmity of all metaphysicians, logicians, mathematicians, and even theologians” -- David Hume is interviewed at 3:16AM
Electrons seem to spin, but actually don’t. So what is really going on? -- Scientific American considers the answer given by philosopher Charles Sebens (Caltech)
“It’s the method of using opposing views to seek truth; Hegel thought his own style of it was better than Plato’s” -- Hegel was a category on Jeopardy! last night
“The organoids are coming!” -- and their use is a step forward not just scientifically, but morally, says Katharine Gammon
“Nothing is true”: big, if true -- David Liggins (Manchester) on why we should take alethic nihilism seriously
“Weirder options are conceivable, but exceedingly improbable” -- two physicists have "calculated an equation that counts universes. And they’ve made the striking observation that universes like ours seem to account for the lion’s share of the conceivable cosmic options"
“Twitter makes preexisting elites accessible, but it also creates its own elites… Still, I think our situation with hierarchy is improved by Philosophy Twitter, not because the hierarchy it institutes is more intrinsically fair, but because it diversifies the unfairness of hierarchy” -- Mason Westfall (WUStL) applies the multiple-status-hierarchies approach to unfairness to the world of academic philosophy
“Having a higher sense of purpose appears protective against all-cause mortality,” according to a recent study -- or to put it another way: a purpose of purpose in life is life
“I take these to be the most important human achievements — language, literacy, human rights and the spread of these things — but I think our next level up is for everyone to have the conceptual framework for their own life be open to them for modification and reflection” -- Agnes Callard (Chicago) interviewed about her life and work
“Concepts of philosophical interest vary across cultures, ages, generations, genders, and socio-economics status” -- a video summing up some of the results of the Geography of Philosophy Project, via Edouard Machery (interesting also as an example of philosophy research PR)
“Even if it were possible, to build infallible memory into machines would mean forgoing some of the important benefits of forgetting” -- Ali Boyle (LSE) on why it's important that AI learns to forget
“Did any parent ever say to their toddler, ‘The dog… now I can say that because there is exactly one member of that species that is salient to us at the present moment…’? I doubt even Russell did that. But young children learn to use definite descriptions just the same” -- an interview with Paul Elbourne (Oxford)
“Successful social movements have frequently—and appropriately—drawn on the socially transformative possibilities of imagination to help make space for justice” -- Michele Moody-Adams (Columbia) on the connection between imagination and political life
“In an overheated debate, your fatigue may lead you to misinterpret the situation and believe that your opponent is too dim or too deluded to see the truth… We humbly suggest that sometimes it’s not them; it’s you” -- Nathan Ballantyne (Arizona State) and Jared Celniker and Peter Ditto (UC Irvine) on "persuasion fatigue"
“Leopards break into the temple and drink the sacrificial vessels dry; this is repeated over and over; eventually it can be calculated in advance and becomes part of the ceremony” -- Kafka's aphorisms (via Oran Magal)
“Why lotteries and not voting? The Athenians weren’t fools; they learned through bitter trials that elections are tools of elites” -- Nicholas Coccoma discusses the case for abolishing elections in Boston Review
The first philosophy unboxing video — Pete Mandik (William Paterson) contributes to the popular YouTube genre
“It’s fine if a vindicatory strategy is question-begging, so long as it achieves a kind of explanatory unity through which mysteries are not left to linger. And I think my strategy does just that.” -- Andrew Sepielli (Toronto) is interviewed about his "pragmatist quietism" in meta-ethics at 3:16AM
“A Søren Kierkegaard in skirts” -- Kristin Gjesdal (Temple) on how Ibsen's "women characters play out ideas and positions on stage"
9 philosophers interviewed about “Philosophy Illustrated” -- in a New Books Network podcast
“It’s a commonplace among lecturers that students don’t know how to read anymore” -- so what advice should we give them about how to do it better? Martin Lenz (Groningen) has some suggestions
One might think that much AI art isn’t just bad, but that it’s not art -- but "AI art is art as much as readymades, minimalist art, or photography" argues G. M. “Boomer" Trujillo, Jr. (Texas - El Paso)
The philosopher who helped kill the king -- on the "mess of paradoxes" in Lucy Hutchinson's "war against the disorder of England’s craven nobility"
“Constructionism was never a matter of ‘just saying whatever’, and science can never be simply a matter of reading the dictates of the natural world off of our instruments” -- Justin E. H. Smith with an appreciation of Bruno Latour and of what it means to "have a choice as to how read the world."
“When asked to select Dennett’s answer to a philosophical question from a set of five possible answers, with the other four being [GPT-3] digi-Dan outputs, Dennett experts got only about half right” -- Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) et al on what happens when large language models are trained on philosophical texts
“Unlike most scientific thinkers of the period… Cavendish insisted that humans are part of nature—not above it—and thus that we lack the perspectival leverage to see and understand its operations” -- on Margaret Cavendish's combination of fantastical imagination, thoroughgoing materialism, and desire for immortality
“As we bridge the gulf between now and then to sympathize with ourselves at other times, we sympathize, too, with the suffering of others” -- Kieran Setiya (MIT) on his chronic pain and its philosophical lessons
A philosopher is invited to take part in a Netflix television show with a magician, the premise of which is that free will is an illusion -- the magician thinks he has cornered the philosopher, but Christopher Kaczor (Loyola Marymount) is the one with a card up his sleeve
“Utilitarian longtermism is objectionable. Longtermism sans consequentialism is another matter” -- Elliott R. Crozat (Purdue Global) considers deontological longtermism
“Most of Earth thus mobilized toward figuring out what is widely thought to be the easiest problem of the three: the line between Anna and not Anna” -- a story by Patrick House about how to delineate the boundaries of consciousness
“Aesthetic value makes the world worthwhile, and… a good life is lived in pursuit and reflection of that aesthetic value” but “evil forces a significant qualification to aestheticism” -- Tom Cochrane (Flinders) defends aestheticism but lets some moralizing in
“Your love of pleasure, Callicles / Is like a jar that always leaks / Like a jar that leaks and then gets filled again. / Leaking, filling, running wild / Like a tyrant, like a child / Ceaseless wanting is, in fact, a kind of pain” -- a song by Luisa Cichowski about the dispute in Plato's Gorgias between Socrates & Callicles over the place of pleasure in the good life
“The last unit we cover is on ‘The Ethics of Horror,’ and we discuss whether there is something morally dubious about watching and enjoying horror” -- Kenneth L. Brewer (UT Dallas) describes his course on the philosophy of horror films
Feel like you’re not good enough to be an academic? Turns out it’s because your parents weren’t good enough at encouraging you -- a new study finds that "the less encouragement a doctoral student received from their parents in childhood and adolescence, the more likely they were to suffer impostor feelings"
“It might sound strange, or even offensive, to suggest that writing about threats to free speech could make people afraid of speaking. The thing is, we know this is how behavior works in other domains” -- Eve Fairbanks on the gap between talk of cancel culture and its reality
“Our democracies are already gamified. Our goal should be to do it better” -- we can go "beyond gamification’s traditionally thoughtless application of points and badges" and use "game design principles put the oft-dashed ideals of digital democracy into practice," argues Adrian Hon
“Agency appears to be an occasional, remarkable property of matter, and one we should feel comfortable invoking when offering causal explanations of what we’re observing” -- an attempt to provide a scientifically respectable explanation of agency that doesn't explain it away, from Philip Ball
“The value of the humanities is, upon exposure to real humanistic practice, self-evident… a society that acts as if this were not true, that threatens artists and philosophers and poets with oblivion or obscurity if they cannot justify their existence, is a profoundly sick culture” -- John Michael Colón on the confusions of the "canon wars"
“Decades of research have revealed a deeper truth [about protons], one that’s too bizarre to fully capture with words or images” -- but it doesn't stop this writer and graphics editor from trying. One example of the weirdness: "the proton contains traces of particles... that are heavier than the proton itself"
Now Open Access: 7 articles by Kripke and 12 articles and book chapters by others about Kripke’s work -- "The Legacy of Saul Kripke" is a memorial collection put together by Wiley (via Eric Piper)
“Ask your kids questions and question their answers. Really get them thinking about issues. Don’t be afraid of these conversations with your kids. You don’t know all the answers. But you don’t have to know the answers” -- Scott Hershovitz (Michigan) interviewed about kids and philosophy
“Instead of supposing that physics must be queen of all we survey, I recommend we construct our image of what an ultimate science might be like on the basis of what current science is like when it is most successful. Physics does not act as queen in these cases” -- "Rather," says Nancy Cartwright (Durham), "she does her bit as part of a motley assembly of scientific... and engineering disciplines"
“The most important teacher of philosophy in America, if not the world, for a third of a century” -- a documentary about Bob Gurland, a longtime, highly-regarded teacher of philosophy at NYU (link is to the film's trailer)
Travel as a philosophical activity -- Emily Thomas (Durham) interviewed on travel, philosophy, women and other subjects
“People don’t like being tricked, especially when the trickery results in giving another person affections they don’t deserve” -- Jesse Hamilton (U. Penn) on "stolen valor"
“I think a lot of wisdom in life (and in philosophy) is about being able to see why things are confusing—once you can see that the confusion itself is a lot easier to live with even if you still don’t have the answer” -- an interview with philosopher and advice-columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith (Princeton)
“Philosophers increasingly face difficult choices in balancing sustainability with other considerations in teaching and research, event organizing, department governance, and institutional service” -- an upcoming APA webinar on sustainable practices in philosophy
“There is a persistent conventional wisdom that… Adam Smith holds a labor theory of value” -- but, despite there being a "kernel of truth" in this, it's not quite right, explains Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam)
“The clarity championed in analytic philosophy is indebted to the clarity indigenous to science; but that there is another sort of clarity: one found in poetry but occasionally also found in philosophy, to that philosophy’s benefit” -- James C. McGuiggan on varieties of clarity
“The new study shows for the first time that the burgeoning brain of a newborn rat will accept human neurons and allow them to mature, while also integrating them into local circuits capable of driving the rat’s behavior” -- the science and ethics of transplanting human brain organoids into animals
“Everything about grad school was a surprise to me… it was the first time in my life that I felt truly out of my league, and I worked hard until I felt I could be the best at it” -- Justin Caouette (Bridgewater State) is interviewed about his life, education, and work
Animal consciousness -- a discussion with Jonathan Birch (LSE), Rachael Brown (ANU), Dan Burston (Tulane), and Liz Irvine (Cardiff)
“Relaxation, then, will bring out the worst in foolish people, but in the wise it will bring out the best” -- Plato and Philo on whether the wise person will get drunk
“Why don’t we have the right to end our lives not just when we want to but to also do so in style?” -- Daniel Callcut on designer deaths
“If ugly people are told repeatedly that they are not ugly or that their woes are not due to them being ugly, even though they are, then this social taboo of being ugly and telling someone they might be ugly, are what puts those people at a hermeneutic disadvantage of interpreting the social world and their place in it” -- Thomas J. Spiegel (Potsdam) on the epistemic injustice of lookism
There was a competition for criticisms of effective altruism, with $120,000 in prizes -- here are the winning entries (via MR)
Map apps “have a colossal influence on our experience of the surrounding world” but “rarely come under public scrutiny” -- that's a mistake, argues Benjamin Santos Genta (UC Irvine)
“I have tried to uncover and unite the truth buried and scattered under the opinions of all the different philosophical sects, and I believe I have added something of my own which takes a few steps forward” -- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz is "interviewed" at 3:16AM
New: “a forum where scholars and the general public interested in biology, cognitive science, ecology and philosophy of science can engage in a constructive interdisciplinary dialogue” -- check out "Dialectical Systems"
Book sales figures are tracked by BookScan, a private, exclusive service that bans academics from using its data -- "The toxic combination of this data’s power in the industry and its secretive inaccessibility to those beyond the industry reveals a broader problem. If we want to understand the contemporary literary world, we need better book data. And we need this data to be free, open, and interoperable"
25 interviews with philosophers and more on the way -- The Dialexicon Podcast is available on Spotify, Apple, and elsewhere, and in video form on YouTube
“Sensations are ideas. They are the way our brains represent what’s happening at our sense organs and how we feel about it” -- what can a psychologist's attempt to "work out how a biological machine like the brain could carry out this feat of representation" tell us about human and animal consciousness?
“It’s amazing how much… compassion and respect for other people, concern for others, is a kind of path out of one’s own sense of loneliness” -- Kieran Setiya (MIT) is interviewed about his new book, "Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way" on NPR
“There are more degrees of freedom in the universe now than in the early universe” -- physicists are working on a problem with "unitarity," an assumption at the heart of quantum mechanics that says that "something always happens"
How different would philosophy of action and practical reasoning be if it were “built from the perspective of working-class agents”? -- Deborah Nelson (UCR) on what "perspectives of economically disadvantaged agents could add to the dialectic"
“Sexual violence is ubiquitous, and for many women it feels like the defining condition and the deepest reality of their lives. But that feeling, like all appeals to personal experience, can obscure as much as it reveals” -- Amia Srinivasan (Oxford) on Andrea Dworkin
“Rorty insisted that philosophy is no longer relevant to politics… That is fortunate, because his philosophical position… was exceptionally implausible” -- Thomas Nagel (NYU) on Richard Rorty and America
Does language shape the content of epistemology? -- Edouard Machery (Pittsburgh) talks about how variations in epistemic expressions across cultures are philosophically significant
The laws of nature, time, quantum mechanics, strong determinism, vagueness, and more -- an interview with Eddy Keming Chen (UCSD) at 3:16AM
“To understand the world more objectively or impartially, we must adopt more perspectives on it. And so it turns out that empathy makes us less, not more, biased” -- Heidi L. Maibom (U. of the Basque Country, U. of Cincinnati) kicks off a symposium at Brains on her new book, "The Space Between: How Empathy Really Works"
An upcoming video game is about Arthur Schopenhauer as a student “seeking prohibited knowledge” -- developed by Toby Svoboda, "The Life of Arthur" will be released next week
“Analytic philosophy, even at its most technical, is one way of tackling those fundamental tasks [of securing grounding and direction in life], and as such serves the same emotional needs that non-philosophers reveal to us during our classes, at parties and in hair salons, planes and Ubers” -- Helena de Bres (Wellesley) wraps up her series on analytic philosophy and the meaning of life
“We laugh at ‘something mechanical encrusted on the living’” -- Emily Herring (Ghent) on Bergson's philosophy of laughter
“There seems to be nothing that in principle cannot be taught in a college classroom provided its relevance to the course” -- Carlo DaVia (Fordham) has produced a guide to help professors untangle and address different potential moral problems related to teaching and classroom speech
“The puzzle of addiction: why do people keep using drugs, given that costs outweigh benefits?… Costs and benefits can only be weighed relative to a set of values [so] whose values determine when drug use becomes addiction?” -- Hanna Pickard (JHU) is interviewed about how to understand addiction
“Just 20% of PhD-granting institutions in the United States supplied 80% of tenure-track faculty members to institutions across the country between 2011 and 2020,” according to a new study -- and "depending on the field, only 5–23% of faculty members worked at an institution more prestigious than the one at which they earned their PhD"
“I am an American Philosopher” is a series of interviews (15, so far) with philosophers published by the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy -- here's one with Eric Mullis (Queens University of Charlotte), who brings together dance and philosophy
“I’ve always thought I was better at helping other people think through their ideas than I was at generating new or ground-breaking things of my own. I used to be ashamed of that, but now that I’ve got students of my own, it’s one of my favourite skills to use” -- Audrey Yap (Victoria) is interviewed at What Is It Like To Be A Philosopher?
“Too often, well-intentioned calls to ‘diversify the profession’ of academia seem to be motivated by brute desires for demographic representation…. That intelligence comes in many forms suggests a better rationale” -- Devin Sanchez Curry (West Virginia) on appreciating "Grandma's metaphysics"
Princeton has so big an endowment that it could, from now on, let in every student for free and still have at least $1.9 billion left over each year -- So why don't they? The author raises this question, but doesn't really try to answer it, and so doesn't seem to realize what's to be learned from it (via The Browser)
“The Mystery of Consciousness,” a live public philosophy discussion, took place this past summer in Liverpool -- featuring Philip Goff, Laura Gow, Anil Seth, Jack Symes, Rowan Williams, and a string quartet
“Gareth paced up and down and told me he was worrying about me a lot. I had to realise, he said, that I was extremely stupid and would need to work very hard to get any kind of degree. I wasn’t in the least offended” -- Lincoln Allison (Warwick) remembers Gareth Evans, who "made intellectual activity exhilarating"
When (and why) are some things best left to the imagination? -- Jennifer Church (Vassar) considers the question
“Young Plato,” a documentary about a headteacher in Belfast who brings philosophy into the teaching at his elementary school, will be screened in the United States -- it's "a very engaging film" according to The Guardian
“There has not been time to come up with the nuances on how [AI art generators] should be used, and large numbers of very different stakeholders have suddenly shown up at the artists’ door, kicking it in” -- Anders Sandberg (Oxford) on some of the issues AI art raises in moral, social, and political philosophy
“When a philosopher has misgivings about the value of philosophy, they’re not just asking ‘why,’ but ‘why why?,’ which is fancier” -- Helena de Bres (Wellesley) recovers her gratitude for philosophy
The Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective (SERRC) launches a monthly podcast called “Knowledge for Breakfast” -- hosted by Fabien Medvecky (Otago) & Michiel van Oudheusden (KU Leuven), the first episode is on "Epistemic Shame and Imposter Syndrome"
You feel attraction to someone? Which of the 12,228 possible versions of this feeling? -- Maria Heim (Amherst) on how India’s "sophisticated traditions of philosophical reflection" explore "the nuances of felt experience with fine-grained particularity"
On “private and public sector jobs in a burgeoning ontological sector, involving the commercial and industrial applications of ontology across diverse industries” -- an interview with Barry Smith (Buffalo)
Philosophers on the tools of neuroscientific experimentation -- a discussion with contributions from Ann-Sophie Barwich, John Bickle, Dan Burnston, Carl Craver, and Valerie Hardcastle
“What is the main impediment to offline creativity? In short, not allowing one’s mind to be offline—rarely choosing, or having the chance, to be alone with one’s thoughts, and to let one’s mind wander” -- Peter Carruthers (Maryland) on a contemporary threat to creativity
“Schelling’s philosophy of oneness might provide a foundation on which to anchor the fight for our climate and our survival” -- historian Andrea Wulf thinks that Friedrich Schelling is just what the environmental movement needs (NYT)
Philosophy professor Robert Pinto (Windsor), who died in 2019, was “one of tens of thousands of residents in Canadian long-term care homes without a psychosis diagnosis that have been prescribed antipsychotics” -- some commentary from Shelley Tremain, who links to a CBC investigative report
“We have to get used to the idea that there may be agents around who are just as intelligent and capable and involved and… committed or reliable as humans and that we need to think about how they matter” -- Peter Railton (Michigan) is interviewed by Katrien Devolder (Oxford) about how we should understand and interact with AI
How “dialogically dense” are different works of philosophy? -- a machine learning algorithm can determine the extent to which an author mentions other persons, and Alexander Klein (McMaster) used it to compare the works of James and Dewey
“If we take Tolkien at his word and read LTR as a ‘true mythology’ of our own earth, then we will find that the text metamorphoses chillingly from a quaint otherworldly fantasy into a literal transcription of one of the most malignant ideologies of the past millennium: the racist ‘Aryan Myth'” -- a previously unpublished piece by the late Charles Mills (now unpaywalled)
“We must be mindful of the way scientific and political discourses are intertwined—and of the limitations of what science communication and popularization by itself can achieve” -- evidence suggests that anti-science attitudes among the public aren't owed to a lack of knowledge, but a lack of trust, write Catarina Dutilh Novaes (VU Amsterdam) and Silvia Ivani (Univ. College Dublin)
“If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.” But what about a dolphin? -- a professor of cognitive psychology, a neuroscientist, and a neurobiologist discuss dolphin language
Video interviews with philosophers, including Elizabeth Anderson, Elizabeth Barnes, David Boonin, and a dozen others --conducted by Simon Cushing (Univ. of Michigan - Flint)
Philosophy of vigilantism, moral ecologies, why we should annihilate our enemies, and more -- in the latest issue of the open-access Washington University Review of Philosophy, focused on war and violence
“The demand that philosophy be personally helpful… sounds wrongheaded to someone with the training of a mainstream contemporary philosopher” -- Helena de Bres (Wellesley) begins a series of essays on academic philosophy's relevance to life
How to read philosophy -- a guide you might consider sharing with students and others new to philosophy, by Charlie Huenemann (Utah State)
“We’ve got to resist this idea that the problem can be identified as some set of students or some particular ideology” -- Teresa Bejan (Oxford), Agnes Bolinska (South Carolina), Janice Chik (Ave Maria), Francisco Gallegos (Wake Forest) and others are interviewed about a program on "teaching civil discourse"
“I’m skeptical… that the dying have good advice for the living. We seem to have, at best, pretty empty advice that you’ve seen elsewhere already. At worst, it’s actively bad advice for anyone who isn’t dying soon” -- Jesse S. Summers (Duke) on what he has learned from having cancer
Meta-analysis finds that trigger warnings, contra both their advocates and detractors, have almost no effect -- results indicate they have "no effect on affective responses to negative material nor on educational outcomes" and "no effect on engagement with material, or... increase engagement with negative material under specific circumstances"
Crows are not black -- reflections from Hannah Kim (Macalester) on a 200-year old passage from Park Jiwon that, focusing on what happens to be philosophers' go-to example for induction, touches on human inattention, stereotyping, color perception, language, and learnedness
“Our educational and research practices are shaped by rules, norms, and goals that are extrinsic to philosophy (and education). This strikes me as rather important to our self-understanding” -- Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) on the philosophically neglected subject of "bureaucratic life" and recent writings by Liam K. Bright (LSE) and C. Thi Nguyen (Utah)
“Increasingly, it seems that the key to understanding the origin and fate of the universe may be a careful accounting of these proliferating varieties of absence” -- types of nothing and their role in physics
Mid-century Marx -- Dan Little (UM-Dearborn) on fluctuations in the attention philosophers paid to Marx from the 1930s to the 1970s
“Ethics… needs to maintain its contacts with the arts and humanities” as they are “sources of moral understanding, inspirations for moral action, and teachers of the sentiments that moral life requires” -- Kwame Anthony Appiah (NYU) on how "one part of the contemporary philosophical landscape – the part that has to do with ethics and politics – fits into, and does not fit into, the humanities"
“Aristotle’s picture of the human good has high standards, but it also takes pains to remain realistic” -- Matthew Walker (Yale-NUS) is interviewed about his work on Aristotle
Philosophy to be taught in primary and secondary schools in Jordan -- "the Curriculum Department at the Ministry of Education that philosophy will be taught to equip students to develop critical thinking"
“Despite Armstrong and Stove’s efforts, Sydney Philosophy continued to radicalise” -- the political differences that split University of Sydney Philosophy into two departments for over 25 years, and how David Armstrong became known as "The Beast"
“Six Commandments for Getting the Most Out of Graduate School” -- a guide by Doug Portmore (ASU), published a couple of years ago at DN
“We cannot allow the novelty of virtual worlds to blind us to the risks of relocating our social and economic activity into a realm that is privately owned and controlled by unaccountable corporations” -- Max Hayward (Sheffield / Harvard) on the Metaverse
“I have grown much more aware of the multiplicity of ways that the organization of professional activities can be simultaneously zones of work, possible intellectual exchange, and joy, while also be structures of exclusion” -- Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) is interviewed about his career, blogging, and living and working with COVID
“These results suggest an inherent difficulty in accurately appreciating how engaging just thinking can be, and could explain why people prefer keeping themselves busy, rather than taking a moment for reflection and imagination in our daily life” -- a new study finds that people underestimate how much they enjoy just thinking
“When I consider my own reasons for doing philosophy, and also the set of philosophers that I find attractive and whose thoughts I wish to incorporate into my own, there seems to me a sort of dualism that I have not yet integrated” -- Liam Kofi Bright (LSE) on the "basically pleasant bureaucrat" and the "sexy murder poet"
“I tried giving some of these [large language model, or LLM] systems standard topics that one might assign in an introductory ethics course and the results were similar to the kind of work that I would expect from first-year college students” -- an important essay from John Symons (Kansas) on the value of what we learn when we learn to write, and how the imminent widespread use of LLMs by students endangers this
Interviews with philosophers -- a new YouTube series from Mark Alfano (Macquarie)
“‘Trans’ had somehow come to the shores of the professional world of mainstream philosophy, and to call the encounter rocky would have been an understatement” -- from "How I Became a Trans Philosopher" by Talia Mae Bettcher (Cal State LA)
Can you distinguish Daniel Dennett from a computer? -- take the quiz
“The campaign had a positive effect on the overall outcome” -- an update on the status of philosophy at SUNY Potsdam
The moral dimensions of academic philosophy -- a conversation between me and John Danaher (NUI Galway) on his podcast, "The Ethics of Academia"
A study “seeks to identify how non-academics perceive philosophy and how they engage in it” -- and you can help by completing a brief survey
“Against proposals for taking antidemocratic ‘shortcuts’ I argue that the commitment to democracy is based on the realization that there are no shortcuts to better political outcomes” -- Cristina Lafont (Northwestern) interviewed at 3:16AM
Drawing, thinking, princesses, nostalgia, history, archaelogy, and more -- in the new issue of The Raven: A Magazine of Philosophy
New reading group blueprints on various topics, including: ethics of commemoration, social dynamics of mathematics, class & aesthetics, Nahuan and Mayan philosophy, and more -- from the folks at the Diversity Reading List
“My plan, if I am being canceled, is not to fight it” -- " If I can quickly put an end to the accusations with some clarifying explanation, I will: the public deserves to hear the truth. But my efforts to rehabilitate myself will cease before I get to the point of reorganizing my public persona around the battle to do so," says Agnes Callard (Chicago)
“You see the students of the Chinese philosophers pressing their teachers for the correct, consistent account of those things just as assuredly as one would expect of students in a philosophy seminar in the U.S. or U.K. So I tend not to think that there is a profound difference here” -- Justin Tiwald (San Francisco State/Hong Kong Univ) is interviewed about his work on Chinese philosophers
“The exclusion of leading Continental figures from the top analytic journals shows that the Continental/analytic divide remains sociologically important” -- data and analysis from Eric Schwitzgebel (Riverside)
An argument map of Alito’s leaked opinion draft in the Dobbs case -- from Nate Otey (Harvard/ThinkerAnalytix)
Preparing philosophy grad students to teach -- how one philosophy program does it
“If we want to get at ‘metaphysical structure’ we need to say something about what kind of thing that could be and how it relates to the logic of truths, and this has to go beyond just appealing to naturalism” -- Paul Livingston (New Mexico) interviewed at 3:16AM
Psychedelic drugs, epistemology, naturalism, and the self -- a special issue of Philosophy and the Mind Sciences includes several philosophers commenting on Philosophy of Psychedelics by Chris Letheby (Western Australia)
“The current generation of Anglo-American philosophers never had enough invested in the aesthetic to fully grasp what is at risk of being lost when the aesthetic is subordinated to the political” -- Justin E. H. Smith on politics, culture, art, and philosophy
“There is simply nothing like this remarkable book for making us think carefully about what makes a story work well” -- Philip Freeman (Pepperdine) on the wisdom in Aristotle's Poetics
“To teach this active reading attitude of not believing everything you read, I borrow the pedagogical strategy of deliberately inserting errors which the student must detect” -- Gwern Branwen on the "fake journal club" (via The Browser)
“I think it’s a great argument that I’m not convinced of…” -- Kate Greasley (Oxford) discusses the complicated ethics of abortion on the Ezra Klein Show
“Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t think they should have a lever that allows any old idiot to divert the whole group of us to Westport on a whim” -- the trolley is reviewed
New: IPM Monthly – Medieval Philosophy Today -- a site for news, opportunities, publication notices, profiles of philosophers, etc., related to medieval philosophy
“What I loved about the history of jazz—namely, that subtle changes to chord sequences and key changes could reframe the entire realm of possibilities for musicians in the future—was also a feature of the history of philosophy” -- philosopher Andrea Pitts (UNC Charlotte) is interviewed about their life and work in philosophy, with a particular focus on social identities
What is the value of studying moral dilemmas? -- an exchange between Paul Conway (Portsmouth) and Guy Kahane (Oxford)
“A great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by the belief in the virtuousness of work” -- Bertrand Russell on the value of leisure and its "wise use," in a 1932 issue of Harper's (via The Browser)
“If spectacular forms of white supremacy were to end tomorrow, whiteness as a structure of privilege, power and hegemony would continue” -- George Yancy (Emory) on how "white-perpetrated, anti-Black murder is all too acceptable, consistent and inoffensive to the very fabric of this nation"
“Passing is not without costs: it takes a significant emotional and psychological toll, both on individuals who pass and on the friends and family they may leave behind” -- Meena Krishnamurthy (Queen's) on the "burdened virtue" of racial passing
A missing color -- cognitive scientist and artist Allen Tager tries to figure out what explains why violet was largely missing for much of human history
Philosophy at the movies -- some highlights from the film & philosophy podcast of Justin Khoo (MIT), "Cows in the Field"
“The objection to violence has its limit at the point when fundamental freedoms are at stake” -- understanding Habermas' view on Germany's role in helping Ukraine (via Darrel Moellendorf)
“Raz’s legacy is a body of work united by dense and detailed tissues of understanding, spun between jurisprudence, political philosophy, ethics, and practical reasoning” -- Jeremy Waldron (NYU) on the significance of Joseph Raz's work
If we conceive of time as a kind of veil of ignorance, perhaps the governance of space is a good subject for a Rawlsian approach—but not for long -- more cynical headline: "Rawls's Theory Finally Finds Suitable Application in Lifeless Void, according to Social Scientists"
More on the metaphysics of farts, and the mysterious author of the article smelt round the world -- by Elizabeth Picciuto in Slate
“How much should we dress up for an event when the topic of the talk was body modification?” -- a journalist reports on an event with philosopher Clare Chambers (Cambridge) about bodies, beauty, and shame
“Faddish calls to… ‘center the most marginalized,’ which abound in the academic and leftist activist circles… ‘never sat well with me'” -- a profile of Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (Georgetown) in New York Magazine
“If any woman could realize Sartre’s picture of self-defining ‘man,’ Iris might have fancied her chances” -- When Iris Murdoch met Jean-Paul Sartre
“For better or worse, most contemporary philosophers must engage either directly or indirectly with racist philosophers” -- Brandon Hogan (Howard) on how to do it better
How to participate in a philosophical discussion -- a guide for students by Olivia Bailey (Berkeley)
The television show that introduced existentialism to to Americans -- the 10-episode series, "Self-Encounter," aired in 1961 and was hosted by Hazel Barnes
“All of this applying takes an incalculable toll… Maybe we need to imagine whole new worlds where people-picking happens very differently” -- Adam Mastroianni (Columbia) on the costs of, and alternatives to, all the applying for everything we all do (via The Browser)
Some people think that humans matter more than non-human animals because of what we can do, or what we’re like -- but, argues Jeff Sebo (NYU) this "human exceptionalism has it backwards: if anything, we increasingly have capacities-based and relationship-based grounds for prioritising nonhuman animals"
“For any hypothetical future apply the ‘Shakespeare Test,’ which asks: Are there still aspects of Shakespeare’s work reflected in the future civilization?… For do any of us want to live in a world where Shakespeare is obsolete?” -- Erik Hoel on why it's important that the future be human
“It really is unfair to a great number of people, past, present, and future, that current student debt holders would benefit from loan forgiveness while others cannot” -- but that by itself doesn't settle the matter, says Barry Lam (Vassar), because "almost every policy is unfair"
“There is a kind of covert moralism that people build into the causal structure of the universe that justifies overly focusing on being the right kind of person, objecting to the right kinds of things, centering the right sorts of people. This amounts to a refusal to look forward” -- Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (Georgetown) is interviewed about his two recent books
“What you need is to have the classroom as a space where we’re not talking left wing and right wing but offering the learning that students need to be able to come to their own positions and judgments” -- Wendy Brown (Princeton) interviewed about politicization, academic freedom, free speech, and today's students
“I contrast the essential-bum-origin view with a phenomenological view, and I argue in favour of the latter” -- Bill Capra on the metaphysics of farts
Three key tips for philosophy students seeking to work outside of academia -- from Ryan Stelzer, who finished an MA in philosophy, worked in the White House, and now has his own consulting firm
The “famous” Michael Huemer – Richard Yetter-Chappell debate about utilitarianism -- hosted by Matthew Adelstein (video)
“When looking to identify the boundaries of species, the branches on the tree of life, or even what counts as life itself, we should be careful about assumptions that come from our very human perspective of biology” -- Gunnar O. Babcock (Duke) on the fascinating questions we face once we appreciate that "life as we know it is overwhelmingly, by many orders of magnitude, asexual"
What if we “reject the orthodox view that the quantum universe must be described by a wave function”? -- we will have a better interpretation of quantum mechanics, argues Eddy Keming Chen (UCSD)
“What desires are politically important?” -- that was the question Bertrand Russell asked in his Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech in 1950
“Things may not be as prim and proper as they appeared to Strawson in his Oxford haven” -- a philosopher's application of natural language processing to social media in the wake of George Floyd's murder suggests a need to expand our conception of reactive attitudes
“Philosophy” was a category on Jeopardy Thursday night -- would you have gotten all of the questions? (link fixed--again)
“A relationship that ends is no more a failure or without value than a life that ends. A good breakup is like a good death” -- "It exemplifies respect, dignity, careful pain management..." says Quill Kukla (Georgetown)
“What sort of philosophy one chooses depends on what sort of man one is; for a philosophical system is not a dead piece of furniture that we can reject or accept as we wish; it is rather a thing animated by the soul of the person who holds it” -- Richard Marshall "interviews" Johann Gottlieb Fichte
“Hopeful pessimism may not be a contradiction, but a manifestation of the wild power that is harnessed only when life’s darkest forces are gathered into the strange alchemy of hope” -- Mara van der Lugt (St. Andrews) on how "hopeful pessimism breaks through the rusted dichotomy of optimism vs pessimism"
“Reminding ourselves that all of that work is on our side, the human side, is of critical importance because it allows us a clearer view of the present, in which we can more accurately track the harm that people are doing with technology” -- Emily Bender (U. Washington) on the errors and risks of being "too impressed" with language models like GPT-3 (via Brian Edwards)
What are the big open scientific and philosophical questions about AI sentience? -- Robert Long (NYU) lays them out
“Kids also don’t worry that they’ll make mistakes or seem silly as they puzzle things out. They haven’t yet learned that serious people don’t spend time on some questions like ‘Am I dreaming my entire life?'” -- Scott Hershovitz (Michigan) on how children are philosophical
Is panpsychism a “new science of consciousness” or “the last gasp of a prescientific view of what consciousness is”? -- Keith Frankish (Sheffield/Open) in The New Humanist
“Given his pervasive anti-moralism, any contemporary reader of Nietzsche is forced to ask: can Nietzsche have a political philosophy?” -- Dan Little (UM-Dearborn) looks at recent attempts to determine Nietzsche's political philosophy
“I can’t even track how many layers of meta this joke is, but one that just came to me is the idea that maybe the joke doesn’t actually make sense, but we need it to make sense, because we need the eggs” -- a novelist, a comedian, a rabbi, an editor, and a religious studies scholar discuss the famous last joke in Annie Hall
What are real-world moral dilemmas about? -- a research team analyzed 100,000 "Am I The Asshole?" posts to find out
“Taking the simulation hypothesis seriously means accepting that the creator might be a sadistic adolescent gamer about to unleash Godzilla” -- Some people think learning that we're simulated beings in a simulated world should make no difference to us; Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) disagrees
Filmmaker Errol Morris claimed that Thomas Kuhn threw an ashtray at him and kicked him out of the graduate program at Princeton -- but, argues K. Brad Wray (Aarhus), there are reasons to be doubtful of these claims
“Reserving the word ‘rational’ for something like coherence seems to me to be a waste of a perfectly good word” -- Juan Comesaña (Arizona, soon Rutgers) is interviewed at 3:16AM
Music by philosophers, for philosophers, about philosophy: the 21st Century Monads have a new album coming out -- you can pre-order it by making a donation to a charity of your choosing, as Joshua Spencer (Wisconsin-Milwaukee) and a puppet explain
Researchers test GPT-3’s “capacity to produce short, coherent essays on philosophical themes” -- "any suggestions that GPT-3 may mark the dawn of a new era of synthetic philosophy, or the twilight of the traditional one, are simply not justified."
A discussion of “Epistemic Explanations” -- Ernest Sosa (Rutgers) talks about his recent book with several commentators in the latest episode of "Philosopher Meets Critics"
“Down one path is understanding the humanities foremost as knowledge work… Down the other path is understanding the humanities as a kind of pure activism committed to rejecting the values that govern institutional and civic credibility” -- Aaron Hanlon (Colby) on the "credibility crisis" facing the humanities
“We all must take a more active role as consumers in how these technologies are developed” -- novelist-professor Sam Lipsyte (Columbia) writes amusingly about his trip to Vegas to hear a philosopher & a sex-technologist talk about sex robots, and maybe try out the tech himself
Socrates said that studying philosophy was preparation for dying -- at one (and only one) university in North America, undergraduates can cut out the middleman and just major in death
“Many Russians are not to blame for the war or the atrocities. Living under a draconian authoritarian regime, they are manipulated by a powerful propaganda machine and they face harsh punishment if they protest” -- still, sanctions that may harm them are justified, argue Avia Pasternak (UCL) & Zofia Stemplowska (Oxford)
“To create a truly secure (and permanent) encryption method, we need a computational problem that’s hard enough to create a provably insurmountable barrier for adversaries.” How can we tell if such a problem exists? -- the epistemology of the possibility of cryptography
New: “In the CAVE: An Ethics Podcast”. It “explores some of the big ethical and philosophical issues facing contemporary societies” -- from the Macquarie University Research Centre for Agency, Values and Ethics (CAVE), it's on Spotify and other podcast platforms
“Once you read these critiques, it becomes painfully obvious that the Dunning-Kruger effect is a statistical artifact. But to date, very few people know this fact” -- a step by step explanation of the problem with one of psychology's most famous findings
“It’s hard not to feel that the machine is thinking in some meaningful way” -- NYT article on what large language models are doing, and what they're doing when they're doing it
“The story of Mary Hesse shows how quickly even well-known women from our recent past can vanish from the collective memory of their peers” -- Ann-Sophie Barwich (Indiana) on the mechanisms of "collective forgetting" that have erased women from the history of philosophy of science
The “cultural wilderness” of bad movies -- 7 philosophers comment on a book by Matt Strohl (Montana) on movies that "fall outside the scope of culturally constructed notions of artistic seriousness"
“How is it not a ‘fallacy’ to feel guilty about something for which you are not blameworthy?” -- John Martin Fischer (UCR) takes up this question and related ones about individual moral responsibility in regard to Russia's attack on Ukraine, in an interview
Do non-human animals have moral experiences? -- James Hutton (Edinburgh) on the philosophy and science relevant to that question
AI-created portraits of philosophers in the style of Maurice Sendak -- some fun with a new AI art generator
“Relying upon adjunct labor is wrong, because it is cruel” -- Alexandra Bradner explains the "useless, unnecessary, and preoccupying disorder it brings to a person’s mind, family, and community"
“The experience of the war shows us again and again that you cherish life, you value life, in the point of when it’s very close to death. At that point, you really understand what life means” -- Ukrainian philosopher and journalist Volodymyr Yermolenko is interviewed by Ezra Klein (NYT)
“When authors gave a funnier title to a work they considered significant, they reaped the benefits of significantly higher citations” -- details on a new study titled "If this title is funny, will you cite me?"
A philosopher is collaborating with The Guardian to offer responses to children’s often strange, imaginative, and philosophical questions -- Scott Hershovitz (Michigan) also recently authored the book "Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Adventures in Philosophy with Kids"
The “categorical ambiguity” of the uncanny elicits a “metaphysical threat response” -- David Livingstone Smith (New England) on the dehumanization of the disabled
“While genetic knowledge can provide a rich source of meaning in answering the question ‘Who am I?’, I don’t think it is either the only source or a necessary source” -- Daniel Groll (Carleton) is interviewed on the moral and political aspects of genetic lineage in a magazine for people who’ve been separated from biological family
Gilbert Harman’s major contributions to philosophy -- a collection of brief essays by several philosophers on the work of Professor Harman, who died last November
Mary Wollstonecraft returns to Newington Green -- in the form of a stenciled spray-painted portrait near where she founded a girls’ school in 1784
“Good—that is to say, ethical—sex is not simply about getting consent so that we can do what we want” -- Christine Emba on the need for shared sexual norms beyond consent
What can arguments for extended cognition tell us about aesthetic experience and understanding? -- Miranda Anderson (Edinburgh/Stirling) takes Otto inside the museum
“The mechanisms, meanings, and dynamics of a social population can be investigated along countless different dimensions, and there are no fixed and final ‘laws of social interaction’ that ultimately allow the explanation of the social ensemble” -- Dan Little (UM-Dearborn) on the "open texture" of the social world
“When an entire discipline gets gamified, we are in for trouble… we discourage ourselves from being truly playful and creative” -- Helen De Cruz (SLU) on the "gamification" of philosophy
“Chance rules all” -- Brian Skyrms (UCI) is interviewed by Richard Marshall at 3:16AM
“By combining model scale with chain-of-thought prompting, PaLM [Google’s Pathways Language Model] shows breakthrough capabilities on reasoning tasks that require multi-step arithmetic or common-sense reasoning” -- be sure to check out the full paper (which they link to), especially p. 38 for examples of logical inference and joke explaining
Commentary from several philosophers on various aspects of the Russian attack on Ukraine -- including Janina Dill, Helen Frowe, Jeff McMahan, Massimo Renzo, Zofia Stemplowska, and Elad Uzan
“It turned out she was just so deeply lost in her own research and writing that she’d forgotten about the meeting entirely. Which delighted me. I mean, that’s exactly what you want out of your philosophical advisers” -- TV producer Michael Schur on what he learned from Pamela Hieronymi (UCLA) about moral philosophy
The philosophical thinking of Martin Luther King, Jr. & Malcolm X -- the "History of Philosophy without any Gaps" begins a three-episode arc on these figures
“The tutorials [in philosophy] were a springboard to a new role and a new life; he now wanted to use his fortune to make a mark in the realm of ideas” -- how Nicolas Berggruen came to be a philosophy-focused philanthropist
“The proposal to start an octopus farm is a proposal to create a new octopus culture [and] a new kind of octopus: the cultural behaviours coupled with the captive environment will be a novel environmental niche that shapes subsequent evolution” -- Kristin Andrews explores the ethical issues of such acts of creation
“How the idea [that the market place of ideas would inevitably lead to truth] mistakenly associated with Mill came to be thought of as somehow intrinsic to liberalism” -- Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) does a little history of ideas detective work
Roderick Chisholm failed his PhD prelim exams at Harvard and didn’t receive a fellowship -- but was appointed Alfred North Whitehead Lecturer there 30 years later (via Nathan Ballantyne)
The difficulty of defending the free speech of those threatening you -- Adam Briggle (North Texas) on the day a candidate for state congress who supports policies that would tear his family apart came to campus
Moral grandstanding in public discourse: is it a problem? -- a discussion between Brandon Warmke (Bowling Green) and Justin Weinberg (South Carolina)
Philosophical ideas represented with minimalist images and brief captions -- from Jonny Thomson on Instagram
“I can provide meaningful feedback, and targeted, productive feedback, better if I put less emphasis on assigning a grade” -- an article about the Marcus Schultz-Bergin's (Cleveland State) experience with "ungrading"
“Once the controversial metaphysical underpinnings of the alleged irreconcilable conflict [between science and religion] are identified… the match turns out really to be a contest of metaphysics against metaphysics” -- Hud Hudson (Western Washington) is interviewed at 3:16AM
“I think what’s at stake is a public culture, that we are all affected by in the same way, and that we collectively produce… it’s something that we are all entitled to try to contribute to. It isn’t owned by anybody”” -- T.M. Scanlon (Harvard) is interviewed by Yascha Mounk (Johns Hopkins)
“She is both beautiful and good, in a way the philosophy of character strives to explain but can’t always illustrate convincingly” -- Mary Townsend (St. John's) on the virtuous Dolly Parton, though "be warned that Aristotle won’t be entirely able to wrap his head around the idea that a petite woman with a high voice might be a profound moral exemplar"
“I’m not the kind of philosopher who is tortured by philosophical questions” -- a video interview with Timothy Williamson (Oxford) on his work and on philosophy in everyday life
Lots of logic videos -- over 180 of them, by Professor Sara Uckelman (Durham)
“The change is meant to reflect all four cardinal virtues of government identified by the Greek philosopher Plato in his most famous work, the Republic” -- the Georgia House of Representatives adds "courage" to the state’s pledge of allegiance, which already mentions wisdom, justice, and moderation (via Tim O'Keefe)
“There are many opportunities to include Africana philosophy in your teaching curriculum; indeed it should be possible for just about any topic you might name” -- Liam Kofi Bright (LSE) & Peter Adamson (LMU) have some advice on how to do it
Margaret Cavendish wrote “a proto-SF novel that explores early modern science, feminist and queer thought, and political philosophy” in 1666 -- and Helen De Cruz (SLU) has posted a summary and illustrations of it
“Who knew that philosophy… could still be this controversial?” -- Mark Oppenheimer & Jason Werbeloff, hosts of the Brain in the Vat podcast, defend the pursuit of "unaskable questions" in the wake of the controversy over Stephen Kershnar's appearance on their program
There was a mistake in that “That’s Not Kant” post -- thanks to Daniele Procida it has now been fixed, and an additional portrait of Kant that's kind of badass has been added
Philosophers discuss the Russian invasion of Ukraine at Oxford -- with Jeff McMahan, Janina Dill, Helen Frowe, Massimo Renzo, Zofia Stemplwoska, and Elad Uzan
New: a Twitter “Community” for philosophy -- Twitter's interest-based "communities" allow you the option of tweeting just to others in the community
“We should distinguish creativity as we ascribe it to products from creativity as we ascribe it to processes. Value, however, is a core part of creativity, both of the product and of the process” -- Julia Langkau (Geneva) on types of creativity and their value, and how "psychology is so far ahead of philosophy concerning research on creativity"
How to “level the playing field so that less-overconfident students can gain some of the same advantages” -- Eric Schwitzgebel (Riverside) follows up on the "overconfident student strategy" with advice for teachers and students
“The beautiful soul is where affections and reason are harmonized through play” -- Richard Marshall "interviews" Friedrich Schiller
“His students at the LSE jokingly referred to his book as ‘The Open Society and Its Enemies, written by one of its enemies'” -- Tae-Yeoun Keum (UCSB) on how Karl Popper's career was elevated by "bashing Plato," and what this tells us about philosophy
“We all know that we do things against our own better judgment… Do we also believe things against our own better judgment?” -- Eugene Chislenko (Temple) on akratic beliefs
How did you end up majoring in philosophy? -- N.G. Laskowski (Cal State Long Beach) asks Twitter
The new bioethics, continued: “Our proof of concept thus highlights how a nonhuman autonomous creator of a deadly chemical weapon is entirely feasible” -- a company that uses AI to improve human health was asked to explore the risk of misuse of their methods. Result: in less than 6 hours they generated 40,000 different deadly molecules
“Hope is needed most exactly when the world looks hopeless” -- Lea Ypi (LSE) on hope, humanity, Russia, Ukraine, and what can be learned from Kant's Perpetual Peace
“Larger, Freer, More Loving,” the podcast from Matthew J. LaVine (Potsdam) and Dwight K. Lewis (Minnesota), returns with a new season -- the first episode focuses on emotion, race, and justice, and features Myisha Cherry (UC Riverside)
“If philosophers refuse to use books simply because they include philosophical views that we dislike or disagree with, then we would be failing to live up to our professional standards” -- Raja Halwani, the editor of an anthology on the philosophy of sex, responds to criticisms of his decision to include an essay by Kathleen Stock in the volume
“Part of the gift of forgiveness, and what can be powerful about it, is that seeing another in this hopeful way… creates a space in which there is a possibility for them to face their flaws without needing defensive denial” -- Lucy Allais (JHU) interviewed at Vox about forgiveness
What are the implications for reactive-attitudes-based accounts of moral responsibility of taking our ordinary reactive attitudes to be the products of structurally unjust social conditions and practices? -- "radical" work by Michelle Ciurria (University of Missouri-St. Louis) is the subject of a symposium with comments so far from John Doris (Cornell) and others, soon
“Refugees need more political autonomy, not less, and third parties – host states, civil society and international NGOs – should enable rather than inhibit the vital roles that refugees play in their home countries” -- Ashwini Vasanthakumar (Queen's) explains why
A Columbia math professor accuses his university of providing false and distorted information in order to climb in the US News & World Report college ranking -- raising further questions about the value of such rankings
“It doesn’t solve the systematic problem of the anonymity of the student experience at the large research university… Nor does it solve the problem of anti-intellectualism in the student body” -- but there are things Harry Brighouse (Wisconsin) has done as a philosophy professor to "mitigate those problems for a handful of students"
“It lies in the weakness of human nature to always want to set up a system; perhaps it also lies in the weakness of human nature never to be able to set one up” -- Richard Marshall "interviews" Johann Gottfried Herder
“I very much like the idea of philosophy as a Great Art… there’s no way of cheating” -- an interview with Sophie Grace Chappell (Open University), possibly "the most counter-suggestible person in the entire world"
Marx “canceled” at the University of Florida -- a library study room named for him (one among many named for various well-known figures in history) has been renamed "Study Room 229" after pressure from rightwing outlet
The recent “Philosophers On The Russian Attack On Ukraine” has been translated into Spanish for publication in “En Letra: Derecho Penal,” an Argentinian journal -- thanks to Leandro Dias and Alejandro Chehtman for their work on this
“I’m someone who actually only has one thing I’m really interested in, which is authority; just about every one of my projects is kind of unified by this” -- an interview with Kate Manne (Cornell) at The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Australasia
How values shape inquiry in cognitive science -- a roundtable discussion with Sam Liao (Puget Sound), Uwe Peters (Bonn/Cambridge), Morgan Thompson (Bielefeld), & Daniel Burston (Tulane)
“What was initially the epistemic vice of overconfidence becomes the epistemic virtue of being a knowledgeable, well-trained philosophy student” -- Eric Schwitzgebel (Riverside) on the "overconfident student strategy," who employs it, and why it's probably more common in philosophy than other disciplines
Ukraine, Russia, and philosophy -- philosopher Michelle Panchuk (Murray State), who has lived in Ukraine and has family there, is interviewed by J. Aaron Simmons (Furman) on the conflict and its lessons
If we’re going to be honest with ourselves, morally sensitive, and thoughtful about our feelings, the best result may be “a stable, if uncomfortable, emotional equipoise” -- Erich Hatala Matthes (Wellesley) on the complex emotions of engaging with the work of immoral artists
Philosopher’s Nest is a new podcast “dedicated to showcasing the work, insights, and experiences of graduate students in philosophy” -- featuring brief interviews conducted by Kyle van Oosterum & Lewis Williams (Oxford), the podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and elsewhere
“There’s something undeniably erotic about elevators… order, intellect, and civilization over chaos, animality, and death” -- Helena de Bres (Wellesley) on elevators, love, and transcendence
“If McArevey and his staff can teach a new generation of boys to think for themselves, question old loyalties and find other ways to manage their anger perhaps they are building the hope for a new Northern Ireland” -- a review of "Young Plato," a documentary about a headteacher in Belfast who brings philosophy into the teaching at his elementary school
“Although all these truisms about the laws of nature sound plausible and familiar, they are also imprecise and metaphorical” -- Marc Lange (UNC Chapel Hill) on the difficulty of pinning down what a law of nature actually is
“It is commonplace in philosophy to test arguments and theories by reference to commonsense… [but] we should aim, whenever possible, to do better than rest on commonsense” -- Marcus Arvan (Tampa) explains why
“Philosophy… should understand itself and know just what it has indeed to offer, without taking anything away, least of all cheating people out of something by making them think it is nothing” -- Richard Marshall "interviews" Soren Kierkegaard
“Directly offering refuge to those most oppressed… is not only a humanitarian policy—it is also a powerful way to increase our national strength” -- John Thrasher (Chapman) and Ryan Muldoon (Buffalo) on the value an "open society"
Silicon Valley Congressman says that to fix social media, Meta, Twitter, etc. should “hire 100 philosophy majors” -- is this evidence that Rep. Khanna has been checking out philosophy Twitter, or evidence that he hasn't?
How has technology changed friendship? How will it in the future? -- Rebecca Roache (Royal Holloway) on the differences---and overlooked similarities---between friendships back then and friendships now
Sexiest degree at the University of London? Philosophy. -- "Going on a date with these precious overthinkers guarantees you’ll learn something new," says the London Tab
“This is a threat to all of us” -- Jeff McMahan (Oxford) interviewed about the Russian attack on Ukraine
Political philosophy and political style -- Michael Blake (Washington) on the signifiance of Zelenskyy's "style of political presentation" being "the antithesis of that shown by... Putin"
It’s not “just looking” -- Helen Frowe (Stockholm) and Jonathan Parry (LSE) on why the consumption of revenge porn should be criminalized
“What’s good? Whatever / The highest good is pleasure” -- a rap about Epicurus, from Nathan Dufour Oglesby. You'll get some pleasure from it. (via Tim O'Keefe)
“A careful examination of Newcome’s historical and intellectual context supports the claim that she made a very important contribution to the development of utilitarianism” -- before Sidgwick, Mill, or Bentham, there was Susanna Newcome (via Richard Yetter Chappell)
“Only those have reached the ground in themselves and have become aware of the depths of life, who have at one time abandoned everything and have themselves been abandoned by everything, for whom everything has been lost, and who have found themselves alone, face-to-face with the infinite…” -- Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling on who can be a philosopher, in an "interview" at 3:16AM
“While we can’t tell you exactly why, according to our algorithm, you are not eligible for chemotherapy and our algorithm is rarely wrong” -- is "our algorithm is rarely wrong" a suitable justification for an AI-based medical decision? Anantharaman Muralidharan (NUS), G. Owen Schaefer (NUS), Julian Savulescu (Oxford) on this and related questions
What are the main contributions that philosophers have made to Internet studies? -- Catarina Dutilh Novaes (VU Amsterdam) starts a list and gets some help from the crowd
“If a being is conscious at all, what it is like to be that being involves an organisation toward staying alive” -- Gary Francione (Rutgers) on what this means for the moral treatment of animals
Paste text into “Only The Questions,” and the result will be an “x-ray” of it that shows you… only the questions -- Clive Thompson describes why he made this tool, and provides some examples and a link so you can try it yourself
The Future Fund wants to support organizations and individuals whose work will make the future go well -- and is funding projects in artificial intelligence, values and reflective processes, and epistemic institutions, altruism, and other areas philosophers might contribute to
“Eros commits crimes of passion because, first and foremost, it commits crimes of thought. It attacks the heart by way of the mind. Eros is an intellectual monster” -- Agnes Callard (Chicago) had a terrible romance. What can be learned from it?
“We are often poorly positioned to make sound judgments about whether someone is virtue signaling… the epistemically virtuous… thing to do is to avoid making such judgments” -- Mark Satta (Wayne State) & A.K. Flowerree (Texas Tech) on intellectual humility and public discourse
“My grandfather… was summoned to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee in the winter of 1958” -- Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin (Sam Houston State Univ.) on the lessons his grandfather's ordeal holds for today's disputes over teaching about racism
“Games give you a moment where you know exactly what you are doing, because there are points… and that’s not true of parenting, or research, or being a spouse…” -- C. Thi Nguyen (Utah) on the Ezra Klein Show talking about good lives, the power & danger of games, what's measurable & what's not, & more...
Last year, a lab “turned a network of hundreds of thousands of neurons into a computer-like system capable of playing the video game Pong.” -- Brian Patrick Green (Santa Clara) on the philosophical questions this raises regarding the nature of minds and the moral treatment of such creations
“No matter what you’re paying attention to, if you’re really paying attention to it, you’re doing your job as a philosopher” -- an interview with Justin E.H. Smith (Paris) on the wide-ranging work he has been up to since he "mistakenly went off to grad school in philosophy"
In 1948, Nelson Goodman gave Morton White and William Fontaine, at the time the only black philosopher at an Ivy League school (Penn), a ride down to the Eastern APA in Charlottesville -- the end of the trip, recalls White, was "chilling"
“It is important for all of us to try hard to understand what scientists have been discovering” -- Martha Nussbaum (Chicago) surveys some recent findings about animals. "We humans have cognitive prejudices to overcome," she says.
“While envy reveals a dark side of human nature—our tendency to covet other people’s possessions and talents and cast an evil eye on them—it also shows a more luminous one: our tendency to improve ourselves, and strive for excellence” -- Sara Protasi (Puget Sound) on four varieties of envy
Anaxagoras asked whether one could cut up a circle to produce a square of equal area -- it turns out you can. Here's the story of the progress made on this old problem, and a visualization of its latest solution.
Would a journal consortium solve some of philosophy’s article publication problems? -- Brian Weatherson (Michigan) sketches what it might look like
When calls for interdisciplinarity are really “antidisciplinary” -- Paul Griffiths (Sydney) goes over some of the warning signs
“Scientific rigour with wildly imaginative theorising” -- a profile of David Chalmers (NYU) and a discussion of some of the ideas in his new book, Reality+
“Locke was misled in his thought experiment… by his construal of the broad epistemic limits of sensibility” -- an essay, with photos, on Locke, microscopes, telescopes, photography, and vision by Aderemi Artis (University of Michigan–Flint)
“They probably pay you pretty well for that.” “Yeah. Wait, what?” -- academic publishing in a nutshell
“Recent architectures in deep learning are illuminated by and in turn empirically vindicate some of the more speculative (and often derided) empiricist ideas about these faculties from the history of philosophy” -- Cameron Buckner (Houston) on empiricism, imagination, and artificial intelligence
“Circumstances alter cases, and online communication of specific types may harm in one context but not in another” -- Onora O'Neill (Cambridge) thinks legislation about this should "focus on online wrongs rather than online harms, on action rather than outcome"
What happens when we ask subjects of X-phi studies “to ‘think aloud’ about the experimental stimuli” and explain “why they answered the way they did”? -- Kyle Thompson (UC Riverside) finds out
“Parmenides’ conclusion / is that motion’s an illusion” -- philosopher-dancer Barbara Montero (CUNY) teams up with philosophy-musician Hannah Hoffman
When Peter Singer won the $1 million Berggruen prize, he pledged to donate it all to charity and let the public decide where $100,000 of it would go -- See which charities the public chose
“Arguments about schools quickly reveal themselves to be arguments about all of the things that adults in liberal democracies prefer to leave up to the individual conscience” -- the political philosophy of childhood makes The Atlantic
“Although both critical thinking skills and good will are useful in isolation, when they are present together – that’s when the magic happens” -- an interview with Bill Fish (Massey) about his research, teaching, the future of philosophy, and more
“The unique woman, the exception from the rule was tolerable. What was not acceptable was the thought that this could be a new type of woman” -- why the history of women in German philosophy requires some detective work, according to Anne Pollok (Mainz)
“It’s pretty clear that the people who did best during the pandemic, as a direct result of the interventions that were recommended by the modelers, resembled the people who did the modeling” -- Eric Winsberg (S. Florida) on various issues and questions about pandemic models and the choices and values that go into them
Tips on negotiating an assistant professor salary -- from an economist, but not just for econ positions
“We can find up to eight dates associated with a publication” and “this gets worse when each publisher interprets the meaning of each… differently” -- When is a paper "published"? (via Retraction Watch)
How to teach a course that is mainly or exclusively composed of less commonly taught philosophical traditions -- suggestions from Helen De Cruz (SLU)
“Love is something that exists on the maximal outer limit of our agency’s thinkability” -- Alexandra Gustafson (Toronto) on the sublimity of love, even when it's unrequited
Bang the head Socratic -- a review of "The Republic", an instrumental "post-metal" album about Plato's dialogue by the band Thumos (via Jeremy Skrzypek)
“It should give us pause that some eighteenth-century histories of German philosophy did indeed include more women than what we today find in standard histories of the nineteenth century…” -- Kristin Gjesdal (Temple) interviewed about her work in the history of philosophy and how histories of philosophy emerge
“The evolutionary lineages in the universe closest to our own [human] lineage are those found here on earth. And since none of them underwent the three major transitions that happened in our lineage, we have no reason to think they might occur elsewhere” -- on why intelligent life in the universe is rare (via The Browser)
“No one is likely to hold stuff like this against grad students” -- whether public controversies or grievances about philosophy departments affect their students' professional opportunities
“I have this master plan to transform academic writing to the point where every article and every book is actually interesting and fun to read. I know this is ridiculous” -- an interview with Toril Moi (Duke) on how she thinks about writing, the teaching of writing, and the audiences for which she writes
“If you just think you’re compensating people for past harm, you’re not challenging the system that produced those harms in the first place and will produce tomorrow’s harms” -- an interview with Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (Georgetown) on reparations, the environment, history, and the future
“Essential to the whole enterprise of Socratic conversation… is a willingness to be refuted. Willingness may be too weak. For Socrates describes rather a positive delight or eagerness to be refuted” -- Andrew Beer (Christendom College) on the benefits of being refuted
“In the land of the infinite, the bullet-biting utilitarian train runs out of track… [and] infinite ethics is a problem for everyone, not just utilitarians” -- Joe Carlsmith (Oxford) discusses the fascinating problems that infinities bring to ethics
“What Makes Heavy Metal ‘Heavy’?” -- figuring that out is itself a pretty heavy task, argues Jason Miller (Warren Wilson College)
New developments in plagiarism: AI paraphrasing tools -- one professor's experience detecting its use by a student
“Dear Professor James, I am so sorry but really I do not feel a bit like an examination paper in philosophy today” -- Gertrude Stein was apparently the teacher's pet in William James' class
“To be honest it’s a bit embarrassing to see philosophy operating downstream from popular culture and corporate PR, rather than approaching these overwhelmingly dominant forces critically” -- Justin E.H. Smith (Paris) brings his fascinatingly wide angle perspective to VR, AI, and applied ethics
“That question just stuck with me… you could be doing a whole string of science based on a flawed metaphysical assumption… Someone needs to work on this” -- the "origin story" of philosopher Quayshawn Spencer (U. Penn)
What are the rules for not being a “COVID jerk”? -- Eric Schwitzgebel (Riverside) lets us know
Psychological research inspired by Parfit’s work on the connection between prudence, morality, and the metaphysics of the self -- some experiments "suggest that people who score high on the Future Self Continuity measure have higher moral standards"
“What if animals do know what it means to die?” -- work in philosophy, psychology, and biology is helping us understand whether animals understand death (via Kris McDaniel)
“It is the duty of philosophy to destroy the illusions which had their origin in misconceptions, whatever darling hopes and valued expectations may be ruined by its explanations” -- Immanuel Kant interviewed by Richard Marshall at 3:16AM
What is gender? -- Robin Dembroff (Yale) in conversation with Justin E.H. Smith (Paris)
“Liberal neutrality rests on substantive moral goods: moral relations between diverse persons” -- and not only is that not incoherent, argues Kevin Vallier (Bowling Green), it's part of neutrality's appeal
“If you cannot do anything about what upsets you, you should attempt to free yourself from such negative emotions… If, by contrast, there is an opportunity for changing the distressing situation, then you should embrace the pain you feel and let it motivate you” -- Katharina Volk (Columbia) on how to make sense of Cicero's changing view of the emotions
If “actions in virtual worlds will potentially be as meaningful as actions in the physical world,” what ethics apply to them? What law? -- an excerpt from Reality+, the new book from David Chalmers (NYU)
The new version of GPT, “InstructGPT,” is better at following people’s instructions -- but "a byproduct of training our models to follow user instructions is that they may become more susceptible to misuse if instructed to produce unsafe outputs. Solving this requires our models to refuse certain instructions; doing this reliably is an important open research problem"
“Why did Husserl begin thinking about movement?” -- Carrie Noland (UC Irvine), a professor of French and comparative literature, on her "adventure" looking into Husserl's influences and motivation
At public schools, should students be taught “tolerance as non-disapproval” or “tolerance as forbearance”? -- there's controversy no matter what, argues Christina Easton (Warwick)
“Well, I see metaphysics as ‘lifestyle’” -- Wilhelm Dilthey is "interviewed" by Richard Marshall at 3:16AM
“‘Love Letters’ tells the tale of a white college [philosophy] professor named Anna Stubblefield and the black family whose lives she turned upside down when she helped teach their disabled son a controversial typing technique known as ‘facilitated communication’ but then took things too far” -- writer Andrew Bluestone has won a Humanitas Fellowship to work on this script
“Much of our reasoning under uncertainty involves negotiating an accuracy-informativity tradeoff, and that this helps to explain a variety of patterns in the things people tend to guess, believe, and assert” -- Kevin Dorst (Pitt) & Matthew Mandelkern (NYU) on whether the conjunction fallacy is really a fallacy
The song has lyrics from Wittgenstein and is dedicated to Rosalind Hursthouse -- it's by New Zealand's Karl Steven (of Supergroove), who took a break from his musical career to get a PhD in philosophy from Cambridge (via Yuri Cath)
Amartya Sen on the memories that shaped his research -- in an interview on the radio show "Marketplace"
“The philosophy of mind is not, pace so many of its contemporary exponents, an ethically neutral or ideologically innocent study. The philosophy of mind is a part of “human science”; politics has everything to do with it” -- Sophie-Grace Chappell (Open U.) argues that consciousness is both gendered and sexed
“A life in VR could be just as meaningful as a life in the physical world” -- David Chalmers (NYU) in conversation with Evan Selinger (RIT)
“Maintaining our punishing attitude towards plagiarism could reap benefits well beyond discouraging plagiarism itself” -- Stuart Ritchie (KCL) counters recent arguments for why we ought not care about plagiarism
A philosophy PhD’s suicide and the mission of an academic organization with which many political philosophers have been involved -- the "existential struggle" taking place at Liberty Fund (via Chris Bertram)
“All those yellow and green Wordle grids popping up on our screens give us a steady stream of small communions” -- C. Thi Nguyen (Utah) on how the popular word game provides moments of mutual understanding
“The show… takes the form of a gathering of ‘radical fairies,’ who come together each year to mourn, and re-enact, the death of Socrates” -- a new jazz opera about the final hours of Socrates is opening in Manhattan
“The defining characteristic of fiction is that it’s made up. So how can we learn from it?” -- that may sound like an easy puzzle to solve, but it's not, argues Amy Kind (Claremont McKenna) in her guest stint at The Splintered Mind
“Likely the first book about moral philosophy to feature endorsements from Steve Carell, Amy Poehler, Ted Danson and Mindy Kaling” -- Michael Schur, the creator of the TV show "The Good Place," has written a book
It’s “not about invincibility, but about vulnerability. And the role supportive others play in sustaining our resilience” -- one of several aspects of Stoicism discussed in an interview with Nancy Sherman (Georgetown)
“If I am right, neither the science of physics, nor any other science, could express all the truths; but the world could nonetheless be wholly physical” -- Tim Crane (CEU) on the real lesson of Frank Jackson's famous Mary example
What do you know about Nísia Floresta? -- Olivia Branscum (Columbia) speaks with Nastassja Pugliese (Federal Univ. of Rio de Janeiro) about the 19th C. Brazilian philosopher, her philosophy of education and her enlightenment critique of slavery and colonialism
“Given that academic ethics is about ‘ethical fine tuning’ and that the academy remains disconnected from the government, the potential for ethicists to respond to the climate emergency within the limits of their job description is somewhat limited” -- Doug McConnell (Oxford) on the role of moral philosophers in regard to global warming
“To prepare students to thrive in a world driven by science and policy, we need to incorporate philosophy in the classroom,” especially philosophy of science -- so argue Nicholas Friedman (Stanford) & Stephen Esser (U. Penn) , who also provide links to lesson plans
Quantum approaches to mathematical puzzles -- it's "not just fun and games, but has applications for quantum communication and quantum computing"
“We need to devise ways of drawing more people voluntarily into the risk social contract, rather than pushing them ever further away” -- Jonathan Wolff (Oxford) on fighting the pandemic
Philosophy, disability, and social change -- videos of several philosophers from a conference on the subject last month hosted by the University of Oxford
“Maybe we are so enmeshed in contradictions in our day-to-day lives, so constantly pulled in multiple conflicting directions at once, that we don’t even notice, except when the inconsistency becomes so insistent that it can’t be ignored” -- if philosophy is going to makes sense of the world and our lives, argues Zach Weber (Otago), it will be with paraconsistent logics
“It is a joy to play with this ontological uncertainty. It is the magic of movies” -- that we see actors along with their characters and a film's production along with its fiction is relevant to the metaphysics, aesthetics, and ethics of the medium, argues Francey Russell (Barnard)
The Last Days of Socrates: The Musical -- written by the Lebanese composer Mansour Rahbani (1998), it's in Arabic, with over 100 dancers and actors, and it is quite the spectacle
How does the meaning of a word (or symbol, or gesture…) first arise? -- Brian Skyrms (UCI) used simulations as part of his work on this puzzle; now Mike Deigan (Rutgers) has made online versions of these simulations for anyone to run
“The solace of Platonism is purchased at a large cost. Is there some less evasive and less contorted way to face our end?” -- Martha Nussbaum (Chicago) on disgust, death, and not hating the body
“The colors, shapes, and other sensible properties entering my experience are all imagined… [but] what’s imagined… is the overall past appearance common to previous encounters with that property” -- "perceiving is imagining the past," argues Michael Barkasi (Toronto)
“Philosophers should welcome opportunities in academic leadership” -- four philosophers with experience as chairs or deans explain why
“Once you recognize the role that the mind plays in investing things with meaning and with reality, then it’s easier to to invest virtual things with meaning, just as much as one can invest physical things with meaning” -- a conversation with David Chalmers (NYU) at Vox
The FBI file on Foucault -- and how it relates to his ideas
“One of the most difficult tasks confronting philosophers is to descend from the world of thought to the actual world” -- Karl Marx interviewed at 3:16AM
“We seem to have strong evidence that we are biased toward explaining failures of human reasoning by positing biases. Let’s call this the ‘Bias Bias’” -- thoughts on bias and paradox from Joshua Mugg (Park U.) and Muhammad Ali Khalidi (CUNY)
“The empirical investigation of a topic like happiness is only going to be as good as the initial conceptualization that frames the hypothesis guiding the inquiry” -- an interview with philosopher Bernard Reginster & psychologist Joachim Krueger (Brown), who team teach a course on happiness
“Even when they deemed it a fable, there was some degree of uncertainty concerning its existence… making it a heuristic tool to understand the nature of plants” -- on the scientific & philosophical value of a mythical lamblike animal-plant (via The Browser)
Examining utterances that are “always speaking”–most laws, for instance–can help us distinguish different meanings of “meaning” -- the Legal-Phi interview blog, run by Lucas Miotto (Maastricht), returns with a conversation with Martin David Kelly (Edinburgh)
It’s thought that “publicly-oriented scientific disagreement… undermines trust in science [and that] emphasizing the uncertainty will mean anything goes, that scientists don’t know anything” -- "And I wanted to push back against that," says Zeynep Pamuk (UC San Diego)
“Welcome to the minefield that is race humour” -- Matthias Pauwels (North-West University) on the "extremely complex operation, involving many interlaced factors tricky negotiations" of ethical comedy about race
You’ve probably read about the metaphysics of holes, but what about their aesthetics? -- some art history of the hole, from Kim Beil (Stanford)
Controversy over a proposal to add a statue of 17th-century philosopher Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia to a monument with 78 statues of men -- in Padua, Italy
“To appreciate the ingenuity of Locke’s philosophical views, I think it is important that we resist the tendency to apply common metaphysical classifications” -- Ruth Boeker (UCD) interviewed about her work on Locke, personal identity, mind, and more, at 3:16AM
Video resources on Stoicism -- a collection curated by Gregory Sadler (MIAD)
Free logician-themed 2022 wall calendar w/ Hamkins, Turing, Haack, Manzano, Rayo, Stebbing, & Williamson -- from LógicaMX, with art by María del Rosario Martínez-Ordaz and concept by Alejandro Estrada-Giron and Moises Macias-Bustos
Figuring out how to “use AI to improve human moral judgments in bioethics” -- a model from Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (Duke) and Joshua August Skorburg (Guelph)
The Tractatus as song -- sung by M.A. Numminem (via Timothy Williamson)
Use of psychedelic drugs causes “significant shifts away from ‘physicalist’ or ‘materialist’ views, and towards panpsychism and fatalism” -- and the effects last for at least months, according to a recent study
“Do your own research” has become the slogan of those “skeptical” of expertise -- Nathan Ballantyne (Fordham) and David Dunning (Michigan) consider how to respond to them
Loneliness and the need to be needed -- philosophers on how to better understand, measure, and address loneliness
A philosophy course taught by your favorite memes of 2021 -- by Ali Fitzgerald in The New Yorker
The first step in creating a Bernard Williams Society -- is a website dedicated to the work and life of Williams, created by Paul Russell (Lund)
“Thinking about dogs without us can help us understand who dogs are with us, and what they need from us, right now, to flourish and be happy” -- bioethicist Jessica Pierce (Colorado) on what we can learn from speculating about "posthuman dogs"
The picture of the “the offline” as where we go to find ourselves means “we are condemned to either living falsely, or being alone” -- but, asks Lauren Collee (Goldsmiths), what exactly is "the offline", what does it represent, and who is it for?
Publication strategies for those on the tenure track at a liberal arts college with fairly demanding research standards -- from Erich Hatala Matthes (Wellesley)
A New York Times columnist tries out Stoicism for the holidays -- "the Stoics have led me to the major philosophical insight that while I can’t control someone else’s construction site, it is within my power to purchase earplugs and then watch a detailed YouTube tutorial about how to 'Stop Inserting Earplugs Wrong!'" says Molly Young
A brief historical survey of philosophers on “enjoying food, drink, sex, dancing, and idleness, without guilt” -- Max Hayward (Sheffield) in The Atlantic
“The [students’] papers often seem to be written in the same way that someone who, never having seen a plane, tries to draw one based on its definition” -- Robert Zaretsky (Houston) on professors who love books and students who do not read them
“What is unique and liberating about philosophy is that you are allowed to defend any idea, no matter how crazy it might sound, as long as you have an argument that you are willing to subject to scrutiny” -- an in-depth interview with Yujin Nagasawa (Birmingham) at What Is It Like To Be A Philosopher?
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus turns 100 -- 10 philosophers provide brief remarks on the book
The year in physics -- a review at Quanta Magazine
Are you worried about the development of “robots single-mindedly intent on pursuing their own goals without any regard for the collateral damage”? -- they--or something relevantly similar to them--are already here, argues Gabriele Contessa (Carleton)
The two iron laws of college reading -- from Harry Brighouse (Wisconsin)
“If the opposition is attacked, undermined, disorganised and divided to the point where it becomes unelectable or incapable of forming an alternative government, we are no longer in a situation where unpopular leaders can be voted out” -- Jonathan Wolff (Oxford) on the importance to a democracy of "treating opponents as legitimate adversaries, not treasonous enemies"
“What should we, then, think of such a dogmatic person’s dogmatism? How should we evaluate this character trait from an epistemic perspective?” -- Mandi Astola (Eindhoven) on the value of distinguishing between the epistemic traits of individuals and those of the groups of which they're a part
“It is far better never to contemplate investigating the truth about any matter than to do so without a method” -- Richard Marshall interviews Rene Descartes at 3:16AM
The work of Moritz Schlick, his role in the Vienna Circle, and what might have been had he not been murdered -- with Jonathan Birch (LSE), David Edmonds (Oxford), Maria Galavotti (Bologna), and Cheryl Misak (Toronto)
“Understanding language requires understanding the world, and a machine exposed only to language cannot gain such an understanding” -- though they've attained human-level rates of accuracy on Winograd schema tests, neural network language models do not seem to have attained humanlike understanding
“Just how strong – philosophically – is the case for blowing up pipelines and power stations to save the world?” -- not that strong, say philosophers
“When people start writing a philosophical essay or thesis they are often advised to get an ‘overview of the literature first.’ Now I’m convinced this is a bad strategy” -- don't let your ideas be crushed by "the literature," advises Martin Lenz (Groningen)
The Google doodle of the day is of Émilie du Châtelet -- the French philosopher and mathematician was born on December 17th, 1706
The artistic and philosophical legacy of Stephen Sondheim -- thoughts from scholars in philosophy, theater, English, and musicology
“What can stories do that more quantitative work cannot?” -- Alexander Prescott-Couch (Oxford) on integrating narratives into social science
“Going There, the gossipy tell-all from news anchor Katie Couric, has very little in common with a volume that bears the name Lectures on the Philosophy of Mathematics. Look closer, though, and a few themes emerge” -- the latest from Joel David Hamkins (Oxford) is on Bloomberg's "best books" list, aimed at "the executive class"
“Again and again Rorty reveals a perspective on current work to which I had been oblivious, including on topics I thought I had mastered” -- Daniel Dennett on Rorty's "On Philosophy and Philosophers"
“Since things we can easily imagine are especially pleasing to us, men prefer order to confusion, as if order were anything in nature more than a relation to our imagination” -- Baruch de Spinoza interviewed at 3:16AM
On “the conflict between holding fast to our beliefs about what we think is just and appropriate for society, and giving our political opponents the respect they deserve even if we disagree with their beliefs about justice” -- Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt) in conversation with Lilly J. Goren (Carroll)
“Why does this guy David Chalmers keep following me around? Every time I look in the mirror, he’s there. That’s kind of freaky” -- NYT interview with Dave Chalmers (NYU) on the nature of reality, meaningful lives, consciousness, and The Matrix
“If the university has grown inhospitable to the humanities, perhaps scholars can smuggle them out, book by book, one affordable seminar at a time” -- philosophers and others venture beyond the ivory tower to help people develop and pursue their love of learning (via Scott Newstok)
What we can—and can’t—learn from increasingly detailed maps of the neural connections in brains -- using connectomes to predict behavior, and other developments in connectomics
A bust of the late Ágnes Heller has been installed at the European Parliament in Brussels -- the hungarian philosopher was known for her work in politics and political theory, social, and moral philosophy, aesthetics, and other subjects,
“Rather than asking about the criteria for rightness, I think a more neutral starting point would ask: What does the moral theory hold to be most important?” -- Richard Yetter Chappell (Miami) thinks "importance," not "rightness" should be the central concept of normative ethics
“Many women who desperately want to abort would also desperately prefer to raise the child if forced to carry their pregnancy to term” -- Elizabeth Harman (Princeton) on one way Justice Amy Coney Barrett is wrong about abortion
Rawls’s A Theory of Justice at 50 -- audio from the recent conference at the University of Virginia School of Law
The humanities and virtual reality -- three open, online sessions later this week put from the Virginia Philosophy Reality Lab
“They did a lot to break the grip of an orthodoxy that makes important things unsayable” -- Ben Lipscomb (Houghton) interviewed about his recent work on Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, and Murdoch
“Those of us concerned with identifying and combating systemic racism would do well to avoid over-simplified formulations that privilege one explanatory factor at the exclusion of another” -- Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin (Sam Houston State Univ.) takes up some confusions regarding racism
At the University of Groningen, philosophy majors are required to take philosophy “outside the walls” -- this involves a creative project rather than an academic paper, and interviewing people outside of academia
How “aesthetic ideals have carried over to contemporary experiments in science” -- Milena Ivanova (Cambridge) takes up the question, "what does it mean for an experiment to be beautiful?"
“The homogenizing of language won’t homogenize thought… but we may [have] reasons to worry that it will limit intellectual diversity” -- Neil Levy (Oxford) on the ethics of the linguistic "affordances" of Grammarly and other AI-based writing tools
“I want to show students a new way into philosophy – through doing ridiculous things” -- that's why Meg Wallace (Kentucky) teaches "Circus and Philosophy"
Want to help your students “steel-man” rather than “straw-man” other people’s arguments? -- ThinkerAnalytix & Harvard are offering free workshops for philosophy instructors on how to teach students argument mapping as a way of exercising intellectual charity
How to get something from “nothing” -- Aaron Wendland (KCL/Massey) on Heidegger, Carnap, and the analytic-Continental split
“My utterly personal and speculative overall take-away from our data is that women’s emancipation had a paradoxical effect in philosophy” -- Katharina Nieswandt (Concordia) interviewed by Adriel Trott (Wabash)
“The broadening of personhood to include some nonhuman entities is not so much a recent adaptation of an old legal concept as it is a return to an even older one” -- Justin E.H. Smith (Université Paris Diderot) on the personalization of nature
Making discussions of cosmopolitanism more cosmopolitan -- short reflections from nine philosophers initiate a project to draw upon Chinese philosophical traditions in order to explore alternative understandings of the nature and future of cosmopolitanism
Part of his legacy is the motivating of “a history of political philosophy that does not cleave to exclusionary conceptions of the discipline” -- an appreciation of Charles Mills by Sophie Smith (Oxford)
“Almost every person has reason to avoid subjection to digital recording whenever possible” -- Elizabeth O'Neill (Eindhoven) on the "spectacular set of new threats" we face owing to the combination of digital recording, the internet, and artificial intelligence
“Living in the now does not entail a refusal to care about the future, only a refusal to condition happiness and meaning on it” -- John Martin Fischer (UCR) on a common insight of Stoicism and Buddhism
“Just as we would be loath to dictate what art people must engage with, we should be wary of social pressures that decree what they can’t” -- Erich Hatala Matthes (Wellesley) on consuming the art of immoral artists
“Ten Propositions of Baruch Spinoza for Tenor and Piano” by British composer Michael Zev Gordon has been shortlisted for an Ivors award -- you can listen to the 21-minute song cycle sets of texts from Spinoza’s Ethics at the link
“That various things are simultaneously imaginable and unimaginable is essential to love, our sense of self, and our sense of what is real” -- Oded Na’aman (Hebrew U.) on evils, attachment, ambivalence, and the problems with Stoicism
“Human beings are ‘general-purpose culture machines’ capable of creating cultural and moral innovations that permit them to live better and more harmoniously together” -- Dan Little (UM-Dearborn) on existentialism for individuals and historicism for human nature
“Stock is quick to point out that she does not believe all trans women are bad” yet “at nearly every instance in the book when trans women are mentioned as agents… they are deceivers, rapists, and violent offenders” -- Adam Briggle (North Texas) agrees with Kathleen Stock on "many of her conceptual points," but, he says, its her "foreboding mood" that drives her arguments
“Like everyone else, Benatar finds his views disturbing” -- a profile of David Benatar by Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker
“Every time I sit down to write an article or do some other research-related task… I have to ask myself: should I be doing this or should I be spending the time with my children?” -- John Danaher (NUI) on the "academic parent's dilemma"
“Philosophical insight arises only from the struggle to cancel this situation of unfreedom and to make the world one’s own in one’s ideas and thought” -- Richard Marshall interviews G.W.F. Hegel at 3:16AM
“We need the burgeoning philosophical field of space ethics to help us tackle the thorny moral questions and complicated debates that growing interest in space exploration raises” -- so argues Chelsea Haramia (Spring Hill) at Noema (via Nathan Nobis)
“If the analysis that I have provided is correct, then Americans cannot solve the race problem. The most that they can do is choose which race problem they are willing to live with” -- Joseph Heath (Toronto) on how, when it comes to race in the U.S., "different parties define both the problem itself and its solution differently"
“When everything that can be explained has been explained, when we know the truths of physics and brains and psychology and social interactions and so on and so forth, will there still be anything worth wondering about?” -- Charlie Huenemann (Utah State) on "the biggest question"
“It would have been easy to demand freedom and protection for both Stock and for the trans and non-binary students or allies, since both sides claim to be being intimidated and silenced by the other. But the letter did not do this” -- a nonbinary philosopher on "how I experienced the unfolding of events leading up to and around the recent UK philosophers’ open letter regarding Kathleen Stock"
“An insider’s take on three different directions it seems to me the left wing of the applied turn is taking in philosophy” -- Liam Kofi Bright (LSE) offers three "ideal types"
A philosophy professor’s account of the “perilous” and “unrelenting” trajectory of his university -- David Benatar's new book is "The Fall of the University of Cape Town"
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason -- condensed into 100 tweets, by Helen de Cruz (SLU)
“I conjecture that, in retrospect, historians will come to view Anglophone philosophy from the 1960s to 1990s one of the great golden ages” -- why Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) thinks "Back in the 1990s, when I was a graduate student, giants strode the Earth! Now, Earth is rather more populated with human-sized people."
“There’s definitely been a shift from more traditional abstract philosophical work earlier in my career, to more feminist and political work more recently… Honestly a lot of it was just a matter of paying more attention” -- Jonathan Ichikawa (UBC) is interviewed about his life and work
“Terrorism involves the intentional harming of non-combatants…, is committed for ideological reasons and/or political ends,” and often includes “the intrusion of fear into everyday life” -- "the US drone campaign meets these criteria, argues Jessica Wolfendale (Marquette)
“What are the most important questions mainstream philosophy ignores or has forgotten about today?” -- 10 philosophers give their answers
“I never saw autism as something that applied to me—that is, until I started reading first-person descriptions by autistics, in particular, autistic women, of their own experiences as autistics in a neurotypical world” -- Amandine Catala (UQAM) interviewed about her research and her life as a late-diagnosed autistic woman in philosophy
“The past can be a source of information on moves that are missed in present professional discussions” -- and so "historians of philosophy are a collective good to the profession that it pays to have a large enough pool to have around," writes Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam)
“Philosophy, the survey seems to imply, consists of a set of clear questions whose answers can usually be bundled into two or three options” -- but "a lot of the philosophical work that I find most meaningful doesn’t take this form. Instead, it challenges the questions themselves," says David Egan (Outer Coast)
Next time someone asks why we should bother studying the history of philosophy -- direct them to this thread
“Pupils should be encouraged to contribute more than ‘yes, Socrates; certainly, Socrates’ most of the time” -- a gov't report on The Academy, from a collection of "polite emails to the ancients" from "a very firmly 2021 standpoint"
A philosopher’s statement of synthesis -- the tracks on a new album of instrumental music from Dale Dorsey (Kansas) unfold in developing patterns that make the perfect soundtrack for your night drive on the electronic highway from here to 1980 (title track is esp. good)
“Every female PhD student is sleeping with her supervisor, don’t be naive, it is well known. They all do.” -- being told this during a job interview was just one of many incidents of sexism philosopher Juliette Ferry-Danini has faced (from 2020 / via Andrew Mills)
“The cleverest people are not those speaking loudest or trying to impress. They are generous instead.” -- Stephen Mumford (Durham) on good philosophical discussion
The University of Austin is premised on misrepresentations about what happens in college classrooms and the state of higher education in the U.S. -- commentary from Aaron Hanlon (Colby College)
Analytic philosophy generator -- by Andrew M. Bailey (Yale-NUS) (via the Australasian Association of Philosophy)
A closer look at Kathleen Stock’s departure from Sussex
and Peter Boghossian’s from Portland State -- at Liberal Currents
“The polarizing effect of Dr. Mills’ work is a testament to its ingenuity” -- Elvira Basevich (U. Mass Lowell) on the philosophical legacy of Charles Mills
“What is a knower?” -- debates in epistemology, such as externalism vs. internalism, are downstream from this more fundamental question, which deserves more attention, argues Nate Sheff (Connecticut)
“Dehumanization lies at the intersection of two compelling imaginative dispositions: our propensity to essentialize and our propensity to project a grand hierarchy onto the natural world” -- David Livingstone Smith (New England) on imagination and dehumanization
“You’re an idiot. Hope is the confusion of the desire for a thing with its probability.” -- Richard Marshall interviews Arthur Schopenhauer at 3:16AM
Is the result 1000 works of art? Or 1001? Or 1? Or for all we’ll be able to tell, 0? -- And what is it? A brilliant art prank? A tribute in the style of the original artist? A distributed artwork?
What makes Hi-Phi Nation so good? -- the research, interviews, writing, editing, choices, technology, aesthetics, craft, and person behind "the philosophy show you can send to your family and friends who aren’t philosophy geeks"
“The connection between sex work and philosophy had a long life in the western tradition” -- Dawn LaValle Norman (Australian Catholic U.) looks at it in the ancient world
“I did not need Chinese Philosophy to understand analytic philosophy, and vice versa… There are some deep structural differences between their fundamental conceptual frameworks” -- an interview with Hiu Chuk Winnie Sung (Nanyang), who has two PhDs (one in Chinese philosophy, one in analytic philosohy)
“If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.” What about a whale? -- researchers aim to use machine learning, language models, and other technology to figure out what whales are saying
“Though their relationship was not primarily sexual, they were in love in the sense of having a deep desire to know and be known” -- Sukaina Hirji (Penn) and Meena Krishnamurthy (Queen's) on the idea of "romantic friendship" and the example of it between Iris Murdoch and Philippa Foot
“A combinatorial system is one in which a relatively small number of simple things are combined to form a relatively large number of more complex things… Could morality be such a system?” -- yes, say an interdisciplinary team of researchers who explain "moral molecules" and provide a "periodic table of ethics"
Break each article into segments of up to five words long, then publish each of those segments as a separate file in a publicly accessible index -- how technologist Carl Malamud is freeing the world's paywalled research for data analysis. His index contains material from over 100 million journal articles. Is it legal?
What’s good and what’s bad about being a child, and why -- Anca Gheaus provides a conceptual map to two views about childhood
“Epistemology is a normative enterprise, ethics is a normative enterprise” -- and the two areas should be "consistently informed by an appreciation of each other's problems," says Mark Schroeder (USC)
“Nationalists think they must be anti-multiculturalism, and multiculturalists think they must be anti-nationalist. Yet in practice, in at least some times and places, citizens are able to reconcile the two” -- Will Kymlicka (Queens) on confronting political theory with empirical evidence
The pandemic ethics conversation with Peter Singer at Rhodes College that some faculty urged be canceled -- it happened, and it is now online, hosted on YouTube by Brain In a Vat
“Intuitive theories of minds and brains are more complex than has commonly been acknowledged” -- recent work in x-phi on how people think the mind and the brain interact
“Public intellectuals… need to engage deeply with the cultures they address, the academic standards of the fields from which they borrow, and the rhetorical moves of their own narratives” -- a look at two scientists' contrasting approaches to taking up humanistic questions
“A species of morally insane beings boasting enormous cerebrums and minuscule bodies” -- how late-Victorian era articles from the journal Mind contributed to the archetype of the mad scientist (via Sebastian Lutz)
“It is her dignity that for so long caused me to presume that my friend must have been born into the class in which she now seems so at home—and to know, as dull functionaries do not, when it is undignified to speak of certain things” -- "Second-generation GI Bill philosopher" Justin E. H. Smith on class, paradoxical individualism, Proust, and identity
“Knowing who your genetic progenitors are can be a genuine source of self-knowledge… But it is important to see that it is just one possible source among many” -- Daniel Groll (Carleton) on the ethics of sperm and egg donation
Gender is complicated and attributed on various bases; for example, in most of Germany “butter” is usually feminine, but not everywhere. Why? -- Wolfgang de Melo (Oxford) on how languages gender nouns, and related issues
Should we kill one and redistribute his organs to five others who could be saved with them? No? What if the one is a pig? -- a look at the ethics of transplanting pig kidneys, at Vox (with philosophers weighing in)
“There’s a difference between ghost stories that are accurate and ones that are real” -- Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin (Sam Houston State Univ.) on how we can "believe some ghost stories without believing in ghosts."
“Causal reasoning should be understood in ‘functional’ terms — that is in terms of the role that it plays in human life and the human goals and purposes that it serves” -- James Woodward (Pittsburgh) discusses "Causation with a Human Face" with others at a Brains symposium
“The misgivings that philosophers had about quantum mechanics, it turned out, weren’t entirely irrelevant after all. If physicists hadn’t been so dismissive of philosophy, they might have seen that sooner” -- Sabine Hossenfelder (Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies) on stagnation and progress in physics
“Unravelling his turgid prose turns out to be worth the effort, affording us glimpses of how things ‘hang together’ that others miss” -- William deVries (New Hampshire) on the "renaissance in Hegel appreciation" (via Preston Stovall)
Was Descartes “skull-blasted”? -- details on the controversy over where Descartes' skull is, and how many pieces it is in
“In recent months, and for the first time, I’ve been embarrassed to be a philosopher… Philosophy has a problem and that problem is hubris” -- says Stephen Mumford (Durham). Can you guess what prompted this?
Nicolas Cage as various philosophers -- from Hane Maung (Manchester)
“The philosopher has to be the bad conscience of his age” -- Richard Marshall interviews Friedrich Nietzsche at 3:16AM
“Collaborations with scientists can suffer when the cultural differences between disciplines are not acknowledged and tended” -- Michael Paul Nelson (Oregon State) has some advice for scientists and philosophers working with each other
Demographic data about people with philosophy PhDs -- results from the recent Academic Placement and Data Analysis project
“Let white students simply think that a Black professor is discriminating against them based upon race and see how quickly the white students are believed” -- some black people may have racial prejudices and individual power, but, says George Yancy (Emory), that is different from systemic racism
“That comedy is an important social safety valve and sometimes an epistemically useful window in a democracy also entails that it may be socially dangerous” -- Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) on Chappelle, Srinivasan, Letterman, Trump, Aristophanes, and Socrates
“To compromise on the detail is to change the subject” -- an enjoyable and informative essay by Emmanuel Ordóñez Angulo (Oxford) on the challenges to and varieties of popularization in philosophy and mathematics
Speaker series on the nature of belief -- from the Concepts & Cognition Lab, hosted by Tania Lombrozo (Princeton) and Neil Van Leeuwen (Georgia State)
New publication by John Locke -- "the discovered manuscript provides the first evidence of Locke's commitment to the principle that minimalistic theism would suffice for peaceable coexistence in any civil society"
Reconceiving abortion as a public good -- so that the state has a compelling interest in people having access to it
“The position that I have in philosophy—I grew up poor, I am a Black woman, et cetera—means I have… very different evidence of what the stuff of anger actually looks like” -- Myisha Cherry (UC Riverside) interviewed in The New Yorker about anger and philosophy
What are and what should be the limits on scientific freedom? -- Heather Douglas (Michigan State) talks with Maria Kronfeldner (CEU) as part of a series on socially engaged philosophy
“The political/ideological takeover is the practice of using political positions to drive our philosophy (or drive out the rest of philosophy), rather than the other way around” -- an interview with Michael Huemer (Colorado) at What Is It Like To Be A Philosopher
Moral progress and moral methodology -- a conversation between Philip Kitcher (Columbia) and Julia Hermann (Utrecht) (scroll to the end for the link to the video)
“There is nothing in the nature of academic research that guarantees that ‘the best ideas of a generation will become part of the canon for the next generation’; instead, many good and original ideas have been lost to the disciplines through bad luck” -- consider, for example, the case of Ludwik Fleck
“There can be a lot of natural values, all equally valuable and natural, but different ones need different circumstances or social settings to be realized—so they will occur or flower at different times/places” -- an interview with Rachel Zuckert (Northwestern), who pays attention to "real tensions real facts about art and our appreciation of it"
“The life I lived, inside the walls of the house and outside, was in fact not one life but two, lives that sometimes complemented and supported each other, but mostly clashed against a reality I could not fully grasp” -- a profile of political philosophy Lea Ypi (LSE)
“Never call yourself a philosopher — let others do that” -- Spencer Case's appreciation of philosopher Bill McCurdy
“To ask only questions we can answer is a failure of imagination” -- a brief appreciation of philosophy from Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside)
“Imagining is not an alternative to reality and rationality or a diminished form of it. Imagining is a complementary form in our ways of knowing” -- Luca Tateo (Oslo) on a unified theory of imagining
The mathematics of heaps “looks like a living process” -- not about philosophy but this is the "heap" of links so file this under self-understanding
There will be a virtual memorial for Charles Mills on Sunday October 10, 2021, from 2pm to 5pm, EDT -- details are on the new Charles Mills memorial website
Audio of philosophy of science lectures from Voice of America’s “Forum: The Arts & Sciences in Mid-Century America” (1963) -- the series includes Quine, Hempel, Goodman, Black, Nagel, Putnam, Levi, Morgenbesser, Feyerabend, Suppes, and others (via Boaz Miller)
“What are memoirists doing exactly, when we claim to ‘find’ this form and meaning in our past experience? Are we genuinely discovering it back there or just making it up?” -- Helena de Bres (Wellesley) on the philosophy of memoirs
“My model of the world is that there are many, many, many thinkers, ideas and texts that are sufficiently interesting to merit serious consideration” -- why Liam Kofi Bright (LSE) opposes philosophical canons
“In sex of all things, where humans so often misconstrue what other humans want… can we ever trust ourselves to know, really know, what an animal wants?” -- Amia Srinivasan (Oxford) takes an unflinching look at bestiality
In Memo Akten’s ‘Learning To See’, “an artificial neural network loosely inspired by our own visual cortex, looks through cameras and tries to make sense of what it sees” -- "Of course it can only see what it already knows. Just like us."
“It is morally imperative to not say true things on social media” -- Justin E. H. Smith on the "false representative class" today's technology has spawned
“The visual image can no longer compete. Video is dead. Videogames seek to evolve into—or devolve back into—text-based games, so far with little success” -- a fascinating short story from philosopher John Holbo (NUS) about a world in which how people read has radically changed
“I sometimes wonder whether it’s news to most philosophers that ‘A = A’ can be funny and even is the structure, or the form, of the perfect joke” -- a philosopher's appreciation of comedian Norm McDonald, who died in September
It’s likely we’ll find that “being conscious, much like being alive, has many different properties that will express in different ways… among different species, among different systems” -- and so, says neuroscientist Anil Seth, "the mystery of consciousness may dissolve"
“One reason most humanities professors wouldn’t consider themselves humanists: they’re too busy pretending to be scientists” -- by looking at the ideas of Charles Babbitt, we can see reasons to "jumpstart an omni-cultural humanist revival"
A Facebook group for faculty and graduate students in philosophy who were first-generation college students -- created by Georgi Gardiner (Tennessee)
“Our knowledge of ourselves is (meta)knowledge like any other – hard-won, and always subject to revision” -- Stephen M. Fleming (UCL) on the science of metacognition
“We don’t even claim that it is rehabilitative, although it might be, but we do claim that it takes people seriously” -- an article about philosophy in prisons, based on discussions with MM McCabe and Mike Coxhead (KCL)
“The fact that the term ‘mob’ can function pejoratively creates a paradox” -- an interview with Susanna Siegel (Harvard) on mob violence and vigilantism
“Rationality is systematized winning.” “It’s not winning I’m worried about… I want to know the truth.” -- a teacher and a student talk about the limits of rationality
Is the ball helping the mouse get to the cheese? -- Do we "see" free will? After watching the video, click on the PDF link for an explanation of a new "perceptual" approach to free will attribution.
“As a scholar, I could not do my job if I accepted the sort of ‘reasoning’ we are given for the cruel arrangements under which we labor” -- "And that is the fundamental bullshit on which all the bullshit sits," writes Amy Olberding (Oklahoma)
“In everyday life we often experience cities as beautiful… however, the city is only a marginal topic in aesthetics” -- Tea Lobo (Collegium Helveticum) on the aesthetics of cities
The philosophical life of plants -- a website for research and networking on "the ways in which plants and thinking have been interlinked... within philosophy, the history of ideas, botany, the environmental humanities, the cognitive sciences and literary studies"
Sophisticated robots: “Either don’t give them full rights and risk perpetrating grievous moral wrongs against them, or do give them full rights and risk sacrificing real human interests for the sake of empty machines” -- a moral dilemma regarding robot rights, from Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside)
Sidney Poitier recites excerpts from Plato over jazz composed and conducted by Fred Katz -- Plato's works in their coolest form (via Ian Olasov)
“Bayesian theories… at best apply to the mind of God” -- but you've got to model yourself after someone! Also, says Paul Thagard (Waterloo): "Philosophical thought experiments rank no better as a guide to truth than religious texts and Republican tweets"
“The Dean of Faculty once called me into her office to respond to reports that I was discussing problems facing the College with other faculty. Dwell on this for a moment” -- reflections on the closure of Yale-NUS and what it was like to be a professor there, from Bryan Van Norden (Vassar)
“I see myself as sometimes just embracing fundamental tensions without trying to offer a perfect synthesis” -- Amia Srinivasan (Oxford) in a wide ranging conversation with Tyler Cowen (GMU)
“If any other problem in social life was occurring at this frequency and at this scale, we would consider it effectively solved” -- a look at the case for "cancel culture"
Zombie Intuitions: “intuitions that are ‘killed’ (defeated) by contextual information but kept cognitively alive by the psycholinguistic phenomenon of linguistic salience bias” -- a problem for thought experiments in philosophy, including (of course) zombie thought experiments
“It is the duty of intellectuals and artists to reject enforced glee, to tell robot customer-service agents to fuck off, to carve out a preserve for the life of the soul as best they can, and to call madness by its name” -- Justin E. H. Smith on phililistinism in philosophy, "awokening" and "STEMification," technology's creep into culture, and more
“Grad school might destroy you. That’s the most important thing I would tell my pre-Ph.D. self if I could” -- G. M. Trujillo Jr. (Louisville), now an assistant professor of philosophy, offers some advice to prospective grad students
The Diversity Reading List is a resource for helping you include authors from underrepresented groups in your teaching -- and now it is hosting a seminar series
“Teaching [The Ethics of Killing] in the present context would have been a fascinating experience” but “the fear that my students might transmit the coronavirus to each other during these ‘ethics’ seminars… horrified me” -- an interview with philosopher Jeremy Fischer, who resigned from his position to protest his university's poor response to COVID
“Despite being one of the most celebrated works of philosophy ever written, the Tractatus is also one of the most gnomic” -- Ray Monk (Southampton) explains Wittgenstein's Tractatus and how it came to be
“We are not in favor of a shock-and-awe approach of springing distressing content on students without advance notice” -- but a survey of recent research finds that "trigger warnings do not minimize anxiety and emotional distress, and might even do the opposite"
“How can something be ill if it is not alive?” -- Viruses were typically not thought to be alive, but discovering "giant viruses" and that they can be infected with smaller viruses raises the question of what life is
Two puzzles about truthfulness -- from Wolfgang Schwarz (Edinburgh)
“Today, mathematicians and others routinely stray outside our comfortable three dimensions” -- but what, exactly, is a dimension?
Memorial event to be held for philosopher Joseph Margolis -- the longtime professor at Temple University died this past summer
Did you hear about the upcoming “Boss Baby” philosophy symposium? -- even The Onion thought, "this is Onion material" (ok, the AV Club, but still). Yet it's a real event, and this article about it explains what motivated it
“Chairs are what philosophers call ‘ordinary objects’… their existence is as obvious as possible, but the more we try to suss out where they are, the more ‘sus’ they become” -- quite possibly the most entertaining thing you'll watch today, and it's about ontology and mereology. Seriously.
Ideological extremism, methods extremism, psychological extremism -- Quassim Cassam (Warwick) makes some distinctions and sees what can be learned from them
“The important thing is to be ruthless with the books that are not good. Just stop reading, put them down, usually throw them away, don’t give them away – if you give them away you could be doing harm to people” -- advice on how to read, some of which implies advice on how to write
“Interrogating the obscurity of Holst’s audacious book exposes a dark side to the German Enlightenment that, until recently, has largely been overlooked” -- Andrew Cooper (Warwick) on how the German Enlightenment failed women
“As a professional philosopher, I will move from ad hoc and pop-up politics to a comprehensive approach to the good life” -- former Loyola Marymount University philosophy professor James Hanink is running for governor of California
“What would happen if we would only accept to review papers that we knew we could/would/were willing to read within a week?” -- thoughts on speeding up refereeing in philosophy, from Ingrid Robeyns (Utrecht)
“A densely argued and damning portrait of Socrates as soldier-citizen-philosopher” -- Dan Little (UM-Dearborn) on the puncturing of an image "entirely based on the philosophical texts without serious attention to historical details"
When the word “is aired for pedagogical purposes, there is no good reason to feel hurt” -- Randall Kennedy (Harvard) on professors mentioning a notorious racial slur in class
Consider a series of versions of a song, starting with the original, A. B is a cover version of A. C is a cover of B. D is a cover of C, etc., down to Z -- if Z bears no musical resemblance to A, is it a cover of A? P.D. Magnus (Albany) looks at a cover song paradox created by Andrew Kania (Trinity)
“A genuine reckoning with the history of American torture remains unlikely” -- Jessica Wolfendale (Marquette) on the erasure of American torture
The Guardian published an interview with Judith Butler but then deleted paragraphs of it -- Why?
“Whataboutism” and “that’s not who we are” -- John Martin Fischer (UCR) on how to understand these common political moves
“We are bodily beings, whose bodily existence has intrinsic worth, yet for whom dependence and disability are natural” -- What this implies for medical care is the topic of an interview with Christopher Tollefsen (South Carolina)
That sound you heard was thousands of philosophy professors whispering to themselves, “yes!” -- Students will once again know what we're talking about when we reference The Matrix in class. Check out the trailer for "The Matrix Resurrections"
“There is no monolithic ‘women’s experience’… Feminist theory is riddled with disagreement” -- "Today, the most visible war within Anglo-American feminism is over the place of trans women in the movement, and in the category of 'women,'" writes Amia Srinivasan (Oxford)
It’s sometimes asked “why the Islamic world never experienced something like the European Enlightenment” -- according to Peter Adamson (LMU), part of the answer may be that it did, just a few hundred years earlier
“To litigate Boxill’s guilt or innocence is to miss the point entirely” -- the real scandal is the "wide chasm between Chapel Hill’s squeaky-clean reputation and the contortions that so-called amateurism demanded"
They say they’re “prioritizing ‘vaccine safety’ over ‘benefits’,” but really they’re just “prioritizing safety from vaccines over safety from COVID” -- Richard Chappell (Miami) on status quo bias in ethical reasoning about the pandemic
“The form of deliberation employed when we infer our own courses of action from what is collectively optimal or required” -- Anne Schwenkenbecher (Murdoch) on "we-reasoning" and public health crises
“The thing to remember here is to do the opposite of what we’re trained to do: Speak at a super high level about some pretty important and intense stuff, with little/no justification for your claims” -- and other non-academic job seeking advice for philosophers, from Aaron Kagan (Facebook Reality Labs)
“The teacher who allows his student’s desire to settle on him as an object, or the teacher who actively makes himself the object of her desire, has failed in his role as a teacher” -- Amia Srinivasan (Oxford) on sex between professors and students
A site of resources for teaching courses in ethics in moral philosophy -- including videos, syllabi, lessons, assignments, and more, from Matt Deaton
So far, “there’s more than twice as many jobs advertised this year than at the same point last year, indicating a significant job-market rebound. However, compared to pre-COVID levels, the market is still on the lower end of things” -- Marcus Arvan (Tampa) takes a quick look at the philosophy job market this season
Slippery slope arguments may be sound, for example, when they “specify as precisely as possible what causal mechanisms create strong incentives and disincentives for specific behaviors to occur” -- such as in regard to Apple's new phone-scanning technology, argues Evan Selinger (RIT)
“The first English translation, published in 1922, the year of The Waste Land and Ulysses, might easily have been mistaken for a Modernist war poem” -- Wittgenstein, war, and the Tractatus
“Online Trolls Actually Just Assholes All the Time, Study Finds” -- not The Onion. Also, "non-hostile individuals" tend to not engage in political discussions online.
Our folk categories of mental activity (e.g., perception, memory, attention, decision-making) have structured how neuroscientists study the brain -- but those categories seem increasingly unhelpful, as none of them "actually corresponds to a thing in the brain"
It refers to both the “dynamic in which practices of freedom produce harm, brutality, and subjugation as freedom” and “freedoms… deemed too inconsequential, repellent, or deflating” -- Elisabeth Anker (GWU) on "ugly freedom"
Future of the history of philosophy? -- illustrated commentary from Nic Bommarito (Simon Fraser University)
Were you influenced by the late Joseph Margolis or his work? -- If so, consider submitting a video comment for a memorial event Temple University is holding (see Update 2)
Artistic renderings of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and others as “real people”, based on busts, portraits, and population genetics studies -- artist Alessandro Tomasi uses Photoshop and Artbreeder to create the images
“Democracy may not always be necessary to ensure that governments work for the people… yet the weakening of democratic political cultures… is concerning because good government can’t be sustained without public scrutiny” -- Fabienne Peter (Warwick) on democracy and authoritarianism
“The sort of socially committed venture that should characterize public work in the arts and sciences generally” -- an appreciation of public philosophy, particularly the "Ask a Philosopher" project created by Ian Olasov (CUNY), in The Chronicle
“The law requires reformation to protect our modern scientific and philosophical understanding that many animals can live their own meaningful lives” -- Martha Nussbaum (Chicago) has submitted an amicus brief to the NY Court of Appeals in support of the effort to free an elephant from the Bronx Zoo
“Separateness as love’s aesthetic and ethical essence” -- a look at Simone de Beauvoir's lost novel of early love, in The New Yorker
“The great thing about philosophy, and what keeps me going at it: it’s so unpredictable. I simply have no idea where the argument might lead me” -- an interview with Sophie Grace Chappell (Open University) about her work and life
“The growing awareness of the moral ambiguity among veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq burdens them with sensibilities of moral injury” -- Stephen N. Xenakis and Jesse D. Hamilton (U. Penn) on helping those who "carry the moral burden of a nation at war"
“Machines can imagine what we cannot imagine and see what we cannot see” -- Arthur I. Miller (UCL) on machine creativity
“Does [Wittgenstein’s account] have a place for thinking that there may be space for the privacy of feelings and thoughts and thus for a potential freedom from the intrusiveness of the powers of surveillance?” -- Hans Sluga (Berkeley) on Wittgenstein, authoritarianism, and surveillance capitalism
The biology, psychology, and philosophy of near-death experiences -- "These reports are very vivid... we look at the positive evidence they offer for an afterlife and ignore the problems with the evidence” says John Martin Fischer (UC Riverside)
How to end a war justly -- Darrel Moellendorf (Goethe University) is interviewed on the subject
Philosophy podcasts organized by style and subject matter -- by Kelly Truelove
“In the coming years, we might discover whether or not the world is quantum all the way up” -- recent research on expanding the quantum scale
“The typical college professor would be lucky to make $35,560 per year, and often might expect to make more like $21,336” -- a look at the AAUP's Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession (via Sara Protasi)
“Mere uncertainty is not sufficient reason to reject a pandemic policy proposal” -- "critics need to offer reasons for thinking that the potential downsides outweigh the potential upsides," says Richard Chappell (Miami)
“The worst possible way of going about making decisions” -- Felipe De Brigard (Duke) and Rob Lowe (yes that Rob Lowe) discuss nostalgia, memory, and decision-making with Laurie Santos (Yale)
On a small island in the Pacific, near the Marianas Trench, a philosophy professor teaches a course that’s often “transformative” for his students -- Daniel S. Helman on being a philosopher on Yap, Micronesia
“It would be better for philosophy, and the humanities more generally, if the horizons of rational knowledge expanded rather than continued to contract. I am, therefore, begging at the very least for better atheists” -- Jennifer Frey (South Carolina) on philosophy's self-conception & future
A philosophical look at Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity” -- use it with care, advise Nathan Ballantyne (Fordham) and Peter H. Ditto (Irvine)
“You ought to care equally about people no matter when they exist, whether today, next year, or in a couple billion years henceforth” -- but speculations about the distant future shouldn't be an excuse for ignoring today's moral problems
“Try to see it my way / You and I both know that we are epistemic peers / I will see it your way / I might be confused because I had a few more beers” -- "We Can Work It Out", epistemology of disagreement version, by Brown University philosophers
“Perhaps one reason we think extinction would be so bad is that we have failed to recognise just how awful extreme agony is” -- Roger Crisp (Oxford) on the difficulty of moral questions surrounding possible human extinction
The philosophy of “my body, my choice” and its use as a slogan to defend abortion rights -- commentary from Elizabeth Lanphier (Cincinnati)
Understanding the popularity of Stoicism -- Vice reports on the cultural phenomenon, with comments from philosophers and other scholars
Researchers claim to have created a “time crystal… an object whose parts move in a regular, repeating cycle, sustaining this constant change without burning any energy” -- do they put "a new angle on the distinction between time and space"?
Pessimistic atheism in “Crimes and Misdemeanors” -- theist Edward Feser (Pasadena) appreciates Woody Allen's atheism
“Anything interesting is something that a lot of people are going to hate. All the ways of mitigating the hate make your text boringer. So, that’s probably why you’re not reading an academic journal right now” -- Michael Huemer (Colorado) on academic writing
“While there is surprisingly little deception on many online platforms, we may nonetheless be witnessing a failure of virtue, for there also does not appear to be much evidence of true honesty” -- Christian Miller (Wake Forest) on online lying
“I handed Heidegger my card… He screamed at me” -- when Paul Schilpp, editor of The Library of Living Philosophers, tried to get Heidegger to agree to a volume on him
“The truly valuable skill here isn’t the capacity to push yourself harder, but to stop and recuperate despite the discomfort of knowing that work remains unfinished, emails unanswered, other people’s demands unfulfilled” -- advice about work
When should we act for the sake of past people or our own past interests? -- a discussion about our duties to the past
Plunderous Plato, Dangerous Descartes, Lethal Locke, Ferocious Frege, and the rest of the Philosophical Powers action figures -- from way back in the day
That “interval during which we might not only speculate among ourselves about what might happen next, but also about what the characters should and should not do, and about which were ones are admirable or cowards or downright despicable” -- Noël Carroll (CUNY) on the costs of binge-wacthing
Kant’s view is that “trying to provide God’s reasons is itself evidence that you’ve got a culpably messed up view of what you can know, and trying to use evil to disprove God shows the same” -- Robert Gressis (CSUN) interviewed on Kant, religion, ethics, the current state of philosophy, and more
“We should keep in mind there’s a collective aspect to privacy. Every time you give out data about yourself, you are also exposing others” -- Carissa Véliz (Oxford ) interviewed by Evan Selinger (RIT) on data privacy in The Boston Globe
“What is X?” is a new philosophy podcast from Justin E.H. Smith & The Point in which he hosts interviews with experts on questions like “What is nature?” or “What is beauty?” -- the first episode, "What is Philosophy?" is with Agnes Callard (Chicago)
“A box much lighter than the others, nearly falling to pieces with a red cloth hanging out on all sides, caught my attention. Opening it gently, I was met with a face” -- the discovery of Spinoza's death mask
“The unlived life is not worth examining” -- aphorisms of the late great popularizer of philosophy, Bryan Magee
John Locke’s pancake recipe. Seriously. -- be warned: between the cream, freshly grated nutmeg, and orangeflower water it will be hard to leave enough and as good for others
In development: “Nietzsche! The Musical” -- "Time and again, he reached for a way to love life... His story of struggle and affirmation carries relevance for our time"
Experimental confirmation of Hume’s ideas about imagination and perception? -- "reality and imagination are completely intermixed in our brain which means that the separation between our inner world and the outside world is not as clear as we might like to think"
“The result is an agent with the ability to succeed at a wide spectrum of tasks” -- Google's significant progress training AI agents in a multiplayer environment "meant to simulate the physical world" and that involves "complex, non-linear interactions" (via MR)
“Long Covid” raises issues in bio-medical ethics, philosophy of medicine, philosophy of disability, business ethics -- Gregory Pence (Alabama) surveys some of the facts and questions related to a condition millions are suffering from
“In Socrates’s late-night imagination, sex ought to benefit neither church nor common good but philosophy students” -- Mary Townsend (St. John's) on eugenics, Socrates, and the "rationalization of eros"
Suppose there’s only a 1% chance that bugs are sentient -- despite that small chance, we ought to support "a moral presumption against harming insects," argue Jeff Sebo (NYU) & Jason Schukraft (Rethink Priorities)
“All the liars are calling me one” -- The Taylor Swift Paradox, as unpacked and analyzed by Theresa Helke (Smith)
“Socrates’s method eschewed the pressure to persuade… His politics of humility involved genuinely opening up the question under dispute” -- Agnes Callard (Chicago) appreciates Socrates' spirit of collaborative inquiry
“They hated it” -- Patricia Churchland (UCSD) interviewed about her work on the mind on Ideas Roadshow
Bob Moses, “a soft-spoken pioneer of the civil rights movement who faced relentless intimidation and brutal violence to register Black voters in Mississippi in the 1960s, and who later started a national organization devoted to teaching math as a means to a more equal society,” has died -- he majored in philosophy at Hamilton College and was working on his PhD in philosophy at Harvard "when he was forced to leave because of the death of his mother and the hospitalization of his father"
“Banded mongooses, acting from behind a veil of ignorance over kinship, allocate postnatal care in a way that reduces inequality among offspring, in the manner predicted by a Rawlsian model of cooperation” -- Rawlsianism in the wild
A philosopher teams up with the biggest art festival in Britain -- Vid Simoniti (Liverpool) and the Liverpool Biennial produce a series: "Art Against the World"
The Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory is “unquestionably the real deal” -- Vogue profiles Amia Srinivasan (Oxford)
“Panpsychism’s appeal may stem partly from the fact that scientists currently can not explain what consciousness actually is” -- philosophy of mind covered at Salon
“There are grounds for doubt… about the power of comedy to effect social change. But I don’t think that robs it of social value. We need to revise our expectations” -- Kieran Setiya (MIT) on political comedy
“This was a matter of redeeming humanity, of whether mathematics is what we always thought it was” -- why logicians and mathematicians are excited about a new proof about the sizes of infinity
Using the capabilities approach to assess the wellbeing of renters -- a report from the UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence makes use of Martha Nussbaum's ideas
A new series interviews scientists and philosophers on questions about consciousness -- hosted by Philip Goff (Durham) and Keith Frankish (Sheffield)
“If you are a sage, and you can’t do wrong, then there is no room for moral anguish or angst… But what if you are not a sage?” -- Nancy Sherman (Georgetown) on compassion, mercy, the military, and the social side of Stoic grit
“I keep looking to traditional… epistemology and finding it mostly unhelpful. But I keep finding bits of aesthetics and the philosophy of art incredibly useful” -- C. Thi Nguyen (Utah) on why philosophy of art and social epistemology are "intellectual soulmates"
“To say you’re giving up on the problem of demarcation does not mean that you are giving up on the idea that there is something distinctive about science” -- and we can acknowledge the limits of science while still vigorously defending it, says Lee McIntyre (Boston University), interviewed at 3:16AM
“What we need isn’t a kind of positive hermeneutics to be inculcated in viewers of pornography, so that they can better interpret what is going on… what we need is the onslaught of images to just stop for a moment” -- Amia Srinivasan (Oxford) interviewed on pornography and sexuality
“Seeing that I don’t write about things or topics but about what people say about things was one of the most important lessons I learned” -- Martin Lenz (Groningen) explains
“I found myself astonished by idea that the structural simplicity I associate with piano keys is the result of an ‘acceptable compromise’ to solve practical problems of musicians playing together” -- Patricia Marino (Waterloo) on subjectivity, simplicity, elegance, and the philosophy of keyboard engineering
“Narcissistic academic professionalism”, “cowardly deference”, “intellectual and spiritual bankruptcy” -- excerpts from Cornel West's letter of resignation from Harvard
Africana Philosophy in the 20th Century -- a series of episodes of The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, with several guest philosophers
Logic puzzles recently used to screen applicants to philosophy degree programs at Oxford -- from the collection of Joel David Hamkins
“Policing boundaries – whether between genders or between literature and philosophy – is only necessary if the line in question is liable to be transgressed” -- Carrie Jenkins (UBC) on literature, philosophy, gender, and emotion
“Philosophy is probably the most internationalized of the humanities subjects in Sweden” -- Sofia Jeppsson (Umeå) on what it's like being a philosopher in Sweden
“If you’re blind to the way circumstance shapes someone’s behavior, it’s going to be hard to really appreciate how the world looks to them” -- Robert Wright on Lee Ross, the fundamental attribution error, and cognitive empathy
Looking for some philosophy to listen to? -- a list of nearly 100 different philosophy podcasts
“The work of a professional philosopher in Ghana is significantly constrained” -- Emmanuel Ifeanyi Ani (University of Ghana) on what it's like to be a philosopher in his country
“There’d be much less pessimistic skepticism about the future of analytic philosophy if people were more familiar with some of the reasons to reject [the ‘grand march to Kripke’] narrative” -- Preston Stovall (University of Hradec Králové) defends analytic philosophy
“College vaccination requirements decidedly do not violate the core principles of medical ethics” -- Nathan Nobis (Morehouse) responds to critics of the requirements
“Clear writing… is aggressive and sadistic—not in its content but in the domination it attempts” -- Simon Evnine (Miami) on clarity
“The world’s foremost consequentialist signed. The world’s foremost deontologist signed. Two of the most prominent bioethicists in the world signed…” Not good enough? -- on the effort to hold human challenge trials in the U.S., and other aspects of COVID-19 response
Philosophy has “a tradition that you cut other people down… I sometimes hear our female students say, ‘I can’t really be a philosopher because that’s not what I feel like doing'” -- "I say to them, 'There are many different ways of doing philosophy'" -- Martha Nussbaum (Chicago)
Getting students to do the readings -- at The Philosophers' Cocoon, with helpful suggestions in the comments
“A young man smoking a pipe cannot do so without looking like a pompous dick… and Classics finds itself in a similar quandary” -- actor Stephen Fry on breaking the cycle of elitism and showing the value of the classics to today's youth (via The Browser)
Philosophers as public intellectuals -- a roundtable discussion with Anastasia Berg (Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem), Agnes Callard (Chicago), and Justin Weinberg (South Carolina)
For two decades, he “encouraged his students to examine the meaning of life and become active and conscientious citizens who help build societies based on values such as justice and liberty” -- now, visiting his former students in prison is part of the life of Chow Po Chung (Chinese Univ. of Hong Kong)
“Being a philosopher, for me, amounts to never wanting to own up out loud to what you are or should be doing” -- marvelous prose from Amy Olberding (Oklahoma) about a stranger, a truck in need of repair, sadness, and a book about death
“We worry about being too gullible with other people. But we should also worry about technological gullibility—about being too willing and eager to trust technologies without realising how deeply they will change us” -- C. Thi Nguyen (Utah) on trust & technology
“EleutherAI’s dataset for large language models, The Pile, includes PhilPapers! So, philosofriends, I prompted their GPT-J-6B to write abstracts based on a few of your titles” -- Kathleen Creel (Stanford) presents her "favorite fake abstracts (vs the real papers)"
A paper in Phil Studies, says a gamer, “really helped me to gain confidence and start playing League of Legends again” -- a brief video with both recordings of gameplay and screenshots of Michael Ridge's "Illusory attitudes and the playful stoic" -- and an appreciation of the virtue of "lightness"
The family had long thought that “Philosopher Reading” was relatively worthless -- but the painting was discovered to be by Jean-Honoré Fragonard and recently sold at auction for over $9 million
“How could it be that a single cat-call, which occurs in isolation, contains seemingly innocuous content, and should therefore by all accounts be nothing more than a communicative pinprick, can nonetheless wrong its target?” -- Lucy McDonald (Cambridge) takes up the question
A bike tour of Amsterdam inspired by Spinoza -- along the "Spinozaroute" are 11 specially decorated benches with unique QR codes for free related podcast episodes on humans and nature
“Without the Comb, the Razor is too dangerous” -- metaphysics, ideology, sexual orientation, and more, in an interview with Peter Finocchiaro (Wuhan)
“The failure of the Board of Trustees to approve tenure for Nikole Hannah-Jones is doing great harm to the standing, reputation, and integrity of the University that I have served energetically since 2003” -- Marc Lange (UNC Chapel Hill) has some words for the Board
A collection of video interviews with philosophers -- and video explainers on topics in ethics, logic, and more, from Sahar Joakim (St. Louis CC)
“The Stone showed that there is a large audience for philosophical ideas, a fact which still surprises and pleases us” -- John Kaag (UMass Lowell) and Crispin Sartwell (Dickinson) on the end of the NYT's dedicated philosophy column
“Pragmatic genealogists take an idea whose practical value is in doubt, or elusive, and try to reverse-engineer the idea’s function in human affairs by figuring out what practical concerns, if any, it answers to” -- Matthieu Queloz (Oxford) on pragmatic genealogies of ideas, such as "state of nature" models
The rewards and risks of philosophical tourism -- Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) comments on Julian Baggini's "How the World Thinks: A Global History of Philosophy"
The ethics of aesthetics and the problem of global warming -- Michael Spicher (Aesthetics Research Lab) on how beauty, ugliness, and environmental technology
10 new conversations with 10 philosophers -- the new season of the UnMute Podcast from Myisha Cherry (UC Riverside) was recently released
“Bearing the facts about publishing in mind helps to rebut one common argument against cancellation: it doesn’t suppress ideas” -- and besides, says Neil Levy (Oxford) "if cancelling a book by some right-wing provocateur opens up space for a different book that is just or more as valuable, then it’s hard to see how the world has suffered a net loss"
A look at six definitions of “gender identity” leads a philosopher to suggest eliminating the concept -- still, argues Anca Gheaus (CEU) "a feminism without gender identity does not exclude trans people"
“We normally think of grit as opposed to being a quitter, but quitting in order to move on to a different approach to a higher level goal can be an exhibition of grit” -- thoughts from Alexander Pruss (Baylor)
The value of being able to “practise in all things a certain nonchalance which conceals all artistry and makes whatever one says or does seem uncontrived and effortless” -- Helen De Cruz (SLU) on "sprezzatura" in academia
Academics and authors issue public letter in support of the Oxford University Press USA Union Campaign -- "the collective voice of OUP workers can contribute to the Press’s mission of publishing excellence"
As a student he took his engineering education “beyond the technical into the philosophical” -- a profile of philosophy-minded engineer Zachary Pirtle, who recently won a NASA Early Career Achievement Medal; worth sharing with science-minded undergrads.
“The kind of ethics we should hope the arts and humanities steer us towards is one that ameliorates and transcends the limitations and distortions of this dominant paradigm derived from science and economics” -- John Tasioulas (Oxford) on the value of humanistic thinking for AI ethics
The definition, defining moment, history, politics, and future of analytic philosophy -- a discussion with Christoph Schuringa (NCH)
What does it mean to call an inanimate object “racist”? -- Vanessa Carbonell (Cincinatti) and Shen-yi Liao (Puget Sound) explain, with a focus on medical devices
“The problem with the cities that Plato and Aristotle envision is not that their citizens lack autonomy… The problem is that most of us think that Plato and Aristotle are simply wrong about what the wise and just laws are” -- Christopher Frey (South Carolina) on philosopher kings and liberal individualism
“You cannot simply cut people off; you are not free to leave at any time… If your [lives are] entwined” -- Agnes Callard (Chicago) on the ethics of ending relationships
“What does story telling do to people? It is making them dream, it is making them suffer as well. But can we stop storytelling? I don’t think so.” -- Julie Delpy, actress in and co-writer of the films "Before Sunrise," "Before Sunset," and "Before Midnight", is interviewed by philosophers at AfB
“The fact that there are unhealthy forms of pity should not prevent us from recognising its humanising element” -- Gordon Marino (St. Olaf) on pity
Do people view pain as mind-centric or body-centric? -- new results suggest people conceive of pain as a "hybrid combining both mental and bodily aspects"
Underphilosophized: “the fraught relationship between the private insurance industry and the state, and the growing power of insurance companies in gathering and wielding data about individuals and groups” -- Caley Horan (MIT) looks at the issues
The allies of Viktor Orban, the right-wing prime minister of Hungary, “have poured £1.5 million into a chain of coffee shops in Scruton’s memory” -- the first cafe to open features "memorabilia including books, records and a teapot donated by the widow of Sir Roger Scruton"
“By contemplating what is possible in the universe, in addition to what happens, we have a much more complete picture of the physical world” -- Chiara Marletto (Oxford) on the importance of counterfactuals in science
“8-bit” style watercolor rendition of Raphael’s “School of Athens” -- by artist Adam Lister
“Engineers of the human soul would wish to deal with…evil by suppression; literature, real literature, deals with it through the power of imaginative sublimation” -- also, says Justin E.H. Smith, "philosophy is not a fan club, and if you are treating it as one, this is because you do not really understand what philosophy is"
“The philosophical picture of natural kinds… are not well-suited to the aims of medicine and disease classification” -- an interview with Anya Plutynski (Wash. U. St. Louis) on the philosophy of cancer and other questions related to philosophy, science, and medicine
“Whether we frame the relevant decision problems from the perspective of the individual or from an aggregate perspective can make a difference” -- Johanna Thoma (LSE) on why the morality of artificial intelligences might rationally differ from the morality of humans
“If speaking our minds is important to developing ourselves as rational creatures, and if such development is at least one important aspect of the good life, then we ought not to sacrifice it willy-nilly at the altar of social status” -- Hrishikesh Joshi (Bowling Green) brings together Aristotle and an interactionist account of reason
“There is a switch that can divert the trolley onto another track, away from the bill. But! Lying strapped to that length of track is the filibuster” -- the filibuster variant of the trolley problem, from Alexandra Petri (via Kathleen Wallace)
“Maybe in the end numbers will come to seem a little like the way logic as used in the Middle Ages might seem to us today: a framework for determining things that’s much less complete and powerful than what we now have” -- have we been tricked by the limits of our epistemology into making mistakes about metaphysics in regards to numbers? (via MR)
“Whatever I knew about masks and vaccines at an intellectual level, violating those expectations still felt wrong” -- Evan Westra (York) on the weirdness of going maskless
“Looking back, when did you feel like you had made your mark in the field?” “I have not reached that point yet.” -- Amartya Sen (Harvard) is interviewed about his life, education, and work
What’s so bad about the literary dominance of white men? -- figuring out the answer isn't as easy as you might think, says Rachel Fraser (Oxford)
“A lot of times, the value of a thing in our lives is not just what it presents, on its face, as its function” -- Zoom makes communication efficient, and efficiency has its costs, writes C. Thi Nguyen (Utah)
“With this series of adversarial collaborations, neuroscientists will get closer to understanding consciousness and how it fits into the physical world while improving scientific practices along the way” -- empirically testing the predictions of different theories of consciousness (via Brian Earp)
How to read philosophy with “less eyestrain, consistent annotations, fewer distractions, great mobility, being able to work outside, with much of the haptics of working on paper” -- Gregor Bös, a philosophy PhD candidate (KCL), helpfully explains his "e-ink solution for focused reading and writing"
“It’s enough for [scientific papers] to draw attention to an idea that is worth pursuing further—and an idea need not be true, well-justified given all our evidence, nor even believed by the scientist in order to pass that test” -- Haixin Dang (Leeds) & Liam Kofi Bright (LSE) on the value of contradictory science
“I want to be somebody who, until the last moment of my life, is absorbing what’s going on around me, learning from it, growing, and shifting” -- a video profile of longtime philosopher and relatively new boxer Quill Kukla (Georgetown)
“Lol… the audacity”: when the Society for the Social Studies of Science tried to school MC Hammer -- and what can be learned from this episode, from Joshua Earle (Virginia Tech)
“There was no Renaissance. It is an invention by historians, a fiction made in order to tell a story… about the development of philosophy”” -- Henrik Lagerlund (Stockholm) makes the case for historiographical nihilism
Is this art? -- an Italian artist sells his latest invisible sculpture
“It seems we want to let money in to further research and philosophical excellence and improve and strengthen departments even if it moves a dept in a direction it would not have itself chosen, so long as that path is one of the paths the dept deems a reasonable direction” -- David Sobel (Syracuse) on outside funding for academic hires
Kant’s Copernican Revolution -- Fiona Hughes (Esssex), Anil Gomes (Oxford), and John Callanan (KCL) talk about Kant on the BBC's In Our Time
“We need advocates to work out all the options, after all” -- Richard Chappell (Miami) on why disagreement between philosophers should not be seen as evidence of philosophy's failure
“Human beings are who we are: we’re walking disasters, we’re walking wonders at the same time” -- Cornel West (Union Theological Seminary) in conversation with Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)
The sociological aspects of “the end of analytic philosophy” -- from the point of view of a relatively recent philosophy PhD, Dave Atenasio (Frostburg)
“I think that off-the-charts retributivism is weak. I think it is weak because it just means I have nothing constructive to do, so I’m going to punish you“ -- Martha Nussbaum (Chicago) interviewed in The New Yorker
More on racial, ethnic, and gender diversity among US philosophy students and faculty -- "It's mixed news"
Leibniz’s freaky unicorn -- the "imaginatively reassembled" skeleton of which he depicted in his Protogaea
“Even if our evolutionary background does not debunk our claim to know objective moral truths, the explanatory stories told by debunkers can still be useful in flagging ways in which evolutionary influences might be distorting our moral thinking” -- William J. Fitzpatrick (Rochester) on the interplay of metaethics and science
Interested in teaching Latin American philosophy but fear you don’t know enough? Here’s how -- and why, from Robert Eli Sanchez, Jr. (Occidental)
“Before the ruling, a book had to prove that it was not obscene before being allowed to cross the border; after, customs had to prove that something was indecent before seizing it” -- how the obscenity case of a book by philosopher Richard Mohr (Illinois) changed Canadian free speech law
“On average, people in more individualist countries donate more money, more blood, more bone marrow and more organs” -- recent research on individualism, altruism, and selfishness
“The question I am asking is whether, looking at ourselves from outside, we should come to view our attachment to rights and deontology as an unnecessarily cluttered moral outlook” -- Thomas Nagel (NYU) attempts to bring our moral intuitions and the science on them into reflective equilibrium.
On teaching: “I don’t think it is a particularly meaningful job, despite what some people claim” -- John Danaher (NUI) explains his negative view of teaching
APA reinstates Diversity Grant and Small Grants programs -- they had been suspended during the pandemic. Applications are open now.
Improvement through subtraction -- experimental research on the human tendencies to think solutions involve adding something, and to overlook solutions that involve removing something
“Further reflections on tolerance and its difficulty” -- T.M. Scanlon (Harvard) delivers the 2021 Knox Lecture at St. Andrews
“Weil was an anarchist who happened to espouse conservative ideals” -- Robert Zaretsky (Houston) on how Simone Weil might offer conservatives "a path forward"
“We found that people who do not fall for COVID-19 misinformation have two qualities in common: they are curious, and they do not cling to their views” -- a team of philosophers bring their work on epistemic trust to bear on the spread of pandemic falsehoods
The promise and perils of brain-computer interface technology -- a survey of what we can currently do with BCI and what we might end up doing
Which schools have the greatest racial diversity among their philosophy majors? -- Eric Schwitzgebel (Riverside) investigates
“I had just finished my oral exam with Donald Davidson, John Searle, and Hubert Dreyfus [and switched] to working as a staff writer for David Letterman…” -- Eric Kaplan, a television writer with a PhD in philosophy, on how "stories can reach places essays don't"
“My point is not that CRISPR technology is an intrinsically bad thing… but that it is taking place in an intrinsically problematic system” -- John Dupré (Exeter) looks at recent books on gene editing and its controversies
Florida politician: “If Socrates was out philosophizing in American society today, he would be cancelled real quick” -- Everyone else: "maybe you want to sit down for this"
Stoicism seems to have a lot of popular appeal; might existentialism be next? -- Gordon Marino (St. Olaf) on the counsel of Kierkegaard
“You cannot understand what science is, and therefore cannot really do philosophy of science, without understanding the extent to which science is embedded in culture” -- a defense of ethnoscience from Justin E.H. Smith (Paris)
Would you like to learn how to incorporate argument-mapping into your teaching? -- there's a free seminar on it coming up in June, sponsored by ThinkerAnalytix and Harvard's Dept. of Philosophy
A list of black studies texts philosophers should be reading -- a list from Nicholas Whittaker (CUNY)
If we’re interested in holding police accountable, we need to know what they should do. Medicine and public health provide some instructive analogies. -- Brandon del Pozo (Miriam Hospital/Brown University) on how to improve policing
Mommy-shaming and philosophy of science -- Cailin O’Connor (UC Irvine) on "the use of scientific findings to promote unrealistic standards for modern parents"
When does a philosophy Ph.D. go “stale”? -- a discussion of some findings from Charles Lassiter (Gonzaga)
Some infinities are bigger than others -- a new animation tells the story of Hilbert's Hotel
“Let’s sort out what is going on here” -- this new interview with Timothy Williamson (Oxford), conducted by Hasen Khudairi, skips the small talk and gets right to exploring his views on a variety of philosophical topics
“The self is a highly organised network” -- What does this mean, and why should we believe it? Kathleen Wallace (Hofstra) explains.
“There is much interaction in Japan between people working in different areas and traditions of philosophy, and across the so-called analytic/continental divide” -- Katsunori Miyahara and Kengo Miyazono (Hokkaido) on being a philosopher in Japan
“How can we allow trans athletes to compete without giving them an unfair advantage over their competitors?” -- a proposal from Chris Surprenant (New Orleans)
“The moral guilt we feel upon being vaccinated is one we have good reason to sit with, rather than ease” -- Elizabeth Lanphier (Cincinnati) explains why
“When considering going rogue, jurors should aim to strike a balance between following their own sense of justice and respecting the accumulated cultural knowledge represented by the law” -- Doug McConnell (Oxford) provides guidance for those considering jury nullification
“A creep is close to normal on the outside, but not quite normal… beneath the surface lurks an active malevolence — maybe sexual, maybe not” -- the guy who wrote the book on being a jerk gives creepiness a try
The popular conception of Stoicism as a me-focused collection of life hacks “misses ancient Stoicism’s emphasis on our flourishing as social selves, connected locally and globally” -- Nancy Sherman (Georgetown) on "the enduring Stoic promise: to empower us in our common humanity"
“It seems that philosophical arguments can be effective in convincing people that they have moral duties to the global poor and move them to act in ways that are consistent with these convictions” -- new experimental philosophy on "the real-world impact of philosophical arguments"
“I tend to think that simply applying deontology or consequentialism is not a great way to approach issues in applied ethics” -- ethics, authenticity, nurses' strikes, and more, in an interview with Paul Neiman (Weber State)
The Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Review -- the new international undergraduate journal is based at the Kellogg Center for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Virginia Tech.
“These issues would not be too concerning for a budding science; they are anomalies for a thirty-year old research tradition that has been extremely successful at selling itself to policy makers and the public” -- Edouard Machery (Pitt) offers a lengthy critique of research on implicit attitudes and bias
“The idea that children are capable of careful thinking about abstract issues is difficult for many adults to accept” -- Jana Mohr Lone (Washington) on doing philosophy with children and what she has learned from them
Minds, symbolic forms, and the cultural world -- Samantha Matherne (Harvard) and Carrie Figdor (Iowa) discuss the philosophy of Ernst Cassirer
Learning about virtue by studying the “difference between cultivating and controlling disgust” -- Charlie Kurth (WMU) on the moral value of disgust
“The highest honorary position in German Protestantism” has been given to a 25-year-old who majored in philosophy -- Anna-Nicole Heinrich is the new chair of the Synod of the Evangelical Church in Germany (via Adrian Kind)
“Is it fortune cookies or a tractatus, a mantra or a rich, textured, and open-ended philosophical program?” -- Daniel Little (UM-Dearborn) on whether Seneca has a system of philosophy
On the moral status of animals, Kantian moral philosophy in practice, and altruism -- a brief interview with Christine Korsgaard (Harvard) by Erich Grunewald
Personal transformation and practical reason -- a conversation with Agnes Callard (Chicago) and Laurie Paul (Yale)
“To reject demonization is to attempt to understand what every other human being does as something you might have done yourself” -- an interview with Samuel Fleishacker on a range of topics, including empathy, Adam Smith, ethics, philosophy of religion, and more
“Appropriate caution in philosophy can become timidity in politics” -- Julian Baggini on Hume and the need to supplement the skeptical wisdom of conservatism with progressive skepticism about the status quo
“Philosophers often feel superior on the grounds that they provide arguments. It is surprising, then, that the poets are more likely to provide demonstrations” -- AfB's series of brief reflections by philosophers on art, music, poetry, films, and literature continues, with a recent entry from Errol Lord (U Penn)
In July 2020, a dozen philosophers submitted an amicus brief in support of legal personhood status for an elephant at the Bronx Zoo -- yesterday, the New York Court of Appeals agreed to hear the case (via Spencer Lo)
“Constructor theory puts counterfactuals at the very foundation of physics, so that the most fundamental laws can be formulated in these terms” -- Chiara Marletto (Oxford) is interviewed about an approach to physics based on possibility and impossibility
Philosopher, artist, and now education activist -- Adrian Piper, who moved to Berlin 16 years ago, is planning a demonstration calling for smaller school class sizes in Germany
“Philosophy is about acquiring wisdom and developing the virtues… with proper instruction, boxing can be fertile ground for those two endeavors” -- a profile of philosophy professor and boxing coach Gordon Marino (St. Olaf)
Criticisms of Howard University’s decision to shut its classics department “overlook a deeper and more urgent problem” -- Brandon Hogan & Jacoby Adeshei Carter, "philosophy professors at Howard who have reverence for the classics"
“My diet is emphatically not the product of an effective-altruist calculus, but rather a strange blend of Kafka-like hunger artistry, neo-Stylitism, deep visceral horror at the very thought of factory farming…” -- Justin E.H. Smith (Paris) on eating animals, converting convictions into an identity, and the aesthetics of moral life
If the university can “fire faculty with impunity, it will set a precedent that will eviscerate the foundational principles of both free speech and of faculty governance on college and university campuses” -- Linfield University has fired a faculty member for speaking up about alleged sexual abuse by board trustees and anti-Semitic remarks by the president
Argument Schemes: a video playlist that uses clips from movies to illustrate logical argument forms -- from Amsterdam University College
Derek Parfit: philosopher, photographer, and… lampost designer? -- yes, according to Nigel Warburton, who learned it from Janet Radcliffe-Richards (who was married to Parfit)
Shame and love in reading and understanding philosophical texts -- reflections from Martin Lenz (Groningen)
“There are immoral and outrageous ideas that cause no controversy whatever” -- perhaps we need a "Journal of Hegemonically Uncontroversial Ideas," writes Leslie Green (Oxford)
“Students need not only learn to think well for themselves… they need to learn to help others think well, too” -- T. Ryan Byerly (Sheffield) on "educating for intellectual dependability"
“Polite Conversations: Philosophers Discuss the Arts” -- a series of interviews with philosophers about their work in aesthetics and philosophy of art, conducted by Brandon Polite (Knox)
“How philosophy is making me a better scientist” -- genomics data science PhD student Rasha Shraim recounts various ways her philosophy background informs and improves her science work (via Michael Dale)
An unusually good newspaper piece on free will, for which several philosophers were consulted -- its author, Oliver Burkeman, deserves a lot of credit... or does he?
“The only idea we are in fact able to conjure of what intelligent beings elsewhere may be like is one that we extrapolate directly from our idea of our own intelligence” -- Justin E.H. Smith (Paris) on how this is "a gross failure of imagination"
Scientists have created human-monkey embryos -- is this a problem? a possible solution to a problem? both?
Junior scholars in philosophy of science on the effects of the pandemic on their work -- testimonies collected by the European Philosophy of Science Association
When Rudolf Carnap visited three imprisoned Mexican philosophers -- Carnap's own account of his visit (via Nathan Ballantyne)
“Our challenge is to see how he can both endorse restrictions on a range of expression of opinion and yet argue for absolute freedom of discussion” -- several philosophers on updating Mill on speech
“The position of advocating for moderation, civility, and civic friendship does not magically rise above the fray, rendering itself, by its peaceable face, immune to debunking arguments and accusations of motivated reasoning” -- C. Thi Nguyen (Utah) on polarization, propaganda, and political explanation
An online Wittgenstein gallery -- featuring photos, notes, and other materials
Can one “get credit for doing the right thing without seeing oneself as doing the right thing”? -- Nomy Arpaly (Brown) on understanding accidentality
“Eventually, the algorithm will find you” -- Simon DeDeo (CMU) on why he quit social media
“I think offering a platform for reasoned argument is not participating in oppression. I think it’s trying to get to the truth” -- very good interview of Peter Singer (Princeton) by Daniel Gross in The New Yorker
“With collective identity comes collective responsibility” -- Jessica Wolfendale (Marquette) explains how this applies to the military in regard to war crimes
“We need the combined wisdom of the mathematician, the philosopher and the psychological counsellor to help combat the forces that sustain problem gambling” -- Catalin Barboianu with an interesting argument for practical, applied interdisciplinarity
How the brain literally “turns” sensory data into memories -- new work in the neuroscience of memory
Do you have an obligation to get vaccinated? -- the answer is more complicated than you might think, argues Travis Rieder (Johns Hopkins)
20 works of philosophical fiction -- a list from Book Riot
“Do we really need a theory of instrumental rationality?” -- we do, says Sergio Tenenbaum (Toronto), and he is explaining why and what it should look like at Brains this week
“Spock is held up as this exemplar of logic and reason and rationality” -- but he's really "a straw man... of reason and rationality, because he keeps making all these dumb mistakes" (via MR)
Zoom and academic freedom -- the firm develops a policy in the wake of outcries over its previous decisions to disallow certain events on its system
“Upon his return to America, he recognized the critical importance of getting at the root of racial prejudice and, in his case, how we treat Asian Americans” -- how Dewey's thoughts on bigotry are relevant today
“An understanding of Coleridge’s thinking… provides insight into the beginnings of the analytic-Continental divide and a bridge between materialist and dynamic (powers-based) views in the sciences” -- Peter Cheyne (Shimane) on the philosophy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Radical embodied cognitive science -- a conversation ranging across philosophy and psychology with Richard Brown (CUNY) and Tony Chemero (Cincinnati)
“What do accountants know about morality? More than you might think, but not enough” -- Robert Bloomfield (Cornell) sets out "moral accounting" and asks philosophers for feedback
“Rogue Philosophers” is a new video series of conversations -- between academic philosopher Jennifer Scuro and philosophical counselor Monica Vilhauer
The park in Athens that is home to the site of Plato’s Academy is getting a makeover -- the plan, which includes a new archaeological museum, "fully respects the history of the space and revives the spirit of the Platonic Academy for the simultaneous education of mind and body," says Greece's culture minister
“I think imagination can do much more than philosophers often give it credit for” -- an interview with Amy Kind (Claremont McKenna)
29 philosophers agree: enough with the repugnant conclusion already! -- in Utilitas. (Editorial note: ok, but let's stop framing Parfit's problems as *about* population; his "population problems" are no more about population than trolley problems are about trolleys)
What should you do as the commenter on a philosophy paper? -- some common and not-so-common options, from Jonathan Ichikawa (UBC)
What’s the use of impostor syndrome? -- Stephen Gadsby (Monash) thinks it may be motivating
“He is much more than an intellectual, he is an adventurer of ideas” -- “Voltaire in Love” is a new four-episode Franco-Belgian mini-series
“Pro-choice advocates have deliberately avoided engaging moral or ethical questions about abortion” -- they shouldn't, argues Nathan Nobis (Morehouse) and Jonathan Dudley (JHU)
“All I knew was that it was interesting” -- Stephen Darwall (Yale) interviewed by Connie Rosati (UT Austin) about his life and work in philosophy in PEA Soup's "Mentees Interviewing Mentors" series
“A surprisingly underexplored question is whether many people have thoughts” — so they did a study. The good news is “The results were consistent with everyone having thoughts,” but there might be worries about the methodology
“Social robots might change the social moral order by changing the metaphors that humans use to understand themselves” -- with the upshot that we will be more likely to think in utilitarian ways, argues John Danaher (NUI)
“There is no evidence that… induced change in free will beliefs has any effect on morality, such as antisocial behavior, cheating, conformity, or willingness to punish” -- findings from a meta-analysis of nearly 150 studies with over 26,000 participants
The fertile philosophy of mind of William James -- an interview with Alexander Klein (McMaster)
Music to my ears: careful distinctions, carefully deployed -- an informative and well-reasoned examination of the analog-digital debate in audio, from Michael Thomas Connolly, a very thoughtful musician and recording engineer
Do lessons that encourage students to try out virtues like Confucian filial piety or Lakotan quietness involve objectionable cultural appropriation? -- Jean Kazez (SMU) takes up the question
Metaethics and experimental philosophy -- the Cognitive Science of Philosophy at the Brains blog continues with contributions from Pascale Willemsen (Zurich) and Bianca Cepollaro (Vita-Salute San Raffaele)
“Where the crowning moment of our identity we hoped to achieve in the pinnacle of success turns out not to be the thing we were looking for after all, and we’re thrown back upon the thinness of our bare self’s existence” -- Mary Townsend (St. John's) reviews "Soul," the recent Pixar movie
“His academic year stipend was $15,000 throughout graduate school, yet he finished with about $35,000 in savings” -- an interview (featuring helpful financial tips for graduate students) with philosopher Trevor Hedberg (Ohio State), who completed his PhD in 2017
Is consciousness located in the brain’s electromagnetic field? -- the idea of the "conscious electromagnetic information" (cemi) field is a kind of "scientific dualism"
“The fall into conspiracy theories is an epistemic form of death-by-a-thousand-cuts. The tragedy is that rationality may not guard against it” -- Kevin Dorst (Pitt) on the surprising rationality of "belief perserverance"
Marx, his Africana legacy, and black women Marxists -- a conversation between Vanessa Wills (GW) and Peter Adamson (LMU)
“She writes on causal relations, perception, the nature of time, the mind-body relation, the philosophical import of dreaming, and much else” -- Project Vox continues to inform us about the unrecognized and underappreciated women philosophers of the early modern period with a new entry on Lady Mary Shepherd
The philosophy, linguistics, & psychology of time -- Matt Farr, Nicky Clayton, and Kasia Jaszczolt (Cambridge) on the Mind Over Chatter podcast
“Help your future self by making the present more memorable” -- Felipe De Brigard (Duke) and others featured in a NYT piece about memory, imagination, and romanticizing the past
“Xenobots are turning some conventional views in developmental biology upside down” -- learning about organisms and life from " a new generation of xenobots — ones that took shape on their own, entirely without human guidance or assistance"
“Aristotle, whose name is taken so much in vain by our logicians, would turn in his grave if he knew that so many Logicians know no more about Logic to-day than he did 2,000 years ago” -- Wittgenstein reviews a logic text
The metaphysics of blockchain -- and its implications for "enterprise" uses of the technology, from Martin Glazier (Hamburg)
“To bridge the gap between a medieval, outdated mode of teaching and curriculum, and to meet the reality — the terrible and miserable reality — which is outside the classroom” -- a previously unpublished 1968 lecture by Herbert Marcuse on the student protests of the time
“Things that didn’t really help: Being ‘reasonable'” -- a philosopher writes about his anxiety and what did and did not help him manage it
New series of video interviews on the philosophy and cognitive science of imagination -- from the Northern Imagination Forum and The Junkyard blog
Theism and “the possibility that there are ways of making sense of things that are very different from any scientific way of making sense of things” -- Adrian Moore (Oxford) on what atheists could learn from logical positivists
John Rawls at 100 -- a discussion between Joshua Cohen (Berkeley, Apple) and Glenn Loury (Brown)
The power — and responsibility — of imagination -- Stephen Asma (Columbia College Chicago) and actor Paul Giamatti on the practice and philosophy of imagination
That time Aristotle allowed himself to be ridden like a pony by the “seductive” Phyllis to warn Alexander the Great about being manipulated by women -- immortalized in a water dispenser for your home
“Women are said to be transformed into objects in AI, but injecting women’s humanity into AI objects makes these objects seem more human and acceptable” -- do we learn something about gender and objectification from people's reactions to robots and AI?
An animated video series on values in scientific modelling -- from Stephanie Harvard (UBC) and Eric Winsberg (South Florida)
“More important than logic, is truth—and in particular, the truth of some contradictions” -- a fascinating interview about logic with Zach Weber (Otago)
The very first edition of the complete works of Plato to appear in any language is up for auction -- estimated to sell for up to $400,000 (scroll down). If you're looking for a deal, consider the 2nd edition of book 2 of Aquinas's Summa, estimated to go for $120,000
“Teaching Disability Studies… has given me insight into how much ableism is ‘baked into the bread’ of academia” -- an interview with Jennifer Scuro (Miami U. of Ohio)
Are you your connectome? -- If so, we might see an in-principle way of giving you immortality. Unfortunately, the most promising technique for this is... fatal?
Academic bullying disguised as fighting for academic freedom -- "Over the past decade, something very odd has happened to the idea of academic freedom: It has become conflated with free speech," writes Jennifer Ruth (Portland State)
At the intersection of philosophical theories of well-being and empirical studies of well-being -- an interdisciplinary team fights equivocations and explores implications
Strategies for better aesthetic disagreement -- from Brandon Polite (Knox) and Matt Strohl (Montana)
“A complex and accurate analog computing device — from a civilization that flourished 2,200 years ago” -- the Antikythera mechanism is further evidence that "the past is more complicated, more multi-faceted, and more surprising than we currently know"
“Demarcation is simply inevitable. Scientists have finite time and therefore must select which topics are worth working on and which are not” -- the challenges of distinguishing science from non-science, in Boston Review
“I believe that actions are wrong when they cause harm that violates a right [or]… when they cause gratuitous offence” -- "Often cultural appropriation does neither." James Young (Victoria) interviewed about art, music, copyright, culture, and more
“The basic idea is simple – and far-reaching” -- Nate Sheff (Connecticut) on Sellars' "myth of the given"
Philosophical questions raised by NFTs -- thoughts from Anthony Cross (Texas State)
“Happy to trade knowledge for freedom” -- Ulrika Carlsson on Kierkegaard, Socrates, and irony
“The ethical character of teacher-student relationships should be determined by the purpose of that relationship: to education the student… The problem… is that purpose is vague” -- John Danaher (NUI) on relationships and friendships with students
The moral significance of maintenance -- "the ghetto and the moon" and other issues in engineering (via Zachary Pirtle)
The prospects of philosophical literary criticism -- a conversation between Jennifer Frey (South Carolina) & Jon Baskin (The Point) that touches on the work of David Foster Wallace, Iris Murdoch, Flannery O'Conner & others
“Junior authors who want to go out on a limb are being penalized by a structure that… doesn’t quite serve the philosophy profession well” -- Helen De Cruz (SLU) on the institutional production of "cookie-cutter" philosophy
“Philosophers have been the source of many of the ideas that have become damaging clichés, so I see nothing puzzling about trying, as a philosopher, to sort out where we’ve collectively gone wrong” -- Theodore Gracyk (Minnesota State U. Moorhead) on philosophy and all that jazz
Live interview with John Martin Fisher (UC Riverside) this Wednesday -- viewers can send in questions for him to answer during the interview (via Taylor Cyr)
The morality of exposing children to a significant risk of harm in the search for a better life -- Lisa Hecht (Stockholm) on how it is reasonable to rely on "rights-weighted expected wellbeing" rather than a precautionary approach in the ethics of migration
Nietzsche in the style of Dr. Seuss -- John Holbo (NUS) is making progress on his "On Beyond Zarathustra"
“Astell’s collection has been hiding in plain sight” -- Magdalene College Cambridge discoveres a collection of books and pamphlets that had belonged to Mary Astell, many annotated with her notes
The Kit Kat Problem -- no, it's not about what to do if you open one up around more than three other people. Jason Brennan (Georgetown) explains
Philosophy of Art Workshops -- an ongoing video series from Aesthetics for Birds
Why high school teachers should bring philosophy into their classrooms -- with some suggestions on how to do it, from Andrew DeBella (via Paul Wilson)
Solipsism for sale! -- Justin E.H. Smith's first foray into selling non-fungible digital art expresses doubt about whether the market for it exists
“Some students told me they had never thought about what it was like to teach remotely” -- C. Thi Nguyen (Utah) on what happened when he was honest with his students about how terrible it is to teach to a screen of black squares over Zoom (WaPo)
As we re-open businesses and restart collective activities, we should discriminate between the vaccinated and the non-vaccinated, but how? -- philosophers and legal scholars on the various factors morally and legally relevant to post-pandemic policy
The scientific and philosophical challenges of defining “life” -- a survey of different views on the matter, with ideas from Carol Cleland (Colorado), Kelly Smith (Clemson), and other philosophers
Neuro-interventions may replace criminal punishments. Thinking about them can reveal what we value in punishment general -- a summary of a study by Corey H. Allen, Eddy Nahmias, and Eyal Aharoni (Georgia State)
“Physicists may have just shown for the first time that imaginary numbers are, in a sense, real” -- What does that mean?
“There are reasons to think that the view from the deathbed is worse, not better, than the view from the midst of life” -- Neil Levy (Oxford) on the idea that those close to death have special insight into what makes for a good life
What’s good about philosophy and what philosophy is good at -- a conversation with me about these and related issues on "Brain in a Vat"
Can you name an ancient woman philosopher? Great. Now name five more. -- Dawn LaValle Norman (Australian Catholic) can help you out
Coming soon: a tool for the accurate machine-reading of medieval Latin texts -- learn more about it and attend a training session on how to use it this week (via Bob Pasnau)
Perhaps it should have been “Immanuel and the Purple Crayon” -- Marshall Thompson (FSU) looks at philosophical themes in children's books
“He’s got the instincts of a grand unifier” and “the heart of a multiplier” -- the fascinating ideas of Spinoza, discussed in an interview with Sam Newlands (Notre Dame)
“When Harvard’s administrators tell Professor West that they cannot bring him up for tenure because it’s ‘too risky’ and he’s ‘too controversial,’ they completely undermine the point of tenure” -- Robin D. G. Kelley (UCLA) on Cornel West, tenure, and Harvard
“I live near Arlington National Cemetery, where approximately 400,000 veterans… are buried. I suspect they would not care so much whether their deaths were the result of errors of commission or omission” -- does the acts/omissions distinction apply to governments, particularly in regards to the pandemic?
“As a philosopher, I can say with some authority that folks are really just overthinking this” -- an interview with Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (Georgetown) about climate change
The “Brown Babes” of philosophy -- on the founding of the Women Doing Philosophy group in the Philippines
“She must endure everything from her husband—if he is unlucky and if he makes any mistakes because of ignorance, or sickness or drunkenness or has relationships with other women. For this fault is at home with men…” -- a passage attributed to Perictione (Plato's mother) -- but probably not actually by her -- describes the "harmonious woman"
“We are at the twilight of the job I have been taking myself to do, namely, teaching writing” -- Charlie Huenemann (Utah State) on the impending obsolesence of good writing skills
“How philosophy can contribute to our most urgent cultural questions about how we come to believe what we think we know” -- Michael P. Lynch (Connecticut) on political epistemology
A color-coded visualization of the relationship between different emotions, as described by Spinoza in his Ethics -- by Evan Roane
“Students are somewhat less accustomed to speaking up or challenging received wisdom, and less comfortable pushing ‘why’ questions” -- Natalja Deng (Yonsei University) on what it's like to work as a philosopher in South Korea
“The idea of ‘cultural appropriation’ is directly antithetical to all the work that cross-cultural philosophers have done so hard to get accepted” -- cultural appropriation is objectionable only "when a culture’s ability to use a cultural product is actually taken away from it," argues Amod Lele (Boston University)
“True diversification of the field will ultimately require aesthetic integration, the blending of more than one aesthetic approach to create something new that appeals to a diverse constituency” -- Chris Jenkins (Oberlin) on classical music, aesthetics, and race
Epoché, a monthly philosophy magazine, has a new website -- while you're there, check out the Index page, a book-like index to their entire run
“Calling all philosophers!… The superhero we need, in a divided America, is someone who can prove to us what’s real and what isn’t” -- a writer interviews several philosophers for a newpaper column on the nature and importance of reality
Puzzles in chemistry, and how philosophy helps solve them -- a modest shout-out to philosophy at Chemistry World
Jesus saves. But what saves Jesus? One answer: non-classical logic -- Jc Beall (Notre Dame) in a brief introductory video on the reasons for (against?) adopting non-classical logic
The constraints of locality, the utility of attention, and other lessons in modeling what brains do when we learn -- recent work on learning algorithms elucidates differences between brains and artificial neural networks
“Once we accept that extensions of concern to other animals are not forced on us by the nature of reasonableness itself, as Korsgaard hoped, there is a temptation to say that everything here is a matter of feelings and emotional responses” -- "There is more to it than that." Peter Godfrey-Smith (Sydney) on the problem with Korsgaard's animal ethics, and a more plausible alternative
Can the verificationism of the logical positivists be the tool that’s needed to fight conspiracy theories? Is it too powerful? -- Liam Kofi Bright (LSE) talks with Tom Whyman
MC Hammer and philosopher Zena Hitz (St. John’s) will be holding a public conversation about philosophy this Friday night on Clubhouse -- Hammer thought Hitz's book, Lost in Thought, was "amazing"
“Imagine a delicious cake that is being eaten by a man in the next room. It’s not for you. It’s just there, and its smell wafts into your room. Does the man have a right to eat the cake?” -- 10 thought experiments written by GPT-3
“Good in Theory” is a political philosophy podcast that recently has been producing an audio adaptation of Plato’s Republic, with commentary -- aimed at a general audience, it is hosted by writer (and former academic) Clif Mark
“I think it succeeded in creating a blueprint for a new kind of democracy” -- Helene Landemore (Yale) talks about moving towards "a more participatory, more inclusive, more authentically democratic system" on Ezra Klein's NYT podcast
“If we truly believed we were so much better than squirrels, why have we spent thousands of years driving home the point?” -- Crispin Sartwell (Dickinson) on the "disaster" of emphasizing our differences with other animals, rather than our similarities
“How did a word for a philosophical ideal come to be used for an unromantic relationship?” -- Merriam-Webster's Word History column takes up "Platonic"
“Philosophy has never been so modern” -- "La Faute à Rousseau," a French television show about a high school philosophy teacher, is getting good reviews
The philosophers most retweeted in the past week by other philosophers on Twitter -- a regularly updated list from Kelly Truelove that offers a view of which tweets have resonated most with philosophers on the social media platform
“Even if you are completely unsympathetic to Rawls and his project, you will learn so much… Rawls is worth your time” -- Lawrence Solum (UVA) on Rawls on his 100th birthday
“The field has evolved” in terms of race, but there’s a recognition of “how far it still has to go” -- a promotional but nonetheless informative piece about Black philosophers at the University of Pennsylvania
In honor of Rawls’s 100th birthday -- a collection of essays on Rawls that have appeared in Boston Review, and one by Rawls himself
Parfit on Kant’s “ends-in-themselves” formulation of the categorical imperative -- audio from the first of the three 2002-2003 Tanner Lectures, with commentary from Allen Wood (via Matt McAdam)
“Every magic show I perform is applied phenomenology” -- an interview with Larry Hass, former philosophy professor and now fulltime "philosopher-magician"
“Sometimes we dismiss a problem as ‘not the most important thing in the world.'” What is? -- one answer from Richard Yetter Chappell (Miami)
“Aristotle” makes an appearance on Nancy Drew show -- in which, among other things, he is called out for his sexism
“Imagine cavemen sitting together to think up what, for all time, will be the best possible society and then setting out to institute it” -- an appreciation of a little thought experiment of Robert Nozick's
The self, transformation, physics, and freedom -- a wide ranging and fascinating interview with Jenann Ismael (Columbia)
“Though philosophers can come up with high-minded epistemic reasons for using thought experiments, those high-minded reasons may be covering up a more uncomfortable truth” -- Ethan Landes (St. Andrews) on why philosophers use thought experiments
“What I know most surely in the long run about morality and obligations, I owe to football.” -- Camus played soccer. Really. He was the goalie.
“There is more to life than what one believes, and definitely more to life than what one wants to argue for or get others to believe” -- reflections on the 10th anniversary of his quitting his job as a philosophy professor, from Bharath Vallabha
“As I decline requests to do tenure files, referee, blurb; postpone research… lectures, and interviews; withdraw from dissertation defenses; accept intra-departmental political defeats… I also register how much stuff I pack into my ordinary self days” -- the latest in a series of reflections from Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) on what it is like to have COVID-19
Where the freedom of expression of scholars and other writers is most threatened -- and the patterns among who is targeted and why
“How to get AI to respect and conform to human values is arguably the most important, if vexing, problem faced by AI developers today” -- and the incommensurability of values may throw a spanner in the works, argues Ruth Chang (Oxford)
“I’ve never understood how polyamory is supposed to survive erotic rivalry, but I have exactly the same objection to monogamy” -- their difference "seems laughably superficial in the face of a problem situated at the molten lava core of the soul." Agnes Callard (Chicago) on jealousy
“We know that our models are distortions of their targets… But at the same time, at least in certain instances, they are the best tools we have at our disposal” -- "So what can we do?" ask Roman Frigg (LSE) and James Nguyen (Univ. London / UCL)
How dire are “civilizational vulnerabilities” -- such that Nick Bostrom and Matthew van der Merwe (Oxford) consider stronger surveillance & global governance as ways to avoid them?
“We won’t understand what imagination is—won’t be able to explain imagination—until we can write a recipe for making it out of parts we already understand” -- Peter Langland-Hassan (Cincinnati) shares his recipe, and others critique it, this week at Brains
“Impossible colors” combine opponent colors (e.g., yellowish blues and reddish greens). They’re thought to not exist and so be unexperienceable -- but philosopher Michael Newall (Kent) examines evidence that at least one of them can be experienced
How can philosophy offer consolation? -- Daniel Little (UM-Dearborn) on the variety of things called philosophy and the nature of consolation
“Aristotle and Hobbes have each identified only one side of human sociality and thus of human politics” -- Hans Sluga (Berkeley) on human nature
“Infuriating”—how a sitcom’s boy genius describes his first college philosophy course -- the CBS show "Young Sheldon" has its titular character take a philosophy class, meet with the prof., & dream about Descartes (warning: infuriating amount of commercials)
A philosophy festival based around conversations, rather than debates or lectures -- The "Happy Prisoner Festival" will take place online on March 27th
“Be Here Now” — with an emphasis on the first word -- John Martin Fischer (UCR) on how best to interpret this common advice
Did Trump intend for his supporters to violently storm the Capitol? -- we don't need a "yes" answer to that question to show he is morally responsible, argues Ben Bramble (ANU)
“She aims to educate people about how philosophy can be of benefit to the real world while also training its readers in how to practice it” -- Peter West (Durham) on Susan Stebbing's 1939 book "Thinking to Some Purpose" and its relevance today
The ethics of COVID vaccination -- a conversation w/ Anne Barnhill (JHU), Govind Persad (Denver), and Courtney Thiele (OSU)
Plato, Aristotle, and MIT undergrads and the quest for the right shape -- the problem of how to tile space
99,965 items from the W.E.B. Du Bois Papers collection at U Mass Amherst have been digitized -- and are now publicly available
Artistic value “is composed of other values without being identical to any of them: aesthetic value, ethical value, cognitive value, art-historical value among others” -- an interview with Robert Stecker (CMU)
Free legal representation for faculty members at public institutions of higher education whose “expressive rights and academic freedom” have been violated -- a new program from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
“Reciprocity is critical” -- Elizabeth Anderson (Michigan) on "talking to the other side", on The Philosopher & The News
A webinar on writing philosophy for public audiences -- featuring past winners of the APA Public Philosophy Op-Ed Contest
What “Long Covid” can teach us about standpoint epistemology -- Natalie Alana Ashton (Stirling) on the role of collaborative critical reflection
Observations and advice about open access publishing in philosophy -- from Bryan W. Roberts (LSE) and David Teira (UNED)
When selling a pirated version of a philosopher’s new book was a money-making scheme -- or, the time a philosopher used book piracy to augment standard distribution channels
Intention, collective action, fairness, power, and other issues in the GameStop short squeeze -- an ethics explainer from Doug McConnell (Oxford)
How to conduct a second-round “on-campus” interview during a pandemic -- Sally Scholz (Villanova) has some suggestions
“To observe the duty to complain, we need skills of complaining well” -- Kathryn Norlock (Trent) on the ethics of complaining
How should “the morally conscientious art lover” treat works of art that are endorsements of evil? -- Noël Carroll (CUNY) takes up the question
Aritifical intelligences may eventually get to the point at which they can think and understand -- but when they do, asks Shannon Vallor (Edinburgh), will humans "still be capable of thinking and understanding alongside them"?
Philosophy of Science Communication, aka PhilSciComm, has a new website -- check out their interviews and other resources
“Expanding of philosophy’s horizons” will be the theme of the Royal Institute of Philosophy’s London Lectures next year -- and the RIP is seeking "suggestions for publications or research which might shed light on important areas, methods, questions, texts or people in philosophy that have been neglected in the English-speaking world"
“When I handed in my resignation, I mostly felt relief. I also felt a surge of energy and creativity. I am excited about what lies ahead” -- a young philosopher, a year after getting her Ph.D., quits academia
“Solving ‘pipeline’ and institutional culture problems requires creativity, long-term culture building, and sometimes will require creating brand new things out of nothing” -- Alex Guerrero (Rutgers) on something his recently retired colleague, Howard McGary, created
A detailed report on whether British Columbia should adopt a universal basic income makes use of the works of several philosophers -- you can read the full report and a summary here (via Stephen Tweedale)
“What always fascinated me about historical studies… was the fact that one learns as much about oneself as about the past” -- Martin Lenz (Groningen) brings this lesson to bear on the teaching of Medieval philosophy
“Faculty that are well-liked by students—and thus likely prized by university administrators—and considered to be easy have particularly pernicious effects on subsequent student performance” -- new research finds that "teaching to the test" boosts subsequent student perfoemance (via MR)
The host of Philosophy Tube, a public philosophy show on YouTube with over 800,000 followers, comes out as a trans woman -- Abigail Thorn discusses it in her latest episode of the show
The annual Brooklyn Night of Ideas, featuring philosophical discussions, readings, and music performances took place online this year -- if you missed it, you can view it at this link
“While non-traditional, non-mainstream views are instantly recognized as views… the opinionated or perspectival character of conventional views often goes unnoticed” -- an interview with David Detmer (Purdue Univ. Northwest)
“The potential benefits of collaboration between computer scientists and philosophers are numerous, and the need for interdisciplinary training is real” -- Alexandros Koliousis and Brian Ball (New College of the Humanities) on training philosopher-engineers
“One danger of conceptual overreach is that we lose sight of the distinctive idea conveyed by a given concept through its immersion in a sea of many other quite separate ideas” -- John Tasioulas (Oxford) on the importance of distinctions in political discourse
“Rather than taking for granted or even dismissing liberal democracy’s historic achievements, we need to preserve them” -- Charles Mills (CUNY), interviewed in The Nation
“By performing this act of deconstruction through a literal act of construction, I am illuminating the contradictory double nature of the mere act of existing” -- a few different items on this skewer by Simon Henriques
“The polarization dynamic leads to a condition where we come to regard political disagreement itself as a sign of democratic dysfunction” -- Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt) explains
“It’s remarkable how many philosophers apparently spend their entire careers attempting elaborate proofs for the comforting things their parents drummed into them when they were children” -- an interview with Walter Horn about democracy, epistemology, art, and more
Can images persuade better than words? -- Nathan Ballantyne (Fordham) on the problems with understanding what others feel and think
A philosophical framework for political hope -- Joe Biden's inauguration speech and David Estlund's (Brown) critiques of "utopophobia"
“Moral knowledge can be acquired in any of the ways in which we acquire ordinary empirical knowledge” -- a discussion of Sarah McGrath's (Princeton) book defending this idea
“The aim of transitional justice is to fundamentally alter the basic terms of interaction, both horizontally among citizens and vertically between citizens and officials” -- Colleen Murphy (Illinois) on the hard work of following through on calls for "unity"
The professor of an online course currently running has been dead for over a year -- and no one bothered to inform the students
“In some standard Gettier cases, if you reason probabilistically, it is possible to know” -- Alexander Pruss (Baylor) makes the case
“Philosophy can’t be so racist that one will just be stonewalled if one draws from traditions associated with low status minority groups… But…” -- Liam Kofi Bright (LSE) on why philosophers "leave credit on the table"
Among those plagiarized were Elizabeth Anscombe, Marilyn McCord Adams, Robert Pasnau, Tad Schmalz… -- an update on the Roques plagiarism case
Is there a philosophy of neuroscience and if so, what is it? -- there will be several posts about this at the Brains blog this week
“If I believed the election was stolen, and if I had satisfied myself that my belief was well founded, then I would believe that resisting the outcome, even with force, would be reasonable” -- Alec Walen (Rutgers) on the philosophical issues involved in blaming and punishing Trump's insurrectionists
“‘Call me a slut’ could mean ‘Remind me that I am merely human, trapped in a body and subject to its animal cravings.'” -- Kim Kierkegaardashian on the ethics of dirty tallk
Why does scientific fraud happen and what can we do about it? -- Liam Kofi Bright (LSE) looks at the problems and a possible solution from W.E.B. Du Bois
“Saying ‘hello’ to strangers is a moral matter, and we cannot breezily disregard the pull to be social as mere etiquette: to ignore a stranger would be to do something wrong” -- so argues Kimberlee Brownlee (UBC)
Improving philosophy class with discussion cards -- Kaija Mortensen (Randolph College) explains
“Perpetrators of this fraud commit to something so disturbing that it becomes necessary to hide it even from themselves” -- Luvell Anderson (Syracuse) on the varieties of racial fraud
“Multiverse theorists commit the inverse gambler’s fallacy” -- Philip Goff (Durham) vs. the multiverse
This department of philosophy has a “director of outreach,” and justifiably so -- a survey of various public philosophy outreach initiatives at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
A panel event to discuss the renaming of David Hume Tower and Hume’s legacy at the University of Edinburgh -- taking place later this month, with Mazviita Chirimuuta, Tommy J. Curry, and others
Over 60 philosophers, bioethicists, psychologists, drug experts “call for the immediate decriminalization of all so-called recreational drugs” -- in an article in the American Journal of Bioethics
“One’s psychological history… is the time-spanning rope that ties together [our] different temporal parts and makes us complete” -- philosopher Steven Hales (Bloomsburg) on when his rope was cut by amnesia
“It does not seem like a wise precedent to prosecute your political enemies. It does not seem like a wise precedent to leave the criminal behavior of your political enemies unprosecuted.” -- "Here we have a proper antinomy" --- Just one of the many angles by which Justin E. H. Smith (Paris) approaches recent events.
“The monotony of complimentary reviews steadily fed my cynicism, as it should feed yours” -- Paul Musgrave (Amherst) on the problems with academic book reviews
“If we take the general status quo for granted, and apply ethical procedures only to narrowly defined questions within its limits, we abandon the most potent power ethical thinking can exhibit” -- Troy Jollimore's (CSU Chico) look at the work of an ethics consultant suggests there's room for improvement in that business
Taking skepticism about microaggressions seriously -- Regina Rini (York) talks with Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt) on the ethics of microaggressions
“Be Here Now” -- John Martin Fischer (UCR) brings philosophy to bear on this common spiritual injunction
The “Fake News Immunity Chatbot” employs Socrates, Aristotle, & Gorgias to teach you to spot fake news -- developed by Eleni Musi (Liverpool). (Note: I was able to use the site on my iPhone, but not in any browser on my Windows laptop)
Developments in physics in 2020 -- a select summary at Quanta Magazine
“It is the unconscious cognitive dissonance at the heart of explicit racism which prevents explicit racists from seeing the immoral nature of their racist actions” -- Berit Brogaard (Miami) and Dimitria Gatzia (Akron) on racism and psychology
When it’s clear that the referee misunderstood your paper -- there is still something that may be learned from the referee report, explains Lewis M. Powell (Buffalo)
Over 1500 political scientists call for Trump’s immediate removal via impeachment or the 25th amendment -- "The President’s actions show he is unwilling or unable to fulfill his oath to protect and defend the Constitution"
“There are almost no consciousness deniers” -- Andrew Brook (Carleton) is interviewed about cognitive science, consciousness, selves, and more
“Rather than viewing the granting of honorifics as settling a social question, we can see it as an imperfect way of inviting debate over what society ought to honor in the name of universal justice” -- Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) on the broader lessons of the controversy over Kathleen Stock's OBE
“Political power accumulates across massive timescales, much larger than the ones folks usually use when evaluating the institutional arrangements that history makes possible” -- an interview with Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (Georgetown)
“The film ends with much of the NYU philosophy department being attacked and turned into vampires themselves in a blood-soaked climax” -- "The Addiction" (1995) starred Lili Taylor as a philosophy PhD student and Christopher Walken as a vampire, and was produced by Antony Blinken, Biden's likely Secretary of State
“Quentin Smith was exactly the kind person who’s not supposed to exist in modern, ultra-specialized, ultra-professionalized academia.” -- a beautiful and interesting appreciation of Smith, who died this past November, by Ben Burgis (Georgia State Perimeter College)
The ethics of publicly discussing public health strategies -- the downside risks of openly floating some ideas should be taken more seriously, argues Matthew Smith (Northeastern)
On Plato’s first trip to Sicily, the king sold him into slavery -- lessons from Plato's attempts to create a philosopher-king
Listen to your gut -- a student proposes that consciousness is an "emergent property caused by the bidirectional communication between the brain and the gut microbiota"
Appreciating the “multi-dimensional” nihilism of Nietzsche -- Kaitlyn Creasy (CSU San Bernardino) is interviewed by Andy Fitch at the LA Review of Books
An MA student in India wonders why she hadn’t been taught about the “women sages who baffled kings and philosophers alike with their nuanced discourse” -- Deepshikha Sharma on Gargi, Maitreyi, and Sulabha (via Michael Glawson)
Rawls’s A Theory of Justice is approaching 50 -- an appraisal in The Guardian
Over 160,000 Medieval manuscripts online -- where to find them
Chinese philosopher makes news with article titled, “Kant’s Ethics Suck” -- strangely, those critical of the article refuse to give their names to the reporter
The women writers of philosophical romanticism -- that's the theme of the second issue of Symphilosophie
The metaphysical and political dimensions of the empiricism v. rationalism dispute -- some thoughts from Martin Lenz (Groningen)
Antinatalist Grinch vs. Natalist Santa -- a film by Pete Mandik (William Paterson U.)
Diamonds and time -- how philosopher Carol Cleland (Colorado) is working with scientists to revise how minerals are classified
“Woke capitalism is the result of real changes in both the material structure of capitalism and its ideological superstructure, those are not changes pulling in the same direction” -- Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (Georgetown) and Enzo Rossi (Amsterdam) explain
Further advice from editors who publish public philosophy -- at the Blog of the APA
The 2020 Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture was awarded a Harvard medical professor -- Paul Farmer, the founder of Partners in Health, says "I was a little shocked to get a prize with the word 'philosophy'"
A series of conversations aimed at thinking through the technology, philosophy, morality, and politics of the Black Mirror series -- the new Black Mirror Reflections podcast, hosted by Leigh M. Johnson (CBU)
“I had an interview… for a bioethics position during which the interviewers spent 35 minutes telling me how much their department valued diversity. When I… shared with them that I was invisibly disabled, they looked at me like I had three heads.” -- an interview with Laura Cupples (Gonzaga)
New symposium series on the Cognitive Science of Philosophy -- at the Brains Blog
The first of a new occasional series of philosophy podcast documentaries for “Ideas” on CBC Radio -- created by Aaron James Wendland (Massey), the first is on Leibniz, Voltaire, and the value of god in a time of crisis
“We can’t appeal to future generations’ rights against harm to explain why we must change course now. Yet appealing to duties of beneficence doesn’t do justice to the felt urgency of the issue” -- Thomas Sinclair (Oxford) on the challenges of explaining why we should protect the environment
“The power of radical change in the lives of human beings” -- Jennifer Lackey (Northwestern) on change, epistemic limitations, and the death penalty
Should we be having more children -- Ross Douthat makes the case, in an article touching on car seats, Parfit, overpopulation, climate, religion, and more
The Morality of Everyday Things -- a podcast from two former Oxford philosophy students who are now business partners
How various philosophers have defined or characterized philosophy -- a list compiled by Ulrich de Balbian
Why one philosophy professor taught in person this term, and how it went -- Harry Brighouse (Wisconsin) shares his experiences and reasons
Science fiction and philosophy -- a discussion with Clare Moriarty, Lewis Powell, James Burton, and Lisa Walters
Doom: the map and the chart -- an assessment of major threats to humanity in an illustrated format, by Dominic Walliman
How to pitch a public philosophy article -- advice from the editors who publish such work, at the Blog of the APA
The ethics of becoming an academic -- John Danaher (NUI) on self-actualization, good consequences, and career choice
Little Bad Thing: true stories about the things we wish we hadn’t done -- a new podcast from Eleanor Gordon-Smith (Princeton, The Ethics Centre)
The philosopher who worked as Trotsky’s right hand man, had an affair with Frida Kahlo, and wrote about logic -- Ray Monk (Southampton) on Jean van Heijenoort
“Researchers often require deception in their studies, yet they receive little training on how to deceive effectively” -- "the field of magic offers a potential solution" (via MR)
“Leaders in the field of AI ethics are arguing that the company pushed her out because of the inconvenient truths that she was uncovering about a core line of its research—and perhaps its bottom line” -- Google gets rid of an ethicist who pointed out risks of its large language models
Philosophy, science, and uncertainty -- Simon Blackburn (Cambridge, UNC), Philip Goff (Durham), and Renata Salecl (Birkbeck, Ljubljana) discuss
Did Einstein really agree with Spinoza’s pantheism? -- Snopes is on the case
“Debate over high-stakes moral issues isn’t always the best option, because the conditions for truth-seeking discussion to take hold are missing” -- Malcolm Keating (Yale-NUS) on what we can learn about debate and discussion from pre-modern Indian philosophy
Currently #10 at Hacker News: How To Learn Philosophy -- at least at the time of this post (via Elle Benjamin)
Mood: “an under-appreciated aspect of why we love some philosophical works” -- Helen De Cruz (SLU) on philosophical mood
Robert Brandom (Pittsburgh) taught “Two Forms of Contemporary Antirepresentationalism: Pragmatism and Expressivism” this past term -- and has put his course videos and lecture notes online
“Marcel Duchamp proclaimed that something becomes art when an artist says it’s art.” Where does that leave the work of people not recognized as artists? -- Michael Spicher (Aesthetics Research Lab) on the artwork of prisoners
“Here is why I actually think humanistic inquiry should be defended: because it elevates the human spirit” -- Justin E.H. Smith (Paris) with characteristically insightful writing on the humanities, pop culture, pronouns, and more
How to make a “quinetweet”: a tweet that quote-tweets itself -- for the people who feel they spend too much time on Twitter and want to read something that will make them feel that they don't
A revisionary interpretation of Spinoza’s metaphysics -- Martin Lin (Rutgers) is interviewed about his work on Spinoza at 3:16
“Science seems to be saying: yes, attending to beauty is exceptionally helpful and, also, we should pay no attention to beauty” -- Michael Strevens (NYU) on scientific progress and "unreasonable constraints"
“Oh, writers, little do we know what unexpected power our words may have. And, oh teachers, little do you know how much every utterance from your lips may be cherished by hundreds of students a generation later” -- Claudia Mills (Colorado)
If the “many worlds interpretation” of quantum mechanics is true, “then many observers across the many worlds are living Humean nightmares” -- and "maybe we are in a slightly nightmarish Humean world after all," explains Charlie Huenemann (Utah State)
Descriptions of what people do “are significantly stronger in shaping behaviour and cognition” than prescriptions telling people what to do -- and this has implications for the ethics of science communication, argues Uwe Peters (Bonn, Cambridge)
Where did Simone de Beauvoir find “an image of adulthood she could live with”? -- in the character of Jo March from Alcott's Little Women, explains Mary Townsend (St. John's), who understands Beauvoir's "satisfaction in simple negation of everything religious"
“Not even the Sixties flower children were as countercultural as philosophy is today, and philosophers are clever enough to know their odds” -- Jeannette Cooperman with some observations about the Daily Nous Non-Academic Hires page
“Once a Genius asked me a question in the Q&A after my talk, and then walked out before hearing my answer” -- Agnes Callard (Chicago) moves from "The Queen's Gambit" to some general points about how "Genius is a personality-laundering scheme"
“To say what’s wrong with the popular, deferential applications of standpoint epistemology, we need to understand what makes it popular” -- and then see what a "constructive approach to putting standpoint epistemology into practice" would be like, argues Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (Georgetown) in an important article
What can Plato teach us about mask mandates? -- David Lay Williams (DePaul) explains (Washington Post)
Can one do philosophy through memes? -- Simon Evnine (Miami) is taking up this question
A team of philosophers, engineers, and scientists at UC Santa Cruz are creating playing cards about ethics and technology -- suggest a question and get a free deck of cards when it's done (via Barry Lam)
Is it bad to be objectified? It may depend on the object: “It would be terrible to be treated like a paper towel… But it would not be so bad to be treated like an artwork” -- Becca Rothfeld (Harvard) on persons and artworks
Great ideas for adding a social dimension to online conferences -- from C. Thi Nguyen (Utah)
There’s a new enormous mural of Antonio Gramsci in Florence by street artist Jorit -- and it is causing some controversy
Ernest Nagel “was once an academic celebrity in the sciences, the leader of what we may call the scientific wing of pragmatism for a generation” but is “now largely forgotten” -- Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) on why "this neglect is a shame"
“Suddenly, we were asked to think directly about the central things that mattered” -- Michael Huemer (Colorado) on what's good and bad about philosophy
“Well, I don’t want to sit by this siren till I die of old age. / So what’s the reason I can’t turn the page? / Simple answer. Shame. / He’s the only man in the world who can see through my game.” -- poet Anne Carson renders Alcibiades's speech in The Symposium in verse (via Aaron Garrett)
“My academic and intellectual independence, the freedom to think things through for myself, hindered only (only!) by my own weaknesses, prejudices, and blind spots, has come at quite a high price” -- Susan Haack (Miami) reflects on her career as a philosopher
What should journal editors ask referees to do? -- Richard Yetter Chappell (Miami) offers some suggestions
Has being a philosopher met your expectations? -- a discussion at The Philosophers' Cocoon
There’s an asymmetry that explains why “transgender identities deserve social uptake and so-called ‘transracial’ identifications… almost always do not” -- but it's not based on "who 'really is' a woman or who 'really is' Black," argue Robin Dembroff (Yale) & Dee Payton (Rutgers)
How many people COVID-19 has killed seems like a straightforward empirical question -- but it's not, as philosopher S. Andrew Schroeder (Claremont McKenna) explains
“Philosophical advances in epistemology and in ethics profoundly shape our points of view. We don’t see them precisely because we see with them” -- an interview with philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
What is a particle? -- ask a dozen physicists, you'll get seven different answers
The British Journal of Aesthetics is celebrating its 60th anniversary -- with 12 short pieces that each look back on a different article the journal previously published, together offering a history of aesthetics over the past several decades
A conversation about hope -- with Myisha Cherry (UC Riverside), Sally Haslanger (MIT), and Jesse Prinz (CUNY)
“What makes the invocation of lived experience such a powerful move – the fact that it’s essentially private, removed from inspection – is exactly what makes it such a perilous one” -- Kwame Anthony Appiah (NYU) on how "identities are too multiple and complex to allow any individual’s experience to count as truly representative"
“The first thing the police had done was call in M’s three colleagues to see if they knew of anyone who might have a grudge against M. It was hence a great surprise when this somewhat routine procedure generated not leads but confessions—three of them” -- "Philosophy Rashômon," by Liam Bright (LSE)
“We tend to misconstrue the nature of oppositions in philosophy” -- Martin Lenz (Groningen) on how we can be misdirected by feelings of intellectual regret
Games, agency, art, and real life -- C. Thi Nguyen (Utah) in conversation with Carrie Figdor (Iowa)
The virtues of intellectual dependability -- they include intellectual benevolence, transparency, clarity, audience sensitivity, and intellectual guidance, says T. Ryan Byerly (Sheffield)
A public philosophy dispute over pandemic policies -- this links to the 4th installment in the debate between Ben Bramble (ANU) and Ian James Kidd (Nottingham) & Matthew Ratcliffe (York) - click your way back to the start
“Metaphysics does not consist in construction but in investigation” -- Alexander Douglas (St. Andrews) on Susan Stebbing and and the emergence of analytic philosophy
A “fact-check” but for the arguments public figures use -- a new series at PEA Soup
Honor codes can serve as a moral reminder that helps “place our values front and center in our minds” -- Christian Miller (Wake Forest) on the empirical evidence for an old-fashioned way of reducing student cheating
Controversy over a new statue in London intended to honor philosopher and women’s rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft -- "I can’t see her feeling happy to be represented by this naked, perfectly formed wet dream of a woman"
The ethical costs of upward mobility -- Jennifer Morton (CUNY) is featured on the NPR podcast Hidden Brain
The virtue of reverence, the wisdom of theater, the qualities of leadership, and more -- in an interview with Paul Woodruff (Texas)
Philosophy of Bitcoin -- Andrew M. Bailey (Yale-NUS), Andrew M. Bailey (Wyoming), and Craig Warmke (NIU) find that cryptocurrency is a philosophically rich topic
Using games, teams, Discord, and additive grading to create an online philosophy course that fosters community and excitement -- Margaret Greta Turnbull (Gonzaga) shares her "gameful" pedagogy
Before the election, a few philosophers were asked to imagine what they’d wake up to the day after it -- pre-election imaginings from Michele Moody-Adams, Shannon Spaulding, Neil Van Leeuwen, and Catherine Wearing
“Despite rumors to the contrary, arguments still work. We shouldn’t give up on them.” -- N. Ángel Pinillos (ASU) with arguments and evidence for using arguments and evidence
A well-known disabled philosopher who is quite possibly the most active advocate for other disabled philosophers is unemployed and now faces eviction. -- Shelley Lynn Tremain discusses her situation and asks for your assistance
In praise of platitudes -- Amod Lele (Boston University) on what we need to hear
Who studies philosophy? a poster listing, and a flyer series featuring, public figures who have studied philosophy, from the APA
“The survival and flourishing of liberal polity may well also require the presence of illiberal parties and commitments in order to maintain liberalism’s own vitality and thereby the vitality of the whole.” -- Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) on a positive aspect of Trump’s presidency
The complete first season of Five Questions -- 26 episodes of a podcast in which Kieran Setiya asks philosophers five questions about themselves
“The genes for autism drove the evolution of human invention” -- empathizers, systemizers, autism, and ingenuity
All about inverted spectrums -- Jonathan Cohen (UCSD) discusses the philosophy and science of them on the latest episode of Reductio with Andrew Lavin
The hidden pleasures of intellectual life — Zena Hitz (St. Johns) in conversation with Robert Talisse
A new blog series on meaning -- edited by Steven DeLay (Woolf), at 3:16 AM
The John Stuart Mill Cup is a tournament in which teams of high school students in the UK match wits with each other discussing ethical issues of public concern -- organizer Ben Sachs (St. Andrews) is looking to expand its reach; contact him for details
"I think that philosophers would do well to have a more capacious notion of both philosophy and brilliance" -- an interview with Amia Srinivasan (Oxford)
Philosophers share their advice and hopes with philosophy students -- John Symons (Kansas) in conversation with Daniel Dennett, Edouard Machery, Luciano Floridi, Agnes Callard, and others
How Bertrand Russell turned The Beatles against the Vietnam War -- Paul McCartney explains on an episode of The View (2009) (via MR)
"We want to know who we are; and that means knowing honestly what we have done" -- Daniel Little (UM-Dearborn) on ethical issues in the philosophy of history
Do you find yourself "wobbling and toggling between perspectives, being unable to relax into a single framework to make sense of things"? -- that might be "zozobra," as Francisco Gallegos (Wake Forest) & Carlos Alberto Sánchez (San José State) explain
What is it like to be a philosopher of Asian descent? -- 29 philosophers share their experiences and thoughts
"I think we have now a way to answer questions about why the brain is the way it is" -- deep neural networks, long thought of as "black boxes," are now "not entirely unfathomable" and used as tools for understanding brains and perception
An online magazine about public philosophy -- "Oxford Public Philosophy" features an interesting array of interviews, essays, poetry, and more
"The executive order serves to suppress the evidence-based research and teaching of highly regarded scholars" -- the APA Board of Officers issues a statement opposing President Trump's executive order on race and sex stereotyping
A London art gallery will show 8 exhibitions during 2021 that explore questions put forth in Hannah Arendt’s "Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought" -- the exhibitions will feature more than 20 international artists
"Rawls was so deeply in the grip of white ignorance about the centrality of racism and white supremacy to the creation of the modern Western world" that he created a theory of justice "inapplicable to his own country" -- an interview with Charles Mills (CUNY)
"While Nietzsche’s interpreters come from impressively diverse intellectual perspectives, very few of them are cyborgs"… until now? -- Neil Sinhababu (NUS) in a PEA Soup book Ethics review forum on Nietzsche’s Moral Psychology by Mark Alfano (Macquarie)
"There is still relatively little scholarship on philosophy by German-speaking women around the time of Kant or Hegel" -- but there were women doing philosophy there and then, and Anna Ezekiel tells us about them (via Oran Magal)
"The only reason Descartes was singled out as the father of modern philosophy was because no one ever read anything other than Aquinas and if you compare those two, of course, Descartes looks new and feels fresh" -- Henrik Lagerlund (Stockholm) is interviewed about Medieval and Renaissance philosophy
Sometimes, "sharing all our information with one another can make us less likely to reach the correct answer to a question we’re all investigating" -- Jonathan Weisberg (Toronto) explains "The Zollman Effect"
Is it the job of science of philosophy to explain consciousness? -- Right now? Both, says Philip Goff (Durham)
"The most used and abused philosophical source to interpret [Trump's] presidency" -- yet now "her former aficionados will stop citing Arendt precisely when she is relevant," says Samuel Moyn (Yale)
Begin "with how ordinary people tend to see things and try to 'meet them where they are at'" -- Nathan Nobis (Morehouse) brings philosophy to the public with open-access books, a kind of introductory online philosophy encyclopedia, and "logic-based therapy"
"The face is the focal point of our most pressing ethical struggle, which is the struggle to see, vividly and without hindrance, the reality of our fellow human beings" -- during the time of masks, a thoughtful essay by Talbot Brewer (Virginia) on the philosophy of faces, touching on race, humanity, love, the future, and more
"This is probably the stupidest thing I have ever read" -- trending on Twitter: Patricia Churchland (UCSD) on the observation of Philip Goff (Durham) that "the data of neuroscience is neutral between materialism, dualism, and panpsychism"
"Success in this profession is too unpredictable to try to game the system. So do work you’re happy with and hope for the best." -- Tamler Sommers (Houston) offers advice on writing public philosophy and related matters
How many holes do various objects have? -- results of a recent survey (via Fiery Cushman)
Infinity vs. God -- some arguments for why God is impossible, from Michael Huemer (Colorado)
A new visualization of fundamental particles and forces -- and a helpful account of its development
How philosophers and scientists understand the concept of mental representation -- a survey from Edouard Machery (Pittsburgh)
"The marginalization… that I experienced as a philosopher of physics whose work is informed by analytic metaphysics was too similar to my experience of marginalization as an autistic" -- an interview with Nathan Moore (Western)
"The prevalence of belief based-accounts of knowledge and propositional-attitude approaches has obscured the importance of reliable and virtuous motivation and skills in epistemology and philosophy more generally." -- an interview with Carlos Montemayor (San Francisco State)
What if we took the thoughts of the members of just one sex, one race, one religion, in one region of the planet, during a 200 year period & taught that that's what "early modern philosophy" is? -- That would be nuts. Jacqueline Broad (Monash) on histories of philosophy.
3 laws about asking questions at talks, plus 4 tips and 7 suggested types of questions -- from Guy Longworth (Warwick) back in 2013. I'd add: be succinct, as it's respectful of others
"I’m committed to the existence of anything that I need to be committed to in order to explain my experience of the world" -- Todd May (Clemson) talks about his atheism with George Yancy (Emory) in the NYT
"This volume is an effort to reduce the needless suffering that the rightly coveted academic life may cause" -- "Academic Agonies and How to Avoid Them" is a new free book by philosopher Joseph Agassi (published by Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective)
Not science fiction: extracting memories from one being and injecting them into another -- fascinating work on the biology of memory
Supporting non-academic careers: what can faculty do? -- an upcoming webinar by the APA
"Academic plutocracy" -- it's a problem for universities, argues Sally Haslanger (MIT), and it "undermines democracy and the pursuit of knowledge"
Yes, your chances of affecting the outcome of a national election are tiny, but here is new argument for why voting in such an election is not irrational -- by Zach Barnett (NUS) (this is an ungated manuscript; the original was pubished in PPA last month)
“I’ve tried to cultivate a public personality for being okay with being wrong. Hopefully not too wrong all the time.” -- I visit The Stoa to discuss disagreement
What is the best philosophical science fiction in all of history? -- a trio of philosophers are putting together an anthology and are soliciting suggestions
"Living a Good Life," a philosophy course at Wesleyan, featured in the New York Times -- the course is team taught by Stephen Angle, Steven Horst, and Tushar Irani
"There is much to celebrate about humanity… but it is salutary, sometimes, to look in the mirror and see a monster. We cannot do this without history and philosophy and literature" -- Daniel Gregory (Tübingen) on the value of the humanities
"Like Barrett, my faith and my fertility have unfortunately been placed front and center in discussions of whether I am the right person for the job" -- Jennifer Frey (South Carolina) on being a Catholic mother and successful professional
A free font from the Braille Institute to improve the accessibility of texts for low-vision readers -- Atkinson Hyperlegible's design is based around "letterform distinction to increase character recognition, ultimately improving readability" (via Kottke)
Social epistemology Spotify playlist -- check out the "Buena Vista Social Epistemology Club," compiled by Gabri Heinrichs (Groningen)
Using metaphysics and philosophy of language to understand and improve software programming -- from former philosophy PhD student & programmer Caleb Ontiveros
"A systemic approach to redistributing resources and changing policies and institutions that have perpetuated harm" -- Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò and Beba Cibralic (Georgetown) on how best to understand "climate reparations" and why we need them
This result dissolves the Fermi paradox -- a 2018 paper argues that the Fermi paradox only arises because the model it's based on "implictly assume ~~certainty regarding highly uncertain parameters"~~

Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett says she is an "originalist"; is this a defensible form of jurisprudence? -- Randy Barnett and Evan Bernick (Georgetown) present an informative "unified theory of originalism"

An unusual philosophy club -- the El Paso Community College Philosophy Club's demographics, interdisciplinarity, welcoming environment, and high level of activity set it apart

"The weird complexity and variability of smell now turn out vital to understanding the brain" -- Ann-Sophie Barwich (Indiana) on the richness, complexity, and fruitfulness of the study of olfaction

"Santa Claus is an old overweight man, and most likely has type 2 diabetes. Each of these factors put him in a high-risk group." -- one of several factors considered by Alberto Giubilini (Oxford) in thinking about how Santa should approach his job this coming holiday season

"As far as I know, my new course… is the only course in the UK that includes any Shona philosophy." -- Lloyd Strickland (Manchester Metropolitan) on why he teaches Shona philosophy in his philosophy of religion course

Schlick was not killed for his philosophy "but what happened next… was indeed shaped by what the Vienna Circle had come to represent in the ideological frenzy of interwar Austria" -- Adam Kirsch on the Vienna Circle and David Edmonds' new book about it, in The New Yorker

38% of survey respondents at least sometimes "thought about or researched further the ethical aspects of a choice" in their lives -- according to a survey of engagement with humanities by people in the U.S. while at home during the pandemic (via Robert B. Townsend)

A mind-reading philosophy professor takes his shows online -- Alexander George (Amherst) has refashioned his mentalist performances for Zoom

New find: 100 cards of notes by Macchiavelli -- at the National Library of Florence

How to make and use a lightboard for online teaching — Jared Millson (CSU Bakersfield) shares a great idea for teachers who like to write on the board in class

Wishing that someone be harmed isn't wrong -- because wishing isn't the kind of thing that can be wrong

This past weekend Google honored 18th Century philosopher Anton Wilhelm Amo -- with a Google Doodle (via Patrick Connolly)

Some "beliefs… are irrational but are the only way for an agent to bring about an epistemic benefit" -- Lisa Bortolotti (Birmingham) begins a week of posting at The Brains Blog on "epistemic innocence"

"'Naturalism' is a tremendously ambiguous term, used to denote many substantively distinct views" -- a survey and taxonomy of the varieties of naturalism in philosophical discourse by Amanda Bryant (Lisbon)

"We should not want Trump to suffer from a disease" -- Why not? Brendan de Kenessey (Toronto) makes the case in The Washington Post

Jenny Holzer installation uses a web-based augmented reality app and a fleet of LED trucks to display quotes from philosophers and others -- it's a collaboration between the artist and University of Chicago faculty and students

"Unknown destinations may well give us… a better, but painful, political and intellectual self-understanding and… unexpected views on the truth" -- Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) on diversifying analytic philosophy

Making the Monty Hall Problem more intuitive -- by adding more doors and more goats (via MR)

"The cash bail system criminalizes poverty" -- and that's only one of its problems, says Gregg Caruso (SUNY Corning)

Want to blog about public philosophy? -- The Blog of the APA is looking for a public philosophy editor

"The sad truth is that even if each individual’s choice is rational, it can lead the collective to some undesirable places" -- policy failures have made it rational for individuals to accept more risk rather than isolate themselves, says Tyler Cowen (GMU)

Am I the Asshole? -- a profile of Reddit's large & well-run popular forum for everyday moral reasoning (with commentary from Pamela Hieronymi and T.M. Scanlon)

"Our confused sense organs mistakenly perceive collections of multiple simples as extended wholes" -- Émilie du Châtelet's solution to the problem of bodies

"People don’t want to associate with material things that are associated with evil" -- there are irrational reasons for this, but also a rational one, writes James Harold (Mount Holyoke)

The "Gender/Sex Disparities in COVID-19 Outcomes" teaching resource and toolkit -- from the GenderSci Lab (Harvard), for use in intro-level gender studies, feminist philosophy, philosophy of science, feminist science studies, health sciences, & similar courses

Philosophical razors -- a list at Wikipedia

"We don’t presently know of any compelling arguments that language models are incapable of achieving language understanding" -- linguist Christopher Potts (Stanford) with philosophical reflections on GPT-3 (via Robert Long)

"The complication of analytic philosophy arises from the attempt to be as precise as possible, whereas the complication for Derrida is the result of meticulously trying to avoid being more precise than is possible" -- Should analytic philosophers reconsider Derrida?

"In her view, democratic debate itself requires us to be a bit hypocritical. It’s less important that we have genuine respect for people with whom we fundamentally disagree than that we act as if we do" -- Is Judith Shklar the political philosopher of our times?

More on publishing philosophy one doesn't believe -- Will Fleisher (Northeastern) responds to Alexandra Plakias (Hamilton)

Real life population ethics case -- what's better: fewer kids created, each with a lower chance of injury in a car crash, or more kids created, each with a higher chance of such injury? (via Robert Long)

"Pregnancy is an epistemically transformative experience" -- and, says Fiona Woollard (Southampton), "this matters because in order to think properly about the ethics of abortion we need to know what being pregnant is like"

The collective project of building a comprehensive mathematical "proof assistant" is underway and will probably take decades -- one wonders whether such a project would be possible, eventually, for parts of philosophy

"Philosophers are excellent candidates for the program" -- Shane Wilkins on the Presidential Management Fellowship, a 2-year program to train recent graduate degree earners for positions in the US federal government

"Students generally feel their specific campuses are creating a positive environment for free speech" -- yet "sixty percent of students have at one point felt they couldn’t express an opinion on campus because they feared how other students, professors or college administrators would respond"

"The normatively stubborn person enforces a rule no matter how obviously wrong and counterproductive doing so is in the present circumstances" -- we should acknowledge the role of judgment in administering law, and the importance of good judgment, says Steven Nadler (Wisconsin)

"The argument formed part of a serious anti-sceptical strategy – a strategy that the bare argument, presented by itself, doesn’t really capture" -- Jonathan Birch (LSE) on Moore's hands

The Happiness Museum -- visit it next time you're in Copenhagen

If you're a philosophy professor, you can nominate someone for the Nobel Peace Prize -- professors in some other disciplines can, too

A student who majored in engineering and philosophy discusses which elements of her education most contributed to her success as an engineer -- Rosemary Barnes on the "need to rethink giving degrees aimed at 'job readiness'" (via Andy Lamey)

The racism of earlier philosophers is built into some of their more abstract philosophical ideas -- "the actual improvement of philosophical thought" involves examining and acknowledging this, says Avram Alpert (Princeton)

Wittgenstein's favorite detective novels -- no, not a McSweeney's post, but a real article about his love of crime fiction

Feminist responses to COVID-19 and pandemics -- a special issue of the APA's Feminism and Philosophy Newsletter

Masks: for the greatest good -- making the best of Bentham

Disagreement, democracy, and civic friendship -- Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt) is interviewed on the Parlia podcast

"The biological definition of sex shouldn’t be the battleground for philosophers and gender theorists who disagree about the definition of ‘woman’" -- Paul Griffiths (Sydney) on how biological sex is--and isn't--important

"If you're not getting multiple journal rejections, you're not doing your job right" -- that's what Arash Abizadeh (McGill) tells his grad students, and to inspire them he created a "CV of Rejections"

"Intellectual humility might make prejudice more severe" -- one of a few findings from an empirical study of intellectual humility

The value of research on honesty -- in Scientific American

Do we now live, as Derek Parfit wrote, "during the hinge of history"? -- the BBC talks to a few philosophers and others to find out

"The case against Hume is that his racism is not a minor aberration in his thought, but a significant element of his larger views" -- Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) shows how we can "confront the complicity of our heroes in justifying really important evils"

"Ask a Philosopher" on public radio in NY -- Ian Olasov (CUNY) and Denise Vigani (Seton Hall) on the show All of It.

A philosopher says goodbye to academic freedom -- "It may seem counter-intuitive that a job higher up the organizational chart should come with a reduction in freedom, but it makes sense," says Shannon Dea (Regina)

"Engaging with your perception on an analytical level… makes a difference in the quality of your experience by fine-tuning your brain to its input" -- Ann-Sophie Barwich (Indiana) on sensory expertise, consciousness, the philosophy of perception, and wine

Writing philosophy means confronting "a many-branching regress" of explanation and defense with every sentence -- which is one reason it is so hard, says Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside)

Quantum modal realism -- Alastair Wilson (Birmingham) interviewed by Siddharth Muthukrishnan on Natural Philosophers

Can virtual reality help us better understand what it's like to be in others' shoes? -- Erick Jose Ramirez (Santa Clara) raises some concerns about this increasingly popular idea

Complaints about ignorant or irrational voters tend to be based on some mistakes -- Michael Hannon (Nottingham) explains, but will that explanation leave you feeling better about democracy?

The editors of a crowdfunded volume on women philosophers are featured in The Irish Times -- Rebecca Buxton and Lisa Whiting discuss the book they put together "for our younger selves"

A biographical memoir of Derek Parfit by Jonathan Dancy -- published by The British Academy (via Martin O'Neill)

"What is it for a thought to be clear? What made our initial thought unclear? And how do we make a thought clear, in the relevant sense?" -- Eli Alshanetsky (Temple) on the philosophical problems of thinking clearly

The idea that academics should not also be activists seems to be based on an unduly narrow idea of what an activist is -- that there are certain types of activists who academics ought not emulate only tells us so much, says Anh Le (Manchester)

A problem with the perception of size -- and Malebranche's solution, explained by Colin Chamberlain (Temple) (via Alison Peterman)

"Panpsychism also offers a solution to the even harder problem of how to ground objective truths about value" -- Philip Goff (Durham)

Exploring Descartes' Meditations with the "philosophical autopilot" turned off -- an interview with John Carriero (UCLA)

Nominations are open for leadership positions in the American Philosophical Association -- nominees and nominators must be APA members

A 1973 film recording of a conversation between Peter Strawson and Gareth Evans is the basis of a series of articles edited by Huw Price -- contributions from 15 different philosophers so far

The Stoa is a digital space that hosts online events in philosophy and related areas -- scroll down on the page to check out their upcoming sessions

"Humans must keep doing what they have been doing, hating and fighting each other. I will sit in the background, and let them do their thing." -- GPT-3 writes an opinion piece for The Guardian, with some help from the editors (via Naomi van Steenbergen)

Five big questions about expertise -- Jamie Carlin Watson (Arkansas) uses social epistemology to "synthesize the disparate fields of expertise studies" in a series of posts at The Brains Blog.

"Criticizing bad science from an abstract, 10000-foot view is pleasant… But actually diving into the sea of trash that is social science…" -- what is wrong with the social sciences? (via MR)

"It's clear that her work will last": an overview of the philosophy of Karen Neander, who died earlier this year -- by Christopher Hill (Brown) and Carlotta Pavese (Cornell)

A philosopher is trying out a new version of an old medium -- check out "The Hinternet," the newsletter of Justin E.H. Smith (Paris)

"Without an active commitment to refuse to honor the dishonorable, universities will likely do so… seduced by the illusion of merit attached to power and celebrity, and then dressing up the decision as intellectual openness" -- Jacob Levy (McGill) on the future honoring of "those who took direct part in the most shameful aspects of the Trump presidency"

Is Heraclitus's ink pot the key to understanding Raphael's "The School of Athens"? -- Kelly Grovier on the "fluidity of identity" in the painting

Is analytic philosophy "just another woke humanities field"? -- Liam Kofi Bright (LSE) looks at the evidence from recent journals

The importance of "team reasoning" -- David Papineau (KCL) on how "choices that seemed puzzling for individuals become obvious for groups"

What is happening in philosophy of science in Russia? -- Daria Drozdova (Higher School of Economics, Moscow) is interviewed on developments in the field there

A heavy metal concept album about Socrates -- "Question Everything" by Helion Prime will be out in October; in the meanwhile you can listen to the first single, "The Gadfly"

Is the meritocratic principle helpful in "distinguishing the morally acceptable forms of 'cancellation' from the unacceptable ones"? -- Thomas Mulligan (Georgetown) thinks so

Is the universe too thin? -- the challenges of measuring the universe and fitting new findings into standard cosmology

“I started Corrupt the Youth so they don’t have to play catch up like I did" -- a moving profile of Briana Toole (Claremont McKenna) and her work teaching philosophy to high school students from low-income or underrepresented groups

Tim Crane, Jane Heal, Tom Baldwin, Alva Noë, Helen Steward… -- recent interviewees at the "Five Questions" podcast by Kieran Setiya (MIT)

Environmental & social scaffolding for overcoming procrastination -- the start of the school year is a good time to revisit this useful piece by Joseph Heath and Joel Anderson

New editors and new features announced at the Brains Blog -- including symposia on cognitive science and neuroscience

The rationality of political polarization -- the first in a series of posts by Kevin Dorst (Oxford/Pitt)

The tech that's a stepping stone towards a "'digital super-intelligent [cognitive] layer' that enables humans to 'merge' with artificially intelligent software" -- details on the latest brain-machine interface from Neuralink

What kind of achievement is it to give birth? -- Fiona Woollard (Southampton) guides us between the mistakes of idolization and invisibility

The almost impossible chessboard puzzle -- a math-obsessed warden makes an offer to two prisoners...

CNN interviews philosopher about fascism -- Jason Stanley (Yale) warns about "massive use of fascist tactics"

"I don’t claim to have a priori knowledge about the extent to which people should or shouldn’t rely on cancellation" -- interesting thoughts from Irfan Khawaja about cancel culture, discussion of which, he says, "strikes me as time-bound polemics masquerading as moral philosophy"

"Philosopher AI" uses GPT-3 to answer your questions -- but not particularly well

Probability, Bayesianism, epistemology, explanation, and more -- an interview with Darren Bradley (Leeds)

Free Hegel! -- to celebrate the 250th anniversary of his birth, Cambridge University Press is making a lot of Hegel content open access & putting out new blogs & podcasts

"To call education 'job training' is, quite simply, to call it 'learning how to follow someone else’s orders'" -- Zena Hitz (St. John's College) on the "liberating power" of a liberal arts education

The author of "An Unknown Woman", a book sometimes described as "a feminist's Walden", has died -- Alice Koller had PhD in philosophy from Harvard, "provided inspiration for so many," yet struggled throughout her life

"For me, the greatest philosophical thrill is realizing that something I’d long taken for granted might not be true" -- Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) on the difference philosophy that opens and philosophy that closes

We should "see our opponent’s political views as an expression of their sincere attempt to think clearly about politics, to act in the office of citizenship according to their best judgment" -- Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt) argues for "political sympathy", in Culturico

Diversify your philosophy of art readings -- a list of works from over 60 authors from racial & ethnic groups often marginalized in Western, Anglo-European philosophy, from Alex King (Simon Fraser)

This philosopher "has spent his career studying concepts like truth, justice, and freedom. Now he wants to put these principles into practice" -- a profile of Richard Dien Winfield (U. Georgia), who is running for Senate, in Jacobin

"If there's one thread running through most of my published philosophical work, it's that introspection isn't good for shit" -- an interview with John Schwenkler (Florida State)

A book complaining about "cynical theories" itself suffers from "misplaced cynicism combined with unwarranted confidence in such cynical interpretations" -- and contains so many misinterpretations of philosophers' views that it "looks much more like incendiary fan fiction than scholarly analysis"

"When you enter the walk-in closet of your soul, are your politics just a youthful fad, as dispensable as drunk-ordered harem pants?" -- Kim Kierkegaardashian offers advice to a young anti-capitalist Marxist who longs for a collection of designer handbags, in The New Yorker

A statue of Hypatia has been erected -- in a new culture and arts district in Cairo

"The Epstein affair brings to light a much larger problem: it undermines the integrity of the research enterprise when individuals can pick and choose lines of inquiry that appeal to them simply because they can pay for them." -- Naomi Oreskes (Harvard) in Scientific American (via Steven DeLay)

Animal Ethics from the Margins has a new website -- the project is "an attempt to highlight the work of underrepresented voices in the animal ethics literature"

"We come to view our own inability to conform to the structures of philosophy… as proof that we’re not suited for philosophy" -- what it's like to be a philosopher with ADHD

The minimal amount of energy needed for life is lower than previously thought -- which "opens up the possibility that life exists in realms where scientists might not have looked before"

It would be perfect irony if Voltaire was "canceled" -- ask yourself before clicking: do you want it to be true that he was?

Epistemic corruption by YouTube algorithm -- Fabio Tollon (Bielefeld) on autoplay, conspiratorial content, bottom-up seduction, and a murder

A discussion of quantum spacetime, "the idea that our familiar spacetime might be actually emergent from some complex quantum mechanical system" -- with Sean Carroll (Caltech) and Siddharth Muthukrishnan (Pitt), on "Natural Philosophers"

"Dear Miss Arendt…" -- a 1975 note from Joe Biden to Hannah Arendt (via @Helenreflects on Twitter)

"I’m willing to engage—usually, and unless people are just trolling or monstering or gaslighting or sealioning me—because that’s what philosophers do: they replace conflict with dialogue" -- Sophie Grace Chappell (Open University) interviewed by Jean Kazez (SMU)

Scholars, should you study what you love? -- many people say yes, but Martin Lenz (Groningen) dissents

"How I reduced student email load by ~95%" -- and other posts about teaching at "New Normal," a new blog from University of Toronto philosophy PhD student Boaz Schuman

"In the current activities of police and law enforcement, we can see the seeds of the response to climate crises" -- Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (Georgetown) explains

20 philosophers on the pandemic -- in the new---and open access---issue of The Philosophers' Magazine

"The data support something that could be referred to as rationalist pessimism: rationality is real, but rare" -- Hanno Sauer (Utrecht) argues that attacks on human rationality from social psychology and behavioral economics aren't as devastating as some believe

"Graduate school should be the place where you can develop a skill set… that is tailored to you and that will serve you well, but that are general enough that they will be useful in a wide range of contexts" -- How one philosophy professor will be welcoming new graduate students in her department this year

Secret allegations and unknown accusers: a philosophy professor describes what it was like to be the target of Title IX investigation -- Robert Frodeman, who was cleared of a Title IX sexual harassment complaint but fired for having been found to have violated his university's relationship policy, tells his story

Over time, "various forms of hostility, exclusion, silencing, and devaluation multiplied," yet "the idea that this was a pattern of mistreatment based on gender became less and less accessible to my colleagues" -- Brook Sadler (South Florida) sees how her own story fits with a recent philosophical account of misogyny

Moral enhancement as an alternative to vaccines -- we should consider pharmaceuticals that boost "the brain’s ability to cooperate with others", says Parker Crutchfield (Western Michigan)

"Bacon, eggs, oatmeal… we simply have no convincing theory to explain how such disparate, seemingly inert components give rise to the phenomenon we subjectively experience as 'breakfast'" -- Jonathan Bines explains the "Hard Problem of Breakfast"

Taylor Swift does some philosophy covers -- sort of

Pandemic restrictions and moral luck -- commentary from Roger Crisp (Oxford)

Interested in writing public philosophy but aren't sure what the editors who publish such materials want? -- here's an opportunity to ask them

The harm of testimonial injustice -- a discussion at PEA Soup

People should get vaccinated for COVID-19 when it's possible to do so. Should it be illegal for them to refuse? -- an argument from David Copp and Gerald Dworkin (UC Davis)

A philosopher, some comedians, and a business owner walk into a podcast -- to discuss cancel culture

A repository of materials for instructors who want to teach critical thinking with argument mapping and mastery learning -- the site, from Javier Hidalgo (Richmond) includes exercises, study guides, a syllabus, guides on how to teach this kind of class effectively, and more.

Significant enrollment jump in philosophy at ANU -- reported in the Canberra Times

Diversity in philosophy vs. the strong barriers put up by "the prestige economy of academia" -- Barry Lam (Vassar/Hi-Phi Nation) with a thoughtful analysis of the obstacles to broadening philosophy

"Humans are natural conformists" and because of this, "individuality, each nugget of genuine idiosyncrasy that is successfully maintained, is a precious achievement worth defending" -- Don Ross (Cork) interviewed on the philosophy of economics, individualisms, minds, and more

With the move online, "the web of informal connections that’s sustained on campus" is gone, but there are some things professors can do for students to make up for this -- Greg Restall (Melbourne) shares what he has done

"Why was Walzer spitballing about what 'racial capitalism' means in the first place? He could have just asked." -- Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (Georgetown) & Liam Kofi Bright (LSE) explain

…and Michael Walzer responds.

"There are disputes about the fundamental subject matter of the area, the corresponding permissible theoretical assumptions, and the most conducive methods for engaging in research" -- Hanna Kiri Gunn (UC Merced) on the boundaries of social epistemology

Australasian philosophers on the pandemic -- a bibliography of recent public-facing work

We should "learn to relish the fruits of idleness" -- Max Hayward (Sheffield) on leisure, education, and the "tedium of lockdown"

A student's path from philosophy to work as a tech analyst and now to studying artificial intelligence -- there are "a lot of touch points" between philosophy and the tech world, says Iva Simon Bubalo

The world's oldest philosophy major just graduated. 96 years old, he was first in his class with top honors. -- "I've finally realized my dream," said former railway worker and WW2 veteran Giuseppe Paternò (via John Bogart)

The "largest and most comprehensive investigation" of the ethnographic record of over 250 cultures "provides strong evidence that there are indeed universal moral values" -- explore an interactive set of data on virtues and vices across cultures from Mark Alfano (Macquarie)

"Free Will Matters" just completed a season of nine episodes featuring interviews with various philosophers -- the podcast is part of the LATAM Free Will project, and is hosted by Santiago Amaya (Universidad de los Andes)

"The first authoritative collection to establish trans philosophy as a unique field of inquiry" is in the works -- it will be edited by Talia Mae Bettcher (Cal State LA), Andrea Pitts (UNC Charlotte), and Perry Zurn (American)

"Cancel culture": Republican politician calls for adjunct lecturer to be fired for anti-police tweet -- his school, the public Auburn University, does not appear to be standing up for him

"The winners in unjust systems always want the oppressed to assume their fate was inevitable" -- David Lay Williams (DePaul) on Tom Cotton, John Stuart Mill, and "necessary evils"

Hegel turns 250 this summer -- to mark the occasion, The Hegel Bulletin and Cambridge University Press have made some of their Hegel-related resources free to access

Teaching in a socially distanced classroom -- professors at Siena College share what they learned from testing out three different scenarios

New: The Free Will Show -- a philosophy podcast, with interviews, that covers the basics as well as advanced new work on the topic, hosted by Taylor Cyr (Samford) Matt Flummer (Porterville)

"Philosophers don’t have a monopoly on critical thinking — but it is their core business" -- a case for the value of philosophy, and against the reasoning behind raising the costs of studying it in Australia, from Daniel Gregory (Eberhard Karls Univ.)

Using Dungeons & Dragons to teach ethics -- Rebecca Scott (Harper College) shares an interesting, active, and fun teaching strategy

"Life is just one specific instance of lyfe" -- NASA engineers a new concept, "lyfe", intended to capture life as we know it on earth but also life as we may not know it (via Dan Weiskopf)

"The book is like a road map through the intricacies of disappointment" -- this year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Albert O. Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty

The Chronicle of Higher Ed's new & improved database of Fall 2020 college reopening plans -- (you may be asked to create a free Chronicle account)

"New research shows that people’s capacity to experience pleasure or enjoyment contributes at least as much to a happy and satisfied life as successful self-control" -- imagine that!

"When the dead are only respectable and seemly, they truly do seem dead" -- Amy Olberding (Oklahoma) on the differences between how we remember the great and how we remember our own

Charcoal portraits of philosophers -- from Paula Pereira, a librarian in California

The chemistry and ethics of love drugs -- a discussion from Brian D. Earp and Julian Savulescu (Oxford)

Is X-phi's depiction of non-experimental philosophy a caricature? -- Tomasz Herok (Lancaster) thinks so

"If you’re not a fan of seeing scientists’ views attributed to personal racism, transphobia or misogyny, then nor should you tolerate commentary about scientists supposedly being biased by their feminist motives" -- Cordelia Fine (Melbourne) on bias and objectivity in science

Oxford University Press is launching a book series on Philosophy, Politics, and Economics -- co-edited by Ryan Muldoon, Carmen Pavel, Geoff Sayre-McCord, Eric Schliesser, and Itai Sher

"In other contexts, we would rather that the state not take sides in contested moral and political disputes. But taking a stand is inevitable in symbolic state speech" -- Jacob Levy (McGill) on statues honoring "the dishonorable dead"

“The Last Days of Immanuel Kant" is a 1996 movie now streamable on YouTube -- "It follows the famously abstemious and abstruse philosopher as he’s anticipating his death, yet it’s a physical comedy filled with neo-slapstick intimacy"

"The barriers to speech are not just about the threat from the state but also about the social atmosphere in which speech is conducted and about who has the standing to speak" -- Chris Bertram (Bristol) on "cancel culture"

The kinds of activities associated with "canceling" may be part of "the best way to bring about well-functioning marketplace of ideas" -- Justin Khoo (MIT) on the "messy and unprincipled" processes of figuring out "which positions are deserving of serious discussion"

What are the 233 most-cited works in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy? -- a list from Eric Schwitzgebel (Riverside)

"Here’s a peculiar thing about people: often what they do doesn’t match what they say they believe" -- a week of posts on the philosophy and psychology of implicit bias, starting off with one by Gabbrielle Johnson (NYU)

"Academic freedom must continue to protect much research that is immoral in one or another way" -- "This immorality needs to be recognized and discussed, but not punished," says Elizabeth Harman (Princeton)

Does "the phenomenological interpretation of quantum physics deserves to be rescued from history and considered on its own merits"? -- Steven French (Leeds) thinks so

"We all have philosophical love stories" -- here's one from Fleur Jongepier (Radboud), along with some more general thoughts about philosophical love

In rationing scarce medical resources, should we give priority to people who are parents? -- Moti Gorin (Colorado State University) discusses this idea in an interview conducted by Katrien Devolder (Oxford)

"Have you felt a sense of friendship, or at any rate, a sense of fellow-feeling with philosophers in the past?" -- Helen De Cruz (SLU) on philosophy "stans"

When it comes to re-opening schools, "the well-being of members of one group depends upon the suffering, and perhaps even death, of the members of another group" -- a possible way out of this stalemate, from Matthew Noah Smith (Northeastern)

Masks and mistakes in moral mathematics -- Daniel Muñoz (Monash) applies Parfitian insights to pandemic problems

"Sophisticated naturalism, no less than extreme naturalism, undermines itself" -- Joel Katzav (Queensland) on Marie Collins Swabey's early 20th C. critique of naturalism

"The difference between use and mention is not a categorical one but one of degrees" -- " if this correct, then what about reading racist or sexist classics?" asks Martin Lenz (Groningen)

Teaching from home? Check out this excellent guide to practices, equipment, technology, and setup -- from Mikio Akagai (TCU) (via Nick Byrd & Lewis Powell)

On the idea "that it is okay (or maybe even required) to make people feel uncomfortable because of their biases or prejudices" -- some cautionary notes from Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic (Roskilde)

A poetry contest for children aimed at celebrating the work of Mary Midgley -- from In Parenthesis, a project of Rachael Wiseman (Liverpool) and Clare MacCumhaill (Durham)

"Doctoral students’ prodigious intelligence consigns them to a life of 'purgatory' as they pursue largely unattainable dream jobs and reject more realistic careers as failure" -- many young academics are "victims of their own 'above the data' brains", according to a study of "quit lit"

"Make your next pitch instantly more compelling by using this one philosopher's framework" -- apparently one business writer thinks the Grice is right (sorry)

"Quite impressive in some areas, and still clearly subhuman in others" -- GPT-3, the new language generating tool, takes a Turing test

"It is indefensibly vague at key points, particularly about what 'cancellation' is and about what the supposed threat to Aristotle is" -- Bryan W. Van Norden (Vassar) responds to Agnes Callard (Chicago)

Did you attend a protest recently? Your face might be in a police database. -- Evan Selinger (RIT) and Albert Fox Cahn on a new way "protesters are risking their safety and wellbeing standing up for justice"

Nostalgia doesn't need your memories -- Felipe De Brigard (Duke) on the evidence for, and implications of, revising our traditional understanding of nostalgia

"It is not only that the benefits of reading Aristotle counteract the costs, but that there are no costs" -- Agnes Callard (Chicago) on literal speech, messaging speech, and "cancel culture"

When is the conjunction fallacy not really a fallacy? -- to answer this, keep in mind there's sometimes a tradeoff between being "accurate" and being "informative", says Kevin Dorst & Matt Mandelkern (Oxford)

Plato, 360 BCE: "the element of 'earth' is cubical in form" -- geophysicists & mathematicians, 2020 CE: "Ummm, yeah. He nailed it"

Are the great thinkers all dead? Why? -- Michael Huemer (Colorado) shares some possible explanations

"Transitional justice provides an important lens for ongoing national conversations in the United States about police brutality and racial injustice" -- Colleen Murphy (Illinois) explains

The spacey tunnels and Escher-esque stairs at China's Zhongshuge bookstores -- for our "ever-growing post-quarantine travel wish lists" (don't miss the linked images)

"Anyone with Hume’s intelligence would recognise the enormity of slavery. But Hume sought to benefit from it." -- Felix Waldmann (Cambridge) on Hume's connections to slavery

How can mathematics inform philosophical inquiries? -- Silvia Jonas (Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy) takes up that question and others

Even when we've "engaged seriously with the other side’s arguments… we make mistakes that we can’t correct by sincere engagement with opposing viewpoints" -- "I think this happens a lot in philosophy," says David Christensen (Brown) in an interview all about disagreement

"Games are a part of an under-respected, and under-theorized, category of art — what I call the arts of action" -- C. Thi Nguyen (Utah) on the philosophy of games

"Cancel culture is one of the ways in which otherwise dispersed and often disorganized individuals can make the more powerful take notice of their views" -- Cancel culture "just is the market-place of ideas," says Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam)

How Gödel’s proof works -- a "simplified, informal rundown" of Gödel's argument for his incompleteness theorems

Three ways of diversifying a philosophy syllabus -- Muhammad Ali Khalidi (CUNY) goes over the menu of options

"How do we respond to linguistic and stylistic diversity?" -- Martin Lenz (Groningen) on language, diversity, and teaching

Philosophy job market mentoring program -- at the Philosopher's Cocoon

Philosophers in non-academic careers -- a new series at the Blog of the APA

"Scientific advisors should not tell policy-makers what they want to hear, but, rather, what they ought to want to hear" -- Stephen John (Cambridge) on expertise, policy, and the pandemic

Articles on science and philosophy -- curated by Walter Veit (Sydney)

"Scientists typically select well-understood questions and employ well-tried techniques to answer them. Philosophers don’t do that – they get to explore beyond the bounds scientists would venture" -- an interview with Zoltán Gendler Szabó (Yale)

Philosophy in a Time of Coronavirus: a short series of videos -- from the philosophers at the University of York

Inclusion in philosophy -- a video of a discussion between Charles Mills, Linda Alcoff, & Shelley Tremain, hosted by Matt LaVine & Dwight Lewis of the Larger, Freer, More Loving Podcast

"Radical Classical Liberals" -- a new group political philosophy blog

Time travel in "Dark" — the popular German Netflix show -- a discussion by Taylor W. Cyr (Samford University)

Philosophy of disability in the thought of Zhuangzi -- John Altmann & Bryan Van Norden (Vasser) on how "this ancient Chinese Taoist reminds us that it is the material conditions of a society that determine and define disability"

Corrupt the Concept is a card game that "invites players to rethink concepts… that we take for granted" -- from the philosophy outreach program Corrupt the Youth

"Reactionary Liberalism": a useful coinage for understanding tensions "internal to liberalism for ages" -- "between those who take the associative nature of liberal society seriously and those who are determined not to"

"Despite appearing as mutually exclusive opposites, horror and comedy are related as cousins under the skin" -- Noël Carroll (CUNY) explains

A 19th Century moral philosopher you probably have not heard of crafted an "original synthesis of Kantianism, intuitionism, theism and anti-utilitarianism" -- Alison Stone (Lancaster) tells us about the philosophy of Frances Power Cobbe

The tradeoffs between two ways of expanding how the history of political philosophy is typically taught -- thoughts from Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam)

We should think of a virus as a process rather than a thing -- doing so "has important implications for how we think about viruses and how we design sustainable strategies to deal with them," says Stephan Guttinger (LSE)

"Here’s why I love philosophy: For all X, you can do philosophy of X, just by diving down deep and long into the most fundamental questions about that topic" -- an interview with Eric Schwitzgebel (Riverside) at Scientific American

Are people reasoning well about what is morally right in the pandemic? -- Frances Kamm (Rutgers) has some concerns

Decolonizing political theory -- a reading list compiled by David Owen (Southampton)

The neoliberal case for a universal basic income -- from Matt Zwolinski (San Diego)

Sometimes, irrational beliefs deliver "significant epistemic benefits that could not be easily attained otherwise" -- Lisa Bortolotti (Birmingham) and other philosophers on "epistemic innocence"

A podcast/discussion series on consciousness -- "Consciousness Live!", created by Richard Brown (CUNY/LaGuardia), currently has over 40 episodes featuring philosophers, scientists, artists, and others

What is meat? -- Andy Lamey (UCSD) takes up the question, and why it matters, in the NYT

"Cultural conservatives aren’t trying to protect language from politics; they are simply sanguine about the politics that language already has" -- Amia Srinivasan (Oxford) on pronouns

Special issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal on COVID-19, pandemics, and ethics -- edited by Quill R Kukla (Georgetown) and Travis N. Rieder (Johns Hopkins)

"The self is really a self-pattern" -- Shaun Gallagher (Memphis) explains what this means and why we should accept it

Minorities and Philosophy (MAP) will be hiring two organizers to help run MAP International -- check out what the position involves and consider applying

"Extreme economic inequality, whether it matters as such or 'merely' for its effects, is pernicious" -- Samuel Scheffler (NYU) in the New York Times

"I think of myself as a very passionate and committed naturalist." Also, regarding consciousness, "it's the only thing." -- an interview with Galen Strawson (Texas)

A series of online talks this summer in moral philosophy -- organized by Gwen Bradford (Rice)

Philosophy and black holes -- David Wallace (Pittsburgh) is the first guest in a new series of interviews with philosophers conducted by Siddharth Muthukrishnan (Pittsburgh)

Animal ethics from the margins -- a resource for finding work on animal ethics and related areas by members of groups traditionally underrepresented in philosophy

A new blog of news and commentary on university policies and affairs — from Daniel Star (BU), the site is currently mainly focused on COVID-19 and the ethics of university policies, at BU and beyond

The third annual "Young Philosopher Award" contest was held online this year -- the Irish Times reports on the event

What will happen when the robots go into business? -- at the intersection of artificial intelligence, business ethics, and political economy

"Being harassed by a senior colleague who threatened to kill my beloved dog" -- one of the career "low points" of Anne Margaret Baxley (Wash. U. St. Louis), interviewed at What Is It Like To Be A Philosopher?

Imagine a flood destroying all of your books -- this happened to philosophy professor Glenn Moots (Northwood), who lost 15,000 volumes, and now his colleagues & others & maybe you are helping him rebuild

"Even feminist activists can fall into the trap of implying that ‘real’ or ‘serious’ pain can’t be psychological in origin" -- Elizabeth Barnes (Virginia) on the entangled issues related to taking seriously women's pain

"The objective of this study was to empirically test the wide belief that Reviewer #2 is a uniquely poor reviewer" -- Conclusion: "Reviewer #2 is not the problem. Reviewer #3 is. In fact, he is such a bad actor that he even gets the unwitting Reviewer #2 blamed for his bad behavior."

"How philosophy did and did not prepare me for business" -- former philosophy professor Zachary Ernst reflects on his experiences in the private sector

Philosophers most retweeted by philosophers on Twitter (with over 1000 followers) -- also check out the graph, linked at the top, of philosopher retweet relationships

The risk of doing moral philosophy -- Jason Brennan (Georgetown) and Christopher Freiman (William & Mary) argue that moral philosophers face a deplatforming dilemma

"It is an opportunity to think together about the big questions that matter to them" -- the New York Times on philosophy instruction for young children during the pandemic

Mentees interviewing their mentors -- a new series at PEA Soup

Why you should self-archive your research and how to do it -- advice from Rebecca Lea Morris

200 Proof Liberals -- a new group political philosophy blog

In a crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic, it isn't always clear what ethicists should be focusing on -- so the first step is to "triage" ethical issues themselves, says David Shaw (Basel, Maastricht)

The contest to create a philosophical argument that convinces research subjects to donate to a charity has a winner -- Eric Schwitzgebel (Riverside) shares it and the way it was assessed

"When we’re doing things to better our society, the body assumes there’s a society there to better. We’re technically alone, but it doesn’t feel that way." -- dealing with the loneliness of isolation during a pandemic

"The head of the colonizer lying on the street speaks volumes" -- Elizabeth Scarbrough (Florida International) on allowing, documenting, and appreciating the ruin of monuments

Malala Yousafzai, the youngest recipient ever of a Nobel Peace Prize, has graduated from Oxford --the NYT couldn't resist noting in the sub-headline that the philosophy, politics, and economics major is "currently unemployed"

"They succeed in keeping people in their place" -- to see what something's function is, see what it actually does. Todd May (Clemson) and George Yancy (Emory) on the police

"It it will be extremely important for students to refrain from all contact with one another outside of academic and residential settings." Uh oh. -- new research on how to contain the spread of COVID-19 on campuses this fall.

40 logicians from 8 countries took part in a 24-hour meeting earlier this month "to discuss ways we might make logic more inclusive and thereby take a small step in efforts to mitigate racism" -- Teresa Kouri Kissel (ODU) reports on #ShutDownLogic

Identity politics and class struggle are often framed as being at odds with one another -- but, as we see in the Black Lives Matter movement and elsewhere, they can be mutually reinforcing, argues Vanessa Wills (GW)

"His support for slavery has been glossed over down the years. Is it time to make amends?" -- on George Berkeley, who owned slaves and "justified slavery as a path to Christian conversion"

"Science is our best guide to the world. But reliable science takes time and contributions by many different kinds of people" -- Neil Levy (Oxford), Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam), and Eric Winsberg (South Florida) on the broader dangers of rushed research and policy on COVID-19

"The core problem with policing and incarceration is the same problem that plagues our whole political system: elite capture" -- Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (Georgetown) makes the case for community control over police

"There is a runaway trolley speeding down the tracks toward millions of people. But has anybody thought about how, if you had dropped a nuclear bomb on the trolley for no reason, many more lives would have been lost?" -- Presidential trolley problems, in The New Yorker

Is Schopenhauer the philosopher for our times? -- well, at least The New York Times -- with remarks from Agnes Callard, Tamsin Shaw, and others

Two former philosophy students make up half the team running "The Invisible College" -- it's a science and technology scholarship program aimed at people who haven't graduate from college (via MR)

"Imagine volunteering for a challenge study and the very worst happens: you die… What conditions would need to be in place for you or your family to conclude that you had been treated fairly?" -- Carl Elliott (Minnesota) in the NYRB

"A pair of brothers can’t see eye to eye. Both are suffering losses… In this uplifting story both eventually come to see that the holes in our lives are not just absences; they are shaped by the presences around us. Four Stars." -- Kristie Miller (Sydney) reviews philosophical works as if they were movies. Two thumbs up!

Racial Diminishment Syndrome: "like the coronavirus, is hard to detect, highly contagious and often deadly" -- "social distancing will decrease the likelihood of extreme illness or untimely death," says Chris Lebron (Johns Hopkins)

"When does playing with ideas become intellectual work?" -- Anil Gomes (Oxford) on boredom, isolation, children, and philosophy

How should professors supervise/guide their teaching assistants? -- a discussion at The Philosophers' Cocoon

"Ms Rowling, it’s certainly not my intention, or the intention of any trans activists whom I personally know, to erode or erase the biological reality of (cis) women’s experience" -- Sophie Grace Chappell (Open University) responds to JK Rowling on gender and sex

"This is the wild egalitarianism of philosophy that I love… even a prisoner may disagree with Aristotle" -- Sahanika Ratnayake (Cambridge) on a knife attack, philosophy, and learning from helping with a course for prisoners

A new philosophy podcast about "critically engaging the popular culture that we live in, particularly with a focus on justice, care, the arts, and community" -- check out "Larger, Freer, More Loving" from Matthew LaVine (Potsdam) and Dwight Lewis (UCF) (and they're on YouTube, too)

"It is remarkable that Western philosophy should feel entitled to claim the tradition of ancient Greek philosophy as its property" -- and that's just one of the problems with the very idea of "Western Philosophy," says Christoph Schuringa (New College of the Humanities)

#BlackintheIvory & Philosophy -- tweets with the hashtag used to highlight racial inequities in academia that also mention philosophy

University of South Carolina administration thinks the term "social distancing" is a downer, recommends use of "physical distancing" instead -- that makes everything better, sings philosophy professor Michael Dickson

The issues surrounding the possibility that U.S. military personnel may refuse to follow unconstitutional or immoral orders from President Trump -- from two former soldiers-turned-military-ethicists, Marcus Hedahl (US Naval Academy) & Bradley Jay Strawser (Naval Postgraduate School)

The Trans Philosophy Project -- it aims to explore "philosophical work that is accountable to and illuminative of transgender experiences, histories, cultural production, and politics"

A summary of recent data on diversity in philosophy -- from Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) at the Blog of the APA

"Brutal systemic racism is a vast tragedy where both complacency and resistance lead to frightening outcomes" -- Regina Rini (York) on the moral complexity of current events and how "easy or comforting verdicts" are not options

In some ways, the human brain is 10 million times slower than a computer -- so how does the brain have "superior flexibility, generalizability, and learning capability than the state-of-the-art computer"?

Renaissance-era manuscripts of the Phaedo and Gorgias, along with items from Kant, Wittgenstein, Darwin, Lobachevsky and others -- currently up for auction

"Progress is measured in terms of the accumulation of empirical successes, rather than stable truths, so progress does not require consensus." -- the "social empiricism" of Miriam Solomon (Temple)

The Logic Supergroup -- "an alliance of logicians in quarantine" putting on various online events

"We stand committed to continued examination of the ways in which racism, economic, and institutional violence mar our society" -- a statement from the President, Vice-President, and Officers of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy

Racism and protest during a global pandemic -- an online discussion with Elena Comay del Junco (Toronto) and Yolonda Yvette Wilson (National Humanities Center) this coming Wednesday

"Infectious diseases don’t just spread or disappear. They also evolve." -- Elliott Sober (Wisconsin) on understanding and modeling virulence

"We want our students to know that we see you and hear you—that we are aware of the racist past and present of philosophy and the UC and that we stand in solidarity with you." -- a statement from UCSD philosophy graduate students

Philosophy as "the original 'talk therapy'"" -- Samir Chopra (Brooklyn College/CUNY) is blogging about philosophical counseling

"If we centralize training in fewer departments, we will become far more homogeneous" -- one of several reasons against eliminating PhD programs in philosophy, from Kevin Zollman (CMU)

"Let’s give some love to the philosophers" -- several philosophers are named as "especially good on America’s racial politics" in a NYT interview with sociologist and writer Michael Eric Dyson (Georgetown)

"Anonymization provides something like the Ring of Gyges to commentators, with predictable results." -- what is a wise commenting policy for philosophy blogs?

"To be anti-racist in philosophy, we must reconsider the nature of our field—not only who belongs, but what belongs" -- Alexus McLeod (Connecticut) inaugurates a new series on anti-racism in philosophy at The Philosophers' Cocoon

"I worry we have lost the moral basis for deeply committed non-violence" -- Kevin Vallier (Bowling Green) on trust and race in the United States

"For human beings to flourish in our contemporary world, we need to make space both for self-determining states and for improved global governance regimes" -- Gillian Brock (Auckland) on COVID-19 and cosmopolitanism

People can submit a question about COVID-19 issues to the philosophers at University College Dublin's Centre for Ethics in Public Life and they'll give you a video response -- they've done about 20 responses to questions from the public so far

A philosopher who recently signed his fourth book contract offers advice on how to publish a book in philosophy -- advice from Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside)

Scientific understanding, the use of deep learning in neuroscience, and the computational theory of mind -- Mazviita Chirimuuta (Pittsburgh) on the Brain Inspired podcast

"The world, independent of our input, does not settle how confident we must be in our claims before we may rationally accept them for purposes of making a decision" -- Richard Bradley and Liam Kofi Bright (LSE) on COVID-19 immunity testing

"If one is sure there is no loving God, there is a pretty decent argument against doing philosophy" -- Alexander Pruss (Baylor) on the relation between the true and the beneficial

"Lack of leadership doesn't just erode trust in the government, it also erodes trust between citizens" -- Max Hayward (Sheffield) on trust and current British politics

"Anti-racism work needs to be ongoing if it is to be effective" -- to help people do this, philosopher Michelle Panchuk (Murray State) compiled 50 weeks' worth of anti-racist activities

"That the analytic philosophy we have ended up with exists as a ‘sociological’ phenomenon is a very important fact about where academic philosophy has been since, and still is today" -- Christoph Schuringa (New College of the Humanities) on the various "deaths" analytic philosophy has undergone

A philosophical conversation on COVID-19 -- with Alec Walen (Rutgers), Sophia Moreau (Toronto), and Christian Barry (ANU)

In praise of aphorisms -- in their interpretation is an invitation for the readers to engage in their own philosophical enterprise – to do philosophy themselves

The Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog says farewell -- "the variety of libertarian and classical liberal views within the academy has become better known"

A new program supporting early career scholars in the humanities and humanistic social sciences -- the "Emerging Voices" Fellowship from the ACLS

Meet the cousin of security theater: "public health theater," or the deployment of "props for perpetuating the illusion that hazardous conditions are under control" -- and beware of violations of the "prime pandemic policy rule," argues Evan Selinger (RIT)

"All the things I learned in school were crap. Some of it might have been true some of it false but who could tell? You just have to start from scratch." -- Descartes' Meditations and many other philosophical works described with one-syllable words only

A series of interviews with Swedish philosophers about the pandemic and how it relates to philosophy -- interviewees include Torbjörn Tännsjö, Åsa Wikforss, and (soon) others

They "can distort as much as they illuminate" -- James Wilson (UCL) offers a thoughtful set of critiques of thought experiments in moral philosophy

Some non-human animals can do math -- Erik Nelson (Dalhousie) on what implications this may have for our understanding and treatment of them

"I don’t think it’s going to be one size fits all." -- Anthony Fauci on how colleges should operate in Fall 2020

The history of the symbol for disjunction -- Landon D.C. Elkind (Alberta) investigates

What is the philosophy of technology? -- Dan Little (University of Michigan-Dearborn) on some answers to that question

The uniformity illusion -- "a visual illusion that shows that detailed peripheral visual experience is partially based on a reconstruction of reality" (via Tom Breed)

"Far from Western philosophy being the unfolding of Absolute Spirit, it was all along… an enfolding of foreign spirits, faintly discerned, generally misunderstood" -- Justin E.H. Smith (Paris) looks at the intellectual history of the history of philosophy

The guilt of those doing fine during the pandemic -- several philosophers are consulted in this WSJ article

The University of Connecticut Foundation is starting a graduate fellowship in memory of Joel Kupperman -- Professor Kupperman died last month

Over a hundred free philosophical activities for children -- "PhiloQuests" are "a series of thinking and creative missions" from the new Institute of Philosophy, Citizenship and Youth at Université de Montréal

Reports of partisan divide are "hugely exaggerated", but to the extent it exists, "it doesn’t arise from their stupidity or our rationality" -- rather, says Neil Levy (Oxford) "it arises from the fact that we place our trust in different sources"

The US Postal Service issues an Alain Locke stamp -- he is one of four people featured in the "Voices of the Harlem Renaissance" series

Discussions of discounting the future are common in climate ethics, and it should be in pandemic ethics, too -- Eric Winsberg (South Florida) explains

A podcast aimed at discussing a "range of ideas found in South Asian philosophy" -- hosted by Malcolm Keating (Yale-NUS)

How the pandemic is affecting how people feel time -- Adrian Bardon (Wake Forest) is interviewed on WNYC's Brian Lehrer show

What would Hobbes do? -- David Lay Williams (DePaul) thinks "Hobbesian reasoning strongly advises that all calls to reopen the economy be subordinated to a focus on preserving human life."

"In many ways, Spinoza is now replacing Kant and Descartes as both the compass and the watershed of modern thought" -- Clare Carlisle (KCL) and Yitzhak Y. Melamed (JHU) on Spinoza on God and nature

How does philosophical expertise influence language comprehension? -- Eugen Fischer and Paul Engelhardt (UEA) invite professional philosophers from PhD students upward to participate in an online study

"I think often of philosophy but as one thinks of someone lost. I want to turn to her and say, 'Remember when we…'" -- Amy Olberding (Oklahoma) on how, under these conditions, "I don't really want to do philosophy"

"Ethics in Action" is a podcast features academics as well as people from industry on questions at the intersection of ethics and public policy -- it's hosted by Nir Eisikovits (University of Massachusetts, Boston)

“He believed the world must be made safe for differences” -- Kwame Anthony Appiah (Princeton) reviews three books on Franz Boas

"It really bothers me to see philosophers who have thought about this stuff for about a minute or two, begin to pontificate as if they knew it all, as if they didn’t have to do any work. It’s so arrogant" -- Talia Mae Bettcher (Cal State LA) is interviewed at What Is It Like To Be A Philosopher?

The collective dimensions of individual ethical behavior in a pandemic -- commentary from Martin Lenz (Groningen)

"Intersectionality" triggers some rightwingers, but it's an important tool for libertarianism / classical liberalism -- Jacob Levy (McGill) explains

The "How The Light Gets In" Philosophy Festival is happening later this month -- but it will be online

"If you think about this whole thing less as a school with an endowment and more as an endowment with educational benefits, our budget adjustments start to appear quite reasonable" -- your university president responds to those who've suggested the school dip into the endowment

"Tenure-track philosophy jobs are tough to come by, even in a non-pandemic year" -- CNN article on future plans disrupted by COVID-19 focuses on a philosophy graduate student

Oil's low price presents an opportunity to introduce a carbon tax -- Peter Singer & Kian Mintz-Woo (Princeton) make the case

"Left to their own devices, most capital investors will not care for the dignity of labor investors; nor will they lead the fight against environmental catastrophe. Another option is available." -- a few thousand academics see in the pandemic's lessons a call to reorganize the economy

Is pandemic panic pushing us even faster to a "Black Mirror" government-tech domination of our lives? -- until recently "public pushback was surging", but then came COVID-19 (via Hili Razinsky)

Teaching philosophy online: what worked and what didn't -- Harry Brighouse (Wisconsin) shares his experiences

"Thinking about uptake does not come naturally to bread and butter philosophers of science" -- Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) responds to Jacob Stegenga (Cambridge) on fast science and philosophy of science

"Ethical Theory Review" is a new podcast featuring interviews with philosophers about their recent work -- it's hosted by Bradford Cokelet (Kansas)

"What if I told you that as a black man living in white America I feel as if I am already dead?" -- George Yancy (Emory) on the "black reality white friend can't see" (NYT)

The top 20 universities will grow, numbers 20-50 may be ok, "but numbers 50 to 1,000 go out of business or become a shadow of themselves" -- Scott Galloway (NYU) on what the pandemic portends for higher education

A defense of Karl Popper against "confused", "bizarre", and "strange" criticisms -- Jonathan Livengood (Illinois) responds to the recent critique of Popper by Michael Huemer (Colorado)

"Sometimes, fairness can demand that we act stupid, even when we’re not" -- Stephen John (Cambridge) on autonomy, expertise, and the lockdown rules

The philosophy faculty at William Paterson University thank their students for hanging in there this term -- and talk about the value of philosophy and why they chose to go into it

The philosopher who is challenging the fundamentals of evolutionary psychology -- Subrena Smith (New Hampshire) is interviewed at Gizmodo

Interested in learning about the use of corpus methods (statistical analyses of textual data) in philosophy? -- attend a Zoom event about it that starts next week, put on by the Australasian Experimental Philosophy Group

ASMR isn't necessarily sexual, but it is a kind of pornography: intimacy pornography -- Rachel Elizabeth Fraser (Oxford) on the meaning, aesthetics, and ethics of "autonomous sensory meridian response"

Taurek and Parfit and ventilators -- Scott Hershovitz (Michigan) on whether, for doctors' decisions regarding, say, the use of ventilators, the numbers count

Hi-Phi Nation's Season 4 has started -- Barry Lam (Vassar) focused his popular philosophy podcast on issues related to crime and punishment for the season

"Armchair Opinions" is a new ask-a-philosopher type Facebook page -- it takes questions from the public and provides responses from philosopher-volunteers

"We are embodied beings, not streams of consciousnes" -- Kieran Setiya (MIT) thinks our experiences with Zoom contain lessons for us about personal identity

A new blog on the philosophy of philosophy -- from Tomasz Herok, a PhD student at Lancaster University

"Five Questions" is a new philosophy podcast -- in each episode, Kieran Setiya (MIT) asks a philosopher five questions

"Philosophy Friends!" is a series of story books introducing philosophy to young children -- by Francisco Mejia Uribe, an economist who studied philosophy and created the books for his daughter

"My husband would not survive a triage decision" -- Kathleen Dean Moore (Oregon State) teaches ethics and "would have argued against his care in theory". In theory.

Knowledge, truth, and science -- physicist Sean Carroll (CalTech) interviews philosopher Liam Kofi Bright (LSE)

A philosophy major won this year's Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing -- Ben Taub graduated from Princeton in 2014.

What To Do About Now? is a new group blog on applied political philosophy and political theory -- initiated by Hannah McHugh (UCL), it aims to give early career political theorists a platform for their more publicly-minded work

"If you are interested in grappling with hard questions and examining diverse views while considering your own beliefs, philosophy might be the right major for you" -- what U.S. News & World Report thinks readers "need to know about becoming a philosophy major"

"Drillosophy": a combination of drill (a type of hip hop music) and philosophy -- "In each of six episodes, they take a philosophical concept and break it down using metaphors thrown up in some of drill and UK rap’s most popular songs"

Season 5 of the UnMute Podcast–"The Quarantine Edition"–just dropped -- 10 new episodes featuring Myisha Cherry (UC Riverside) in conversation with different philosophers

"Reconciling two competing philosophies in the science of COVID-19" -- Jonathan Fuller (Pittsburgh) takes a closer look at two types of epidemiology

"In my final year as a professor, I created and executed a plan to start a non-academic job in project management… Here’s how I did it." -- former philosophy professor Katharine Schweitzer discusses her transition from academic to non-academic employment

"Appiah’s list started to read like a premonition" -- an article from 2010 reads like "a rundown of the most prominent and brutal vectors of Covid-19 in the US" (via Robert Long)

"Her drawings are imaginative, often elliptical responses to philosophical writings" -- the philosophical art of Maria Bussmann

"What is the appropriate governmental response in respect to holding elections during pandemic times?" -- Alexandru Volacu (Bucharest) on the "pandemic electoral trilemma"

"The informal and untraceable talk, the socializing, the comradery, and the sheer serendipity that results from being in the space space and time together…" -- videoconferenced academic events lack these, so despite their alleged advantages, Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) is not a fan

"People become misinformed because they tend to trust those they identify with" -- philosophers Cailin O’Connor & James Owen Weatherall (UC Irvine) explain with the peculiar example of hydroxychloroquine

Faculty members in the Department of English and Philosophy at Idaho State created an emergency fund for their students -- it was the idea of assistant professor of philosophy Evan Rodriguez

"A few months ago, you were talking smack about my year in a cabin. Now you’re trapped in your condo." -- Henry David Thoreau has a few words for you

Ways to be blameworthy -- a discussion at PEA Soup

A work of art that is "best described not as prescient, not before its time, but apart from time as we currently experience it" -- Interesting and thoughtful reflections from Ben Roth (Harvard) on his visit to The Lightning Field

Computer games that are "philosophically intriguing" -- a list from Helen de Cruz (SLU)

Is there progress in philosophy? -- a discussion at The Philosophers' Cocoon

AI algorithms are sometimes thought of as a corrective to human biases but may amplify them instead -- Susanna Schellenberg (Rutgers) explains

"The mental processes of crafting and rehearsing a narrative that has the credible appearance of genuine reasoning, but whose arc inevitably bends toward exculpation" -- Jason D'Cruz (Albany) on the "remarkable cognitive achievement" of rationalization

"Even now one is ashamed of resting, and prolonged reflection almost gives people a bad conscience." -- What did Nietzsche have to say about work?

"There is no more fascinating figure in early modern philosophy than…" -- someone most people haven't heard of

"If healthy volunteers, fully informed about the risks, are willing to help fight the pandemic by aiding promising research, there are strong moral reasons to gratefully accept their help." -- Peter Singer (Princeton) & Richard Yetter-Chappel (Miami) on testing COVID-19 therapies on humans

"Our goal is to inculcate ethical reasoning across the entire company" -- a profile of Will Griffin, the chief ethics officer at Hypergiant, an AI firm

"On this issue there’s an ideological wormhole that takes you from the right to the part of the left that’s concerned with standpoint epistemology" -- an interview with Spencer Case (Wuhan)

Highly charged debates, journals with high standards, "increasingly technical fine-points," and the "sharp-edged and somewhat cliquish" environment -- some reasons the field of Indian philosophy can be intimidating to a younger scholar, according to Douglas Berger (Leiden)

You may not know her name, but some ideas this philosopher discussed in the early 1900s may sound familiar -- Joel Katzav (Queensland) on Helen Huss Parkhurst's imaginative approach to radical realism

Interested in philosophy of law or the theoretical study of legal institutions and practices? -- join the Legal Philosophy Network, a new Facebook group started by Alex Guerrero (Rutgers)

What philosophical work should you do if you want to influence the rate of technological development? -- reflections from Caleb Ontiveros

"The critical ethical challenge is to render the relationship between individual agency and structural change more perspicuous" -- Vafa Ghazavi (Oxford) on how philosophers can help make sense of the pandemic's "complicated chains of harm"

Would you choose to live forever? -- a recording of a webinar with John Martin Fischer (UCR)

9 questions about the pandemic, political philosophy, policy, and more, addressed by 9 different philosophers -- at the Justice Everywhere blog

The Journal of Controversial Ideas now has a website -- edited by Jeff McMahan (Oxford), Francesca Minerva, and Peter Singer (Princeton), it is now accepting submissions

(previous discussions of the Journal)

"The same openness that enables health authorities to innovate with Bluetooth data will also permit everyone from advertisers to police to immigration officers to do the same unless new privacy laws are enacted to stop them" -- concerns about the plans of Google and Apple to help with COVID-19 contact tracing, from Evan Selinger (RIT) and Albert Fox Cahn

Information zombies, idea contagion, and retraction resistance -- Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall (UC Irvine) on the "pandemic of misinformation about COVID-19 spreading on social media sites"

Refraining from the "weaponization of contemporary analytic philosophy" -- Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) draws some lessons from Seneca

An a priori proof that there's a super-spreader in your department -- from Philosophy Defense Force Chief Roy Sorenson (Texas)

The philosophy on Pete Buttigieg's bookshelf -- Dworkin, Korsgaard, Rawls, Raz, and more (via Bruno Leipold)

In situations of despair and tragedy perhaps the best we could hope for is "accompaniment" -- Nicholaos Jones (Alabama, Huntsville) reflects on the importance of "enriching, and making manifest the value of, the other’s efforts"

"Expertise in any field must join technical knowledge in the field with certain virtues" -- a brief q&a with Elizabeth Anderson (Michigan) on expertise and democracy (via Anna Alexandrova)

Influential mathematician John Horton Conway, known for inventing the "game of life," "surreal numbers," "the free will theorem," and more, has died -- a memorial for the "magical genius" from Princeton University

"I started doubting the reality of everything, even myself. But if I didn’t exist, then how could I already have over a dozen subscribers on Spotify?" -- noted philosophers reconsider their key insights after a month of social distancing

The data regarding COVID-19 is so bad that "none of us would be able to publish a paper in a third-rate econ or poli sci journal" using it -- so, asks Jason Brennan (Georgetown), is the government's reliance on it for issuing policies & orders a sign of delegitimizing incompetence?

"Dr. Fauci is George the chemist" -- Laura Nelson on when life imitates philosophy

The Big Number Duel between Agustín Rayo (MIT) & Adam Elga (Princeton) -- a video from Numberphile (via Dmitri Gallow)

In short supply during the pandemic: masks, ventilators, and "the realization of how little we know" -- Erik Angner (Stockholm) on epistemic humility

Non-contradiction contradiction? -- or not?

"For all the puffery in calling ourselves Homo sapiens, the “wise human,” we display remarkably little wisdom, even of a prudential kind" -- David Benatar (Cape Town) on how human choices about the treatment of animals led to the pandemic

Reformulating the laws of physics in a new mathematical language in order to make sense of the passage of time -- an explanation of the recent work of physicist Nicolas Gisin

How will the pandemic change higher education? -- a collection of answers from academics, editors, administrators, and policy analysts

The philosophy and science of the television show "Devs" -- with remarks from Bill Blattner (Georgetown), Erin Flynn (Ohio Wesleyan), David Landy (San Francisco State), Ben Lennertz (Colgate), & Neal Tognazzini (Western Washington)

"One reason death can seem freshly invented in loss is because the death we find in our philosophies is not the one we find in life" -- Amy Olberding (Oklahoma) on meditates on the "the stuff of lives that have no more use for stuff"

The rectangles are indeed lined up and moving at the same speed -- a new optical illusion (via Gregg Caruso)

Are lockdowns a good way for Africa to respond to the pandemic? -- No, argues Alex Broadbent (University of Johannesburg)

"Journal Entries" is a new podcast in which researchers in philosophy and cognitive science discuss their work, motivation, and background -- it's hosted by Wesley Buckwalter (Manchester)

T.M. Scanlon on ethics, the pandemic, and his work -- in an interview along with The Good Place's Michael Schur on public radio (Scanlon's segment begins at 31:40)

The philosophical questions behind the "death rate" number -- Jonathan Fuller (Pittsburgh) on understanding the pandemic

Truth Machines -- a new presentation of a classic logic puzzle (via Matthew Ferguson)

Free audio recordings of books by Bertrand Russell and others -- from Landon D.C. Elkind (Iowa)

When humans are quiet and stay put -- what happens to the rest of the world?

A new site website is publishing English translations of Deleuze's seminar lectures at the University of Paris between 1971 and 1987 -- among other things, it is crowdsourcing recordings of the lectures (via Will Anderson)

"A year ago, 'TT or bust' was a common but ill-advised attitude toward the job market. That attitude should be unthinkable today." -- Samuel Kampa, a philosophy Ph.D., encourages others to look for work outside of academia and provides advice on how to do it

"What does his fall from such exalted heights tell us about the sorts of intellects that do—and do not—shine brightly for posterity?" -- Ray Monk (Southampton) on G.E. Moore

Why aren't academic philosophers wise? -- because they live narrow, stable lives. Or so argues Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside)

"We should resist the widespread view that political theory always has to be… addressing practical problems and giving us guidance about what to do" -- a video interview with David Estlund (Brown)

Scientists think something called "ideal glass," which may never have existed "in all of cosmic history," is the key to understanding actual glass, which apparently is a scientific mystery -- anyone else reminded of questions regarding "ideal theory" in philosophical discussions of justice?

"The demand for the sort of work I do seems to be increasing, and newly minted philosophy PhDs would be a good fit for many comparable positions" -- Jason Schukraft talks about his work at a think tank

Zoomiathan -- clever image or trenchant commentary on our willingness to accept Zoom's privacy-intrusive practices and misleading claims?

"I believe in opportunistic utopianism. Crises can provide opportunities for major breakthroughs." -- Philippe Van Parijs (UC Louvain) answers a few questions about economics, social welfare policies, and the coronavirus in The Brussels Times

A "new way of representing and thus acknowledging our extreme uncertainty can lead to serviceable practical advice" -- Liam Kofi Bright and Richard Bradley (LSE) on policy, uncertainty, and the pandemic

Talk of who is "naturally" vulnerable to Covid-19 obscures the role various institutions play in making people vulnerable to it -- commentary from Shelley Tremain

“The ability to work collaboratively, setting aside your personal academic progress, is occurring right now because it’s a matter of survival” -- at least in the sciences (NYT)

"Wondering how cleaning became a preferred form of procrastination" -- pandemic-prompted self-isolation or graduate school? A list.

The pandemic has given us a set of "natural experiments" in approaches to public health -- an interview with Jennifer Prah Ruger, director of the Health Equity and Policy Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, in The New Yorker

"Many of us feel ashamed at now having so little to contribute to the public good, especially if we were educated (as I was) entirely at the public expense" -- Les Green (Oxford) tries to understand academics' unwillingness to sacrifice work in order to help others

Terms of art -- in a new series at Aesthetics for Birds, Alex King (Buffalo) provides short definitions of words/concepts in aesthetics and philosophy of art

A ranking of countries in terms of academic freedom -- by a team that believes that "academic freedom must be resurrected as a key criterion for academic reputation and quality"

"The self-help approach to impostor syndrome is fundamentally misguided, for several interlocking reasons" -- Katherine Hawley (St. Andrews) on how our collective practices and professional environment contribute to the problem

Shakira is taking an ancient philosophy course at the University of Pennsylvania -- one of "a number of abnormal events" prompted by the pandemic

A crowdsourced list of schools that have instituted some kind of hiring freeze or pause -- compiled by Karen Kelsky (via Malcolm Keating)

"There is a logic… that governs the totality of life on earth, and human history has been much more significantly shaped by that logic than by any of the stories we have told ourselves about who we are" -- Justin E.H. Smith (Paris), who is NYC with symptoms of COVID, reflects on the pandemic

"The question is not whether to set priorities, but how to do so ethically and consistently, rather than basing decisions on individual institutions’ approaches or a clinician’s intuition in the heat of the moment" -- Ezekiel Emanuel (Penn) and others on the allocation of medical resources during the pandemic

Using Zoom for your online course? Beware "zoombombing" -- such as "racist vitriol or pornographic content shared with the group by an unwelcome user"

Finding the online teaching experience a bit clunky? -- Roy Sorenson (Texas) has an alternative, though apparently it has its downsides, too

"A cartography of impact" to help philosophers "recognize, reconcile and mobilize their professional and public role" -- how "field philosophy" looks from the point of view of Britain's Research Excellence Framework

Philoso-piece Theatre -- from Christina Van Dyke (Calvin). Part One: Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics

A new Dischord server aims to be a place where professional philosophers can share and receive academic support and advice -- "We hope that through the channel, people from socio-economically different backgrounds will be able to seek help with setting up online resources for the very first time" (via Sahana Rajan)

"In Africa, millions will starve if the global economy enters a protracted downturn" -- Alex Broadbent and Benjamin Smart (Johannesburg) on the challenges of knowing what anti-pandemic measures to take

The COVID-19 Open Research Map -- a means by which to interactively explore research related to COVID-19, coronavirus, and SARS-CoV-2 published since January 1, 2020

A philosophy professor is part of a group of parents who take turns providing an online educational experience for their kids -- Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin (Sam Houston State) shares how he has introduced them to philosophical questions about identity

Philosophers on Medicine -- a series of conversations with various philosophers, hosted by Jonathan Fuller (Pitt)

"Molecular jitter in the system" -- Nature or nurture? It turns out there may be a third option: random "noise"

A helpful visualization about the value of social distancing and staying home -- created by Siouxsie Wiles, a microbiologist and science communicator based in New Zealand

"Much has been said comparing the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change with the growing consensus of public health officials about how to respond to Covid-19" -- "We think this comparison is inapt and dangerous," write Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) and Eric Winsberg (South Florida)

The APA will be holding a webinar for those who are moving their courses online -- "Teaching Philosophy Online: Advice and Tips from Experienced Instructors" is taking place Tuesday, March 24th at 3pm Eastern time

Washingtonian Magazine now has a coronavirus ethicist column -- Karen Stohr and Dan Sumalsy, both at Georgetown, will be alternating as the ethicist on call

"JSTOR and our participating publishers are making an expanded set of content freely available to our participating institutions where students have been displaced due to COVID-19" -- they're working to get books as well as journal articles available

"The skeptics and pessimists need the optimists, just like the sick need the well. What happens when the whole planet falls into one category? It’s a disaster either way." -- Helena de Bres (Wellesley), a "non-joiner" and "anti-silver-lining-er" who likes the darkness of philosophy, comes to appreciate the light

The ethics of social distancing during the pandemic -- Wired seeks guidance from T.M. Scanlon (Harvard), Debbie Roberts (Edinburgh), and Max Hayward (Sheffield)

How irrational are humans? -- Kevin Dorst (Oxford, Pitt) brings a skeptical eye to the irrationalist picture we get from behavioral economics & social psychology

What Lucretius taught us about pandemics -- Stephen Greenblatt in The New Yorker

Peter J. King, formerly a lecturer of philosophy at Oxford, has received a 7-month prison sentence -- the sentence follows a conviction for possession of indecent images of children

Ethicists on who gets treated when hospitals are overcrowded -- Olivia Goldhill at Quartz asks several philosophers their views

"99% of college professors say that developing critical thinkers is the most important thing they do and they’re already doing it. But 75% of employers say the kids they hire after 16 years of school don’t have those skills." -- the first episode of a new podcast series features an interview with education researcher Jonathan Haber

Should the schools close because of the coronavirus? One way to turn that question into a lesson plan -- an argument map for the both "yes" and "no" positions and a link to discussion question (via Aidan Kestigian)

Philosophers on videogames -- GamesRadar asks philosophers: what topics should the new installment in the BioShock series address?

"When race scholars ask whether or not race is modern, they end up answering six entirely different questions" -- Adam Hochman (Macquarie) on what we can learn from disentangling these questions

"How could he see so clearly the need to respect the vulnerable and then abuse those under his spiritual care?" -- reflections on philosopher & theologian Jean Vanier, who was found to have sexually abused six women, from a philosopher who once worked for him

Check out the Aesthetics Research Lab -- a "digital think tank" focused on "theoretical and practical issues in aesthetics" run by Michael Spicher (Boston U.)

"I don’t think there is anything in the nature of Jewish philosophy that makes it more amenable to Continental philosophy than to Anglo-American analytic philosophy, which in any event is a false dichotomy" -- an interview with Daniel Frank (Purdue) on a wide range of subjects in Jewish philosophy

How is the market like the soul? They both have the "dual quality of being both an obvious illusion and the most real thing there is" -- Justin E.H. Smith (Paris) on philosophy and investing

"The first thing I would stress to those of you new to online instruction is that instructor presence is a big deal in online teaching: -- Fritz McDonald (Oakland) inaugurates a new series at The Philosophers' Cocoon on transitioning to online teaching

The brief life and enormous legacy of Frank Ramsey -- Cheryl Misak (Toronto) & Steven Methven (Oxford) on the BBC's Arts & Ideas, plus a discussion of philosophers & travel with Emily Thomas (Durham)

The threat of constant surveillance on college campuses -- Evan Selinger (RIT) and Evan Greer (Fight for the Future) on the use of facial recognition technology at universities

"The last generation is going to have to be composed of people better and braver than we are now—and it is our job to help them end up that way" -- Agnes Callard (Chicago) on the end of humanity

"Philosophers who change their mind often are not deficient in belief, and don’t lack sufficient conviction, because no conviction need be required" -- Alexandra Plakias (Hamilton) on philosophers who change their mind

The key to emotional intelligence is "emotional granularity" -- Lisa Feldman Barrett (Northeastern) explains

Some history, methods, and benefits of online conferences -- timely work from Nick Byrd (Florida State)

We are overqualified for certain forms of cognitive labor, and underqualified for others, and recognizing this is part of understanding the threat artificial intelligence may pose to us -- Ken Taylor submitted this essay on artificial intelligence to Boston Review a few weeks before he died

What's wrong with child labor? -- Nicolás Brando (Queen's University Belfast) looks at the arguments

The takeover of Philosophical Review by analytic philosophers in the early 20th Century is correlated with a reduction in the number of articles it published by women -- more historically- and sociologically-informed analysis of philosophy from Joel Katzav (Queensland)

The cubes are not rotating -- a new one for your optical illusions file

If it is almost impossible to raise good kids, don't have them. And in 2020, it is almost impossible to raise good kids -- a once would-be mother of 8 and bioethicist Thalia Arawi (American University of Beirut) on how she became an anti-natalist (via Owen Schaefer)

"Western societies continue to rely upon an ethics of membership that we are less and less able to articulate" -- Will Kymlicka (Queens) on human rights and membership rights

Another philosophy-centric television show? -- "Devs," from the maker of the movie "Ex Machina," is a show about free will, morality, and "the intersection of philosophical thinking and scientific logic"

"I always know things are not going well in my personal life if I’m thinking about Nietzsche at 4:00 a.m." -- an in-depth interview with Kathleen Higgins (UT Austin) at What Is It Like To Be A Philosopher?

The connection between philosophy and travel -- as explored by Emily Thomas (Durham)

When it comes to the origins of the coronavirus, "vital human interests so clearly run parallel to the interests of nonhuman animals" -- Peter Singer (Princeton) and Paola Cavalieri argue for shutting down "wet markets"

A philosopher who had to embed her ideas and arguments in poetry and plays to get around her censors -- Adriana Clavel-Vázquez (Oxford) and Sergio A. Gallegos (John Jay) tell us about the work of Juana Inés de la Cruz

"There was footing to be found in Aurelius’ instruction ‘not to be overwhelmed by what you imagine, but just do what you can and should’" -- a moving account from Jamie Lombardi (Bergen Community College) on how she dealt with her husband's unexpected death

A call for "a groundswell of insurrection against the ableism in philosophy that continues to subordinate disabled philosophers, especially disabled philosophers of disability" -- from Shelley Lynn Tremain

Lao-tzu, Plato, and "Parasite" -- David Lay Williams (DePaul) brings ancient philosophy to bear on the award-winning movie

"List three beliefs held by eliminative materialists," "Explain why more people aren't solipsists," and other questions -- an old but good philosophy quiz from P.D. Magnus (Albany) and Ryan Hickerson (Western Oregon)

Are principles of justice defective in virtue of being unrealistic? -- David Estlund (Brown) in conversation with Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)

"Our intuitions about the meaning of this word are highly unreliable" -- Matthew Chrisman (Edinburgh) on the meaning of "ought" and other metaethical matters

"John Rawls: It takes you three hours to explain how to divide a group check" -- Alex Baia explains what your favorite philosopher tells us about you

"One of the main lessons of the 20th century is that good things can be pursued in terrible ways" -- Alex Guerrero (Rutgers) on why Sanders should stop praising Castro

An interesting philosophy class assignment to develop students' listening skills -- pairs of students discuss a topic, record the discussion, and then separately write up reports on it in which the emphasis is explaining their interlocutor's view

"In subsequent generations the Pythagoreans probably capitulated and accepted the name, as happened with ‘freak’ or ‘queer’" -- how philosophers came to be called "philosophers"

A lecturer in philosophy at Pembroke College of Oxford University has pled guilty to "three counts of producing indecent photographs of a child" -- Peter King, who authored a 2008 article in Ethical Theory & Moral Practice on child pornography, will be sentenced next month

How can public philosophy contribute to philosophical progress? -- Ian Olasov (CUNY) looks at three possible ways

When we seek someone who truly understands us, what are we looking for? -- Iskra Fileva (Colorado) has started blogging at Psychology Today

The force of nonviolence -- an interview with Judith Butler (Berkeley) at the Partially Examined Life podcast

Physicist Sean Carroll regularly interviews philosophers -- recent guests on his Mindscape podcast have included Laurie Paul (Yale), Kwame Anthony Appiah (Princeton), Jenann Ismael (Columbia), & Daniel Dennett (Tufts)

Teaching "On Bullshit" -- C. Thi Nguyen and Imree Parma (Utah Valley) share their experiences

How did the term "western philosophy" come into use? -- Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) does some digging

A map of mathematics -- an annotated visualization of the field as practiced by mathematicians

"At 10 a.m. the Chinese army surrounding the city sealed it off, trapping me and about 9 million others inside" -- Spencer Case (Wuhan University) recounts his "escape from Wuhan"

Jeremy Bentham has been moved -- and apparently the kids call him "Jezza"

Morally disgusted by something? -- maybe a ginger pill would help

A democracy, but without professional politicians -- The New Yorker on "open democracy", an idea developed by Hélène Landemore (Yale)

The rhetorical trick of using conditional arguments to make pseudoscience seem scientific -- Regina Rini (York) in the TLS

"We are stuck here now, and we don't know when we will be free" -- Xiao Ouyang, associate professor of philosophy at Wuhan University (via Joel Walmsley)

Is the philosopher's love of disagreement tied to the idea that we form our personal identities in part by setting ourselves apart from others? -- Martin Lenz (Groningen) on a way in which philosophical disagreement may be personal

Extremism may be best understood as a complex of psychological factors rather than as a type of political doctrine or affiliation -- Quassim Cassam (Warwick) in The New Statesman

Feminism would be improved if it was less caught up with backward-looking, retributivist anger -- Martha Nussbaum (Chicago) on oppression, feminism, and varieties of anger

Wondering Freely is a new philosophy blog -- by Helen De Cruz (SLU)

Zeno's paradoxes -- today's "daily obsession" at Quartz

Substantial update to the Diversity Reading List -- 351 texts by underrepresented philosophers recently added

"After Dinner Conversation" is a website that publishes original short stories aimed at prompting conversations about ethics -- each story is accompanied by discussion questions

"Where moral improvement of the world is concerned, concepts that don’t answer to the mixed nature of human experience won’t be effective at steering that experience" -- Amy Olberding (Oklahoma) thinks that when discussing anger, it's a mistake to "conceptually isolate it from other emotions"

"Stranger Apologies" is a new blog on politics, polarization, and (ir)rationality from Kevin Dorst (Oxford) -- in this post he argues that the central problem of today's political discourse is not polarization, but demonization that begins with seeing our opponents as irrational

Theorizing racial justice -- video of the 2020 Tanner Lecture on Human Values at the University of Michigan by Charles Mills (CUNY)

"Trial By Trolley" is a "party game of moral dilemmas and trolley murder!" -- a video overview of the game (via Pete Mandik)

A discussion of panpsychism -- between novelist Philip Pullman, who makes use of the idea in his fiction, and philosopher Philip Goff (Durham), who defends it in a recent book

On philosophizing about disability -- Elizabeth Barnes (Virginia) appears on the Embrace the Void podcast

Planet Word is a new museum about language -- it's opening in Washington, DC this spring

The Journal of Social Philosophy has published its 50th Anniversary issue -- all of the articles in it are freely accessible (for a few months)

The work, achievements, and influence of Frank Ramsey, who died at age 26 -- Cheryl Misak (Toronto) shares some highlights from her biography of the mathematician, philosopher, and economist

Are "near-death experiences" real? Probably. Are they accurate, though? -- John Martin Fischer (UCR) on how to understand and appreciate near-death experiences

"Why should I as a professional philosopher engage in this activity? Simply put, because I have become a better philosopher by doing it" -- Cristina Cammarano (Salisbury University) on teaching philosophy to children

"Line Edit" is a show about writing short pieces for wide audiences about the big questions -- its latest episode features S. Matthew Liao (NYU) talking about his piece on the ethics of Facebook

Even if the left weaponizes compassion and the right weaponizes free speech, both compassion and free speech are important values -- Robert M. Simpson (UCL) on protecting our morals during political warfare

"Great philosophers embrace bizarre views because our ordinary commonsense understanding of the world is so radically deficient that no non-bizarre view is defensible" -- Eric Schwitzgebel (Riverside) defends the great philosophers

How pregnant migrants face "social illegalization" even if they cross the border legally -- Amy Reed-Sandoval (UNLV) on "the larger forces that permit this mistreatment to occur" (via David Forman)

Debates over "whether sex is fixed and binary or complex and changeable, appear to be about scientific truthiness. But they are really part of the for-the-moment unsettled process of world-building" -- Anne Fausto-Sterling (Brown) on how "the science of sex and gender will not settle itself until we, as diverse societies, settle the substantive social questions"

"Being 'great' in the sense of 'the Great Philosophers' isn’t really about being good at thinking" -- Michael Huemer (Colorado) on why the great philosophers were bad philosophers

"Despite the efforts of ‘science’, two definitions of death live side by side to this day" -- Sharon Kaufman (UCSF) on the complications of death

A short film about Agnes Heller is currently in production -- learn more about it and see how you can help

There's a new public philosophy series at the TLS: "The Morals of the Story" -- authored by Regina Rini (York), her first installment concerns the coronavirus

Academic Placement Data and Analysis continues its comparisons of philosophy PhD programs -- Miami, DePaul, Georgetown, and Arizona are among the recent programs looked at

"Science has not refuted free will, after all. In fact, it actually offers arguments in its defense" -- Christian List (LSE) on how "an agent’s future choices can be open at a psychological level even if the underlying physics is deterministic"

"To further discussion on philosophical problems that arise in the study of games" -- did you know about the Game Philosophy Network?

"I believe most of these people are genuinely confused about how science works" -- Sabine Hossenfelder (Frankfurt) thinks the public--especially climate change deniers--need to hear more from philosophers of science

Generous Questions is a podcast "asking philosophers what they're up to, and then asking them to explain it some more" -- their latest episode is with Clare Moriarty (KCL)

Kripke on interpreting Wittgenstein -- a video interview at IAI

Academia is “the last bulwark of serious evidence-based discussion" -- a profile of Onora O'Neill in Times Higher Ed

A new venue for "work on subjects like philosophy, politics, and literature which is nuanced and original, but not bound by the stylistic conventions of academic publication" -- The Oxonian Review introduces a new "Essays" section, and the first contribution is by Paul Lodge (Oxford)

What we can learn from the Neverending Story? -- Helen De Cruz (SLU) on the novel's philosophical lessons

"It’s not just me that matters, not just “us”—a particular group of human beings with whom one identifies—that matters, and not just human beings that matter" -- an interview with Marion Hourdequin (Colorado College)

"The lack of racial diversity allows for more open and honest philosophizing" -- Brandon Hogan (Howard) is interviewed about teaching at an historically black university

"Because people take subjectivism to be such a wildly implausible view they make no effort to see the world from a subjectivist's point of view" -- Liam Kofi Bright (LSE) on taking subjectivism seriously

Imagine if you could only apply for one job at a time, and the interview process consisted of four days of exams -- Nastassja Pugliese (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) explains what it's like to be a philosopher in Brazil

Bertrand Russell's "theoretical antidote to the irrational, sectarian vitriol between European nations" was logic and analytic philosophy -- Alexander Klein (McMaster) on the connection between politics and metaphilosophy, and the value of the history of philosophy

"Illegitimately devaluing others’ goals and ignoring their opinions—this is the essence of being a jerk," a vice that "works to prevent its own detection" -- Eric Schwitzgebel (Riverside) provides a partial classification of academic jerks. What types did he miss? (Thanks to The Chronicle's Evan Goldstein for the link)

The philosophers who advised The Good Place got cameos in the show's finale -- Click for a photo of Pamela Hieronymi (UCLA) and Todd May (Clemson) on set with Kristin Bell, but if you don't want spoilers don't read any of the article

Instead of asking students to write a short essay on their exam, how about have them develop a "structured question"? -- Martin Lenz (Groningen) on the teaching of philosophical questioning

Regulative epistemology: the aim is "not to describe what knowledge is, but to make people into better thinkers who are more aware of their cognitive limitations" -- John Schwenkler (Florida State) looks at the ideas of Nathan Ballantyne (Fordham)

Most firms have a CEO. How about a CMP? -- a call for business to hire "chief moral philosophers"

What's wrong with "addicts"? -- Maggie Taylor (Colorado) on the importance of distinctions between persons and their conditions

Neural Mechanisms Online, a site about the philosophy of neuroscience, holds periodic webinars -- up next is one with Ruth Millikan (Connecticut)

The moral is political -- judgments of moral responsibility are political artifacts, so "we can’t treat moral responsibility as an ‘apolitical’ endeavour," argues Michelle Ciurria (Missouri, St. Louis)

Coronavirus on your mind? Or the flu, for that matter? -- philosopher Dana Tulodziecki (Purdue) on the origins of hand-washing as a public health measure (via John Brunero)

The Journal of the Philosophy of Emotion has published its first issue -- it's open-access

Why are the answers scientism gives us to some big philosophical questions hard for us to accept? -- Alex Rosenberg (Duke) identifies the culprit: the theory of mind

"I became even more intrigued when I began to get the feeling that Wilfrid was seducing me, just by the use of opportunistic double entendres, sprinkled ever so casually amongst the clever tracery of the history of ideas" -- recollections from Wilfrid Sellars' late second wife about their relationship and his death (via Leiter Reports)

The indie rock band that's 75% philosophers has a new album out today -- check out "Better, Sometimes" by The Counterfactuals

"While contemporary academics worry about the dearth of women in the history of philosophy, George Eliot’s philosophical accomplishments too often go unacknowledged" -- Clare Carlisle (KCL) on why the novelist should be remembered as a philosopher, too

Newly discovered home audio recordings of Bertrand Russell -- "the tapes offer new insights into his life, humour and behind-the-scenes influences" reports the BBC

Political disagreement is greatest among the "cognitively sophisticated", but why? -- one explanation, that cognitive sophistication magnifies politically biased processing of new information, is challenged in a new study (via Lisa Bortolotti)

On speaking ill of the dead -- Iskra Fileva (Colorado) in the NYT on what can be learned from controversies surrounding the discussion of Kobe Bryant in the wake of his recent death (via What's Wrong)

"Low income itself is a key, and arguably the major, cause of the debilitating outcomes in cognition, emotional stability, and health for poor children" -- a survey of some recent research by Jeff Madrick

"As a public service, I am here to explain to you that no, you probably do not agree with Popper at all — unless you are completely out of your mind" -- Michael Huemer (Colorado) on Karl Popper

Computer modeling in philosophy -- a special issue of the open-access journal "Open Philosophy" (link takes you the issue's introduction)

"A collection of resources for higher education faculty and administrators to use in making the case for the value of studying the humanities as an undergraduate" -- the "Study the Humanities" toolkit (via the Blog of the APA)

“There’s a temptation once you know how to solve a philosophical problem, to make everything into a philosophical problem. But lots of problems don’t have [that] shape.” -- Amia Srinivasan (Oxford) is profiled in the Financial Times

The varieties of theories about time travel and causation represented in fictional works -- by Henry Reich of MinutePhysics

"Certainly many misdeeds do occur because of the misure of science. But I worry that they also presupposes that when science is functioning properly there are no misdeeds" -- Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) responds to Chirimuuta and Dietrich

"Heroism is aspirational, and worthy of admiration, but it is a pedagogical, moral and historical error to spend our moral capital insisting on it" -- It is enough to refrain from welcoming and helping with the oppression and murder, argues Rivka Weinberg (Scripps) in the NYT

On the Cofnas paper, "the latest entry into the jam-tomorrow-never-jam-today of RDI [Race Difference in Intelligence]" research -- John Jackson (Michigan State) on how RDI research "was never about pure science," but embedded in an "ugly history" of racist social policy

"One thing I believe in, to the bottom of my heart, is that we should elect more scientists to the US Congress" -- Martha Nussbaum (Chicago) is interviewed about her work and politics in The Nation

Suppose belonging to a certain demographic group correlates with being 100 times more likely than others to commit a crime. Should this be admissible evidence in a court of law? -- a discussion of an argument from Marcello Di Bello and Collin O’Neill (Lehman)

"Anger implicates all of us in moral corruption… How much immorality should we permit ourselves?" -- Agnes Callard (Chicago), in the lead essay in a new Boston Review forum on anger

Love and lust in Lolita -- Jennifer Frey (South Carolina) & Becca Rothfeld (Harvard) on "the tensions we readers are forced to navigate between the awesome beauty of Nabokov’s prose and the ugly perversion that is the central focus of our attention in the novel"

The “Twitter presidency” versus democracy -- Boris Litvin (Stetson) on Rousseau on Trump on Twitter

Bond evolution, breaking and formation -- recorded on film, at the atomic scale, for the first time

A former philosophy professor keeps a journal during the zombie apocalypse -- that's the central element in the new "ethical guidebook" from Bryan Hall (Regis), subtitled, "how to keep your brain without losing your heart"

A woman pretending to be Alan Turing daughter's stole his doctoral degree, a medal of his, and other pieces of memorabilia from an archive in England in 1984 -- Federal officials just announced that she was caught (2 years ago), and the materials recovered, in Boulder, Colorado

An intellectual history of culinary philosophies and a sketch of a food ethos for today -- "there was never a golden age", says Rachel Laudan

The meaning of nihilism -- Nolen Gertz (Twente) distinguishes nihilism from other concepts in its vicinity, such as pessimism, cynicism, and apathy

"What It Is Like To Be" is an anamorphic sculpture by Thomas Medicus made of 144 hand-painted glass strips -- it was inspired by Thomas Nagel's "What Is It Like To Be A Bat?". Watch the video. (via Colossal)

The impeachment of Donald Trump is a teaching moment -- especially if you're teaching Rousseau, says David Williams (DePaul)

"Who, on Earth or on distant planets, would aim to engineer consciousness into AI systems themselves?" -- Susan Schneider (Connecticut) on why there may be nothing that it's like to be a superintelligent alien

New research on the logical operations that the brain's individual dendritic compartments can perform -- one possible upshot: "Brains may be far more complicated than we think"

A summer institute to help philosophy instructors design courses that convey the value of philosophy -- put on by the Council of Independent Colleges, it is directed by Ned Hall (Harvard)

"The protests have been extraordinarily popular and remarkably effective—not in spite of but because of… tactics of uncivil disobedience" -- Candice Delmas (Northeastern) on the uncivil disobedience of the Hong Kong protestors

"Philosophy has a profound impact on me" -- an interview with Cixin Liu, author of the tremendous Three-Body Problem science fiction trilogy

"If our actions are harming other animals, then we have a responsibility to try to reduce or repair these harms" -- Jeff Sebo (NYU) on what humans owe to animals

"At 97, he wondered whether he’d been deceiving himself about the meaning of life and death" -- a documentary about philosopher Herbert Fingarette made during the last few months of his life

"What else from philosophy influenced the construction and design of LinkedIn?" -- Tyler Cowen (GMU) interviews Reid Hoffman, who has an MA in philosophy and who helped develop PayPal, LinkedIn, & other ventures (via Robert Long)

"The Repugnant Conclusion has become one of the most popular and famous results of modern moral philosophy. What seems to be much less well known is the story of how it came to be" -- Simon Beard (Cambridge) on Derek Parfit

Human and animal minds -- Peter Carruthers (Maryland) is guest-blogging at Brains this week

Anti-plagiarism norms tend to over-run their justifications -- (via Agnes Callard)

The ethics of migration -- Adam Hosein (Northeastern) talks with Jack Weinstein (North Dakota) on the public radio show, "Why?"

Scientists use frog cells to build the first "living robots" -- this "new form of life" has "enormous potential" but it also "raises a bevy of ethical questions"

"The popular perception that strong AI will eventually grow out of our control risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, despite the present reality that weak AI is very much the product of human deliberation and decision making" -- Annette Zimmerman, Elena Di Rosa, and Hochan Kim (Princeton) on the important choices we face *now* regarding this technology

What does "Western" mean in "Western philosophy"? -- Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) on Russell's history

The editors of the revamped Philosophy describe "changes to the editorial process" at the journal -- they're "intended to bring it more in line with current peer-review practices"

What to think of "near death experiences"? -- John Martin Fischer (UCR) in a lively video interview

Equality of what? -- Joshua Rothman surveys some varieties of egalitarianism in The New Yorker

"Philosophers" was a category in the "Greatest of All Time" edition of Jeopardy! last night -- do you know the right questions?

"I find it difficult to believe that exposure to relentless criticism is truth-conducive" -- Martin Lenz (Groningen), whose worry about philosophical practices "is not that we keep too many options on the table; it is that we cast aside ideas too soon"

Handouts for introductory philosophy students on various philosophical skills -- from Neil Mehta (Yale-NUS)

The "Ask a Philosopher" booth comes to Philly -- The Philadelphia Inquirer has the story

Contemporary moral philosophy "is riddled with metaphysically unexplained claims about reasons and our responsiveness to them—about, in other words, reasons as exercising a power to move" -- an interview with Thomas Pink (KCL)

"I just have to give the rock credit for what it did out there. In all of our matchups, it’s used a similar strategy, and, I have to admit, it’s working." -- sports coverage of Sisyphus, in The New Yorker (via Andrew Mills)

"Do we really want to encourage first-generation college students from low-income families to play a 1-in-10 winner lottery with their lives?" -- Jason Brennan (Georgetown) on why we should be wary of recruiting students from low-income backgrounds into academia

Minds, patterns, and the scientific image -- Daniel Dennett (Tufts) in conversation with Sean Carroll (Caltech)

"The machine sees the world in a different way than we see the world. Just like an artist does." -- Arthur I. Miller (UCL) is interviewed about machine-created art by someone skeptical of its value

"I am the last philosopher left in the [House of] Lords." -- Baroness Onora O’Neill (Cambridge) discusses her work in philosophy and government in an interview at Justice Everywhere

Was killing Suleimani justified? -- Peter Singer (Princeton) takes up the question

How academic organizations can benefit from shared, multi-institutional collaborative academic event calendars -- an example of the History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) ecosystem, from Lynn Chiu (Bordeaux/CNRS, St. Andrews)

Students protest tenure denial of assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago -- the students seem to think he was denied tenure because of the kind of philosophy he specializes in

"When the relatively uncomplicated reduction of the carbon footprint of the American military is compared to the complexity of other attempts to decarbonize… the former seems like startlingly low hanging fruit" --Eric Winsberg (South Florida) on climate change & the military

"The judge ruled that ethical vegans should be entitled to similar legal protections in British workplaces as those who hold religious beliefs" -- Ethical veganism qualifies as a "philosophical belief" for the purposes of UK anti-discrimination law

"Even if true neutrality is ultimately impossible, it is a terrible overreaction to give up on the aspiration to balance." -- Daniel Callcut on what the philosophy classroom can teach us about journalism

"Shaking free of the pedagogy of fear in Israel and restoring honor to children’s questions demands a fundamental conceptual change within education in Israel' -- Arie Kizel (Haifa) argues for teaching philosophy to children

The value of manners -- John Schwenkler (Florida State) looks at Amy Olberding's work on civility

Alex King (Buffalo), Daniel Star (Boston), and others on the best art of the past decade -- at Aesthetics for Birds

For the purposes of determining who has human rights, is "substantially human" enough? -- human rights in the era of biotechnology that mixes non-human and human cells

A comparison of academia in the US and the UK -- by Richard Yetter Chappell (Miami), who much prefers the US system

Why run a philosophy summer camp, and how does one do it? -- Adam Waggoner (Michigan) and Charlie Kurth (Western Michigan) share their experiences and what they've learned

Problems with wishes -- Charlie Huenemann (Utah State) converses with the genie in the bottle

Liar paradox nightmare -- via Tanya Kostochka

"Psychology is an indeterministic science, and many self-proclaimed naturalists in the philosophy of mind are statistical illiterates. Without an understanding of the relevant statistical evidence, confirmation bias is a real risk." -- an interview with Mark Kalderon (UCL)

The search for the part of the brain that is "the seat of consciousness" -- lessons from the study of the claustrum

Is it possible to overdo democracy? -- Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt) discusses why the answer is yes on the Democracy Works podcast

"Buddies of mine who I love, they say things like; “how are things up there with the liberal snowflakes?” Let me assure you, I have not met one kid who fits that description." -- a 52 year-old Navy veteran, currently a freshman at Yale, reports on his experience

"Unquestioned teleological bullshit" -- Martin Lenz (Groningen) on a recent account of progress in philosophy

Climate change will force people from their homelands -- Matthew Lister (Deakin) looks the various forms such migration will take and some possible responses to it

Oxford University press temporarily gives free access to the articles in its journals that were most popular in 2019 -- (via Edouard Machery)

Philosophy job market wiki -- incomplete and possibly misleading, but some people believe its existence is better than the nothing they often hear from hiring departments

The new Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Australasia (UPJA) has just published its inaugural issue -- it's the first undergraduate philosophy journal run by students from the Australasian region

Cambridge University Press is offering free access to some of the articles and chapters it published this past year -- check out their "Philosophy Highlights" (via Andy Lamey)

"Silicon Valley’s vigorous promotion of 'ethical AI' has constituted a strategic lobbying effort, one that has enrolled academia to legitimize itself" -- the author asserts that "the majority of well-funded work on 'ethical AI' is aligned with the tech lobby’s agenda"

"There is something wrong if we systematically accept papers we can find no fault with but that don't stir our imagination, whereas the papers with holes but new ideas get shot down by objections" -- Helen De Cruz (SLU) thinks academic philosoph should make more room for wonder

Laws of nature, causation, and more -- a conversation between philosopher Ned Hall (Harvard) and physicist Sean Carroll (Caltech)

"Students were repeatedly reminded that they should begin the design process by asking, 'What do *other* users need?'" -- Evan Selinger (RIT) and Albert Fox Cahn are teaching future engineers & designers how to build ethics into their ideas from the start

Self-driving Mercedes cars will be programmed to save their drivers, not pedestrians and occupants of other vehicles, in potential crash situations. -- the moral costs "will be outweighed by the fact that cars will be better drivers overall"

A call for philosophers to appreciate not just arguments, but the experience of philosophical ideas in a diversity of forms -- Martin Lenz (Groningen) directs us to meditations, examples, stories, perceptions, etc.

The 2019 Optical Illusion of the Year -- it's the "Dual Axis Illusion" by Frank Force (via Kottke)

Grad student unionization is crucial for addressing the mental health crisis among graduate students -- so argue philosophy graduate students Sebastian Ramirez and Kelly Swope (Vanderbilt) in Times Higher Ed

Philosophers and others list their top TV shows of the 2010's --

"Positing theories is not confirming theories. Traditional philosophy tries to pretend positing and confirming are the same thing by sliding intuition into the equation as a source of putative evidence." -- one of a few provocative remarks in a recent interview of Michael Shaffer (St. Cloud State)

Can you produce a philosophical argument that convinces real research participants to donate a surprise bonus of $10 to charity at rates higher than control? -- if so, you could win $500 for yourself and $500 for the charity of your choice

"She Speaks: Academic Muslimahs" is a podcast hosted by philosopher Saba Fatima (Southern Illinois) -- it just concluded its first season

Do you have a lot of books checked out from the university library? -- not compared to this professor, you don't

"Duck season!" "Rabbit season!" "Duck Season!" "Rabbit Season!" -- clever art by UC Davis philosophy graduate student Megan Parks (via Zoe Drayson)

Students think Avital Ronell, who NYU found responsible for sexually harassing one of her graduate students, got off too lightly with a 1-year suspension -- a group of them attempted to read a statement to her and are calling for her to be fired (via Caroline Bowman)

Philosophers and others on their favorite writing (outside of academic philosophy) of the 2010s -- part of the Aesthetic for Birds Decade-Best series

"There are countlessly many biological distinctions we could make, but do not, because there is no social need to do so" -- once again Justin E.H. Smith (Paris) looks beyond boundaries most of us don't realize constrain our thought, here, on "women" and species

"The root problem is that it is just too easy for us, the professors, to spend other people’s money" -- Tim Wu (Columbia) on using expensive textbooks

Virtues and the microbiome -- new research on how microbes affect their hosts' fearfulness

"Technology has displaced religion as the main driver of passive nihilism" -- a brief interview with Nolen Gertz (Twente)

"Modesty involves breaking out of a way of experiencing life rooted in comparing yourself with others" -- an insightful take on modesty from Nicolas Bommarito (Buffalo)

Existentialist Tarot cards -- created by Melanie McQuitty (Los Angeles Pierce College)

It looks like polarization, but it's more like an inchworm: both sides are adopting more progressive views on moral issues, just at a different pace -- Delia Baldassarri (NYU) on culture wars (via MR)

With whom may a search committee share a candidate's letters of recommendation -- a discussion at PEA Soup

"In its public interactions, philosophy is in danger of being at once too conservative and too radical for the tastes of society" -- "But it’s not as if philosophers lack resources to deal with such problems," argue Robert Frodeman and Evelyn Brister (RIT)

"If life without death has no value and meaning, and if life with death has a value and meaning that death itself eventually takes away, then this signals one of the greatest tragedies of human existence" -- Adrian Moore (Oxford) on immortality

Cricket–the sport–and moral philosophy -- really just for people who are into cricket and moral philosophy

Do grad school grades matter? -- a discussion at The Philosophers' Cocoon

"Our findings suggest that there is no single clear path to a faculty job offer" -- a study of the academic STEM job market. Is there one of these for philosophy? (via Nathan Ballantyne)

Reductivism and other topics in the philosophy of war -- Helen Frowe (Stockholm) interviewed by Daniel Rhodes at Epoché Magazine

Was Camus murdered by the KGB? -- a new book makes the case: “They rigged the tyre with a tool that eventually pierced it when the car was travelling at high speed”

"Women come in all sorts of different shapes and sizes… Every elite athlete has competitive advantages. Some are physical… Other advantages are social or economic." -- philosopher & champion track cyclist Rachel McKinnon (College of Charleston), a transgender woman, on accusations she cheats by competing in women's races

When a representative of the queen mentions the "space-time continuum," it may be time to call a philosopher of physics -- Macleans asks Christopher Smeenk (Western) to explain

Learn more about the Underrepresented Philosophy of Science Scholars (UPSS) Initiative -- a program of the Philosophy of Science Association

The landscape on which liberty and equality are depicted in opposition demands scrutiny -- David Faraci and Philip Goff (Durham) on inequality and ownership of land and resources

"I'm very comfortable with Peter [Singer's] way of thinking", says Paul Simon -- the singer is helping Singer promote the new edition of his book, "The Life You Can Save"

Best films of the 2010's -- lists from several philosophers and others

Neuroscientists and a novelist on the nature of consciousness -- a look at their recent books, in The New Yorker

"The best set of principles for judging whether statistics are being communicated in a trustworthy fashion come from the philosopher Onora O’Neill" -- Teddy Groves (a philosophy PhD and statistician at Novo Nordisk) on transparency in political polling (via Liam Bright)

The CEO of Kitu Life was feeling uneasy about the bro-culture at his firm, so he hired a philosopher to help -- that philosopher is Reid Blackman, a philosophy prof-turned-"ethical risk" consultant

"On average, replication success rate was 30% and effect sizes were 38 times smaller than those in the original study." -- Jonathan Haidt's "moral foundations" theory, correlating particular moral concepts with particular political positions, faces replication problems

"I sometimes characterise my work as a midwife for philosophy—I don’t do the philosophy, but I help bring it into the world!" -- an interview with Elizabeth Hannon (of The Forum for Philosophy and the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science)

"There’s no general algorithm for designing experiments to guard them against failure" -- Philip Kitcher (Columbia) provides an informative review of a pair of books on problems with biomedical research (via Dan Weiskopf)

"Practical Suggestions for My Cis Colleagues in Philosophy" -- some advice, plus a list of resources, from Ray Briggs (Stanford)

"The thing that’s really key to me is that my money could do 100 times more good for other people than it did for me" -- an interview with Toby Ord (Oxford), who founded Giving What We Can

"Virtue signalling has its place in moral discourse, and we shouldn’t be so ready to denigrate it" -- argues Neil Levy (Oxford/Macquarie)

The Philosopher Cocoon's excellent series on professional philosophy around the world continues -- with a post by Paloma Atencia & Miguel Ángel Sebastian (UNAM) on being philosophers in Mexico

"'Individualistic' philosophical ethics serves us well… in correcting such misplaced fatalism" -- reflections on moral mathematics from Richard Yetter Chappell (Miami)

If contraceptive sex is permissible, then so is gay sex, oral sex, and mutual masturbation—and so it's not -- some of the views, and events in the life, of G.E.M. Anscombe, as detailed by John Schwenkler (FSU), based on his research at U Penn's Anscombe Archive

The opportunity costs of poverty -- a way of understanding poverty, from Jonathan Wolff (Oxford)

"I do not so much reject the supernatural, as explore how far the large-scale defects of human life might be authentically met within a non-reductive naturalistic framework." -- a wide-ranging, interesting, and informative interview with Mark Johnston (Princeton) by Daniel Kodsi at Oxford Review of Books

Is scientism a threat to philosophy? -- further discussion by Catherine Wilson (CUNY)

and more on the subject -- from Ian James Kidd

The arguments against impeaching Trump -- Michael Huemer (Colorado) explains what's wrong with them

Three women philosophers in the history of philosophy of mind -- by Emily Thomas (Durham)

"Be happy to be worth stealing from" -- Agnes Callard (Chicago) is opposed to anti-plagiarism norms

"We cannot, nor would we, fire Professor Rasmusen for his posts as a private citizen, as vile and stupid as they are, because the First Amendment… forbids us to do so." -- a Provost's statement on a professor who "for many years, used his private social media accounts to disseminate his racist, sexist, and homophobic views"

How can moral theory be practical? -- Andrew Sepielli (Toronto) and others discuss Holly Smith's (Rutgers) answer to this question

Applied philosophy of the near future: minds & privacy -- a conversation between Susan Schneider (Connecticut / NASA) and Evan Selinger (RIT)

George Eliot translated Spinoza’s Ethics in 1856 — If her manuscript had been published then it would have been the first published English translation of the work (via Brian Weatherson)

What happens when you let AI play hide and seek? -- after 390 million games, they developed some unexpected moves

A crash course in inductive logic -- from Jonathan Weisberg (Toronto)

"Sad Prof" is a comic strip about academic life -- created by Carrie Jenkins (UBC)

Bees "appear to have at least some of the principal hallmarks of consciousness": they seem to be able to represent time and space, plan, perhaps even imagine -- if bees are conscious, what else is?

"There has long been confusion over the location of the remains of de Montaigne" -- but they now appear to have found them in the basement of a museum

The reading list of John Stuart Mill, ages 3–7 -- including works in English and Greek

"The game is never really “over” and neither is his despair" -- The Myth of Super Mario by Albert Camus

Legal theorist Wojciech Sadurski, an outspoken critic of the Polish government, is facing legal proceedings intended to silence him -- the "sue to scare" tactics of the ruling party and its hounding of Sadurksi "is a clear violation of freedom of expression under EU and ECHR law"

"What one finds in the classical pragmatists is a series of substantive disputes about enduring philosophical topics, including meaning, truth, knowledge, value, experience and the nature of philosophy itself" -- Cheryl Misak (Toronto) and Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt) explain

An online book forum on "Moving Up without Losing Your Way: The Ethical Costs of Upward Mobility" by Jennifer Morton (City College/CUNY) -- you needn't have read the book to participate

"When we allow the travails and categories of democratic life to penetrate the whole of our social experience, we actually impede crucial and essential kinds of social activity, and this leads to democracy’s unraveling" -- an interview with Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)

"You may know that it works, but not have a clue how it works… and that is exactly what is happening in quantum theory" -- an interview with Tim Maudlin (NYU)

"This analysis revises our perception of the classical interpretation of the experiment and its putative relevance to the explanation of state atrocities" -- Milgram "suppresses the relative impact of the different levels of belief on obedience and defiance... Where belief in the shocks was greatest... subjects were most defiant" (via Ben Hale)

"You must be very erudite, but not really part of the sociology of philosophy" -- Justin E.H. Smith (Paris) on how "erudition is necessary for philosophy"

"If your go-to image of the theory involves internet anger, then you’re probably being over-influenced by personal memories of arguing with people who may or may not understand the theory themselves." -- Regina Rini (York) tries to figure out why some philosophical ideas become magnets for the belligerent and ignorant on social media

"Manne might spend most of her days arguing that women should not be coerced into providing care and attention to everyone they meet, but she sometimes wonders if she is giving enough of herself" -- a long, detailed profile of philosopher Kate Manne (Cornell) in The Chronicle of Higher Education

"I conjecture a correlation of approximately zero between how one would rate oneself in relative jerkitude and one’s actual true jerkitude" -- Eric Schwitzgebel (Riverside) summarizes his theory of jerks

The low-tech cameras of the past would typically take a mediocre photo, but "through its very mediocrity, each image told us that the real world was better than the one it depicted" -- "But things are different now," explains Jenny Judge (NYU)

Designing a logical methods course that addresses various "variables associated with students’ inability to do college level mathematics" -- the course is taught by Greg Restall and Shawn Standefer (Melbourne)

"Features of everyday life are overwhelmingly transformed into expressions of political identity, and… this transformation undermines democracy itself" -- Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt) discusses his new book on democracy with Carrie Figdor (Iowa)

"As is always the way, truth has been a casualty of war." In this case, it's a theory of truth and a culture war. -- Liam Kofi Bright (LSE) kindly takes one of the culture warriors du jour seriously enough to share a useful philosophical distinction with him

"I take the recent rise of public philosophy as an attempt by the neoliberal academy to claim for itself everything we do" -- Justin E.H. Smith (Paris) is "against public philosophy", and is also "not some jovial country vicar who, for the good of the parish, joins in for a bean-bag toss or a three-legged race at carnival time"

"The mathematics we have today is the result of countless decisions, big and small, and, in that sense, I think it is best to think of mathematical concepts as being designed" -- an informative and interesting interview with Jeremy Avigad (CMU)

A new fashion collection inspired by the ideas of ancient Greece -- including "fringe dresses embroidered with blurring quotes by Socrates and Aristotle"

"How come nobody played cards with the pirate? Because he was standing on the deck! The other pirates had no universal moral perspective from which to criticize him" -- postmodern pirate jokes, from Alex Baia

"Why the university and the Chinese government invests so much in the growth of philosophy (and internationalization more broadly) is, of course, a complicated sociological question" -- Peter Finocchiaro (Wuhan) on being a foreign philosopher in China

"People tried to reject Aristotle on the same grounds that they now try to reject Confucius or the Bhagavad Gita" -- on the racism that helped build the philosophy canon

A strange 1756 opera that satirized David Hume -- "The Philosopher's Opera" by John McLaurin

A special issue of Forma de Vida on the occasion of the centenary of Anscombe's birth includes a postcard from her to a Portuguese philosopher -- (via Pedro Ferrão)

"Although individuals may have a right to be misinformed and to share their false beliefs with others, there is no legal framework entitling them to have those beliefs amplified by algorithms." -- Cailin O’Connor and James Weatherall (UC Irvine) on the problems of social media and how to best approach them

The popular caricature of scientific method "is not just bad philosophy, entirely inadequate to account for scientific practice. It is also bad history, with tenuous links to the growth of early modern science" -- Philip Kitcher (Columbia) on science and its methods, in a review of Why Trust Science by Naomi Oreskes (Harvard)

Assorted 1-page infographics about various aspects of the humanities -- from Humanities Indicators

If someone imprisoned for life comes to meet the legal definition of death, but is then revived, have they completed their sentence? -- the court says: the prisoner "is either still alive, in which case he must remain in prison, or he is actually dead, in which case this appeal is moot"

A video of Barry Stroud's memorial, with remarks from several philosophers -- including Niko Kolodny, Sam Scheffler, Antonia Peacocke, Jason Bridges, Janet Broughton, Tom Nagel, and Sarah Stroud (via Julie Stroud)

Will philosophy beat hydroengineering in post-apocalyptic importance? -- geek fun disguised as what may be the world's weirdest debate

At the end of Reasons and Persons, Parfit asks about the relative differences between three possible futures -- a team of researchers has now asked thousands of people the same thing. What can we learn from their findings?

Continuum of Selves is a "jazz-philosophy fusion project" -- it's led by James Tartaglia (Keele) and funded by Adrian Piper's foundation

The Spring 2020 Met Gala—the famous fashion party hosted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute—will be based on a philosophical concept -- "Employing Henri Bergson's concept of la durée (duration), it will explore how clothes generate temporal associations that conflate past, present, and future"

"Phi on New York: Philosophy for the City" is a new online magazine that brings philosophy to bear on life in NYC -- it's a project of the Gotham Philosophical Society

The blog, "Understanding Society," which focuses on philosophy of social science and the workings of the social world, turns 12 -- it is written by Daniel Little (Michigan-Dearborn)

A philosopher has guest-curated an art exhibition that "invites you to reflect, question, and explore the ways in which art can depict moral virtue and vice" -- an innovative form of public philosophy from Kevin DeLapp (Converse)

Depictions of fields like ethnic studies, gender studies, etc., as "harboring the academic villains of popular imagination" are leveraged into broader critiques of higher ed -- but there are very few faculty working in these areas (via Jason Stanley)

What does John Stuart Mill's life tell us about what a meaningful life is? -- Elijah Millgram (Utah) in conversation with Robert Talisse

What makes something horrifying? -- David Livingstone Smith (New England) on horror

"Rather than biological automata, they might be understood as creatures with capacities that in animals are readily regarded as learning, memory, decision-making, and even agency" -- an interview with biologist Suzanne Simard (UBC) on plants

"It gives us an idea of the changes that were made at the last moment when they had to commit themselves to what was going to be in print" -- McMaster University's Bertrand Russell Archives has acquired the page proofs of Principia Mathematica, with Russell's hand-written notes on them (via @BRussellSociety)

~~minecraft.global~~