Heap of Links

The 295 most-cited authors in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy -- from Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) with help from his son
"Make friends with people you disagree with" -- and plenty of other good advice for new college students from Harry Brighouse (Wisconsin)
"No son of mine is going to be a Benthamite utiltarian. This is a John Stuart Mill family, dammit!" -- "And as long as you live under my roof, you’re gonna be following my extremely niche (and extremely specific) perspective on philosophy"
"I much prefer this work to adding to the now painfully overspecialized journal literature in philosophy" -- Tom Sorrell (Warwick) on his work as an "embedded ethicist", in an interview that also covers his writings on Descartes and Hobbes
"College is probably the last time in your life you'll be around people (your professors) whose job is to make you a more interesting person. Take advantage of that." -- my contribution to a long thread of advice to students starting college
"Asking the humanities to save STEM is a variant of 'educationism'—the fallacy that getting our school curriculums right will fix our society" -- Paul Musgrave (UMass Amherst) thinks "the humanities should be saved... but not because they will help the C-suite develop better products or stop executives from making disastrous ones" (WP)
The International Social Ontology Society debuts its YouTube channel -- with a keynote address by Sally Haslanger (MIT) on ideal and non-ideal social ontology
"Seeing the truth will make you extinct" -- We ought not think our senses are veridical. How, then, can they be useful? Donald Hoffman (UC Irvine) explains
Great suggestions for how to have a great first day of class -- advice from James Lang (Assumption College)
Morality? There's an app for that. -- Michael Klenk (Delft) thinks we should "take proposals for artificial moral advice seriously"
A critique of ideal theory -- at PDL
At the root of "tribal arrogance" is "a confusion about truth" -- Michael Lynch (Connecticut) is interviewed on MSNBC's "Morning Joe"
When the question, "do running backs matter in the NFL today?" comes up, ask an expert... on what matters -- philosopher Erin Tarver (Emory) is interviewed at Slate about football's "hottest profound question" (via Owen Schaefer)
How we might end up killing ourselves with AI -- Susan Schneider (Connecticut) on replacing brains with tech
Artisanal ethics -- the customer is not always right---especially when it comes to coffee, says Matt Strohl (University of Montana, Missoula)
"It can be hard to make a causal claim connecting speech and action, between nasty discourse and harms that go beyond the social or psychological" -- but "there is a case to be made," argues Lynne Tirrell (Connecticut) in The Guardian
Is there academic tenure in the UK? -- answers from Michael Otsuka (LSE)
Brainjacking, personality changes, and other risks of deep brain stimulation -- Jonathan Pugh (Oxford) discusses a range of ethical issues raised by the increasingly used technology
Aesthetic tribalism: "It’s bad for us aesthetically. It’s bad for us generally. And we can do something about it." -- commentary from Dominic McIver Lopes (UBC)
"In philosophy we tend to theorise too soon, about things that we don’t yet understand well enough because we haven’t looked at them hard enough before we rush into theory." -- Sophie Grace Chappell (Open University) on what it has been like for her to be a trans woman, and what can be learned from her experiences
Political Science deploys devastating new weapon in best-disciplinary-conference wars -- I think this is one of those situations in which no one will object to someone starting a petition
Attempts to find out whether we're simulated minds in a simulated world will be "either extremely uninteresting or spectacularly dangerous" -- Preston Greene (Nanyang) in the NYT
The charge of politicizing tragedy "has its purchase only if one thinks that the political considerations brought out in the grief are misguided or irrelevant" -- Scott Aikin and Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt) on the charge of politicizing tragedy
Ned Block (NYU) talks consciousness -- on The Partially Examined Life podcast
Philosophy Job Market Mentoring Program -- those seeking mentoring and those able to offer it: sign up!
Different theories in the philosophy of mind as illustrations -- by Jasper van den Herik (EUR), with other suggestions in the replies
Synthetic wombs and the abortion debate -- the ideas of a few philosophers are discussed in this NYT article
"The aesthetic and the moral are not as separate as we would like to believe" -- Agnes Callard (Chicago) on the "fine line between respecting others’ right to their bad taste, and opting to participate in it"
"There is no established orthodoxy about gender in academic philosophy" -- a statement from 33 philosophers
The top ten places for an undergraduate degree in philosophy in the UK, according to The Telegraph -- more noteworthy for the publicity it brings to philosophy than its content
"The people you want to listen... aren’t the ones who are listening" -- Mark Alfano (Australian Catholic University) is attempting to burst the anti-vaxxer bubble.
"The rapid speed at which this science is advancing suggests the potential for promising applications of memory-editing techniques in the future" -- a discussion of recent advances in memory editing and how they might translate to current clinical practice
There's no such thing as the direction of time -- Matt Farr (Cambridge) lays out the C-Theory of time, which "goes a significant step further even than the B-theory"
"The ritual of a Killing Day is known to all adults. It is taught to children first in outline only, and then gradually in more detail as they get older." -- Kieran Healy (Duke) on how the U.S. has "institutionalized the mass shooting"
In defense of the marriage-free state -- Clare Chambers (Cambridge) on the problems with government being involved in marriage
Philosophers, "hold on to the thing that should have brought you in in the first place, which is your own desire to understand things" -- Kwame Anthony Appiah (Princeton) in a wide-ranging and interesting conversation with Tyler Cowen (GMU)
Carelessness, dogmatism, gullibility, wishful thinking, and other epistemic vices -- Quassim Cassam (Cambridge) talks with Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt) about his new book
"I felt phenomenology could provide a way of explicating our existence in its singularity while doing so in light of its universal structures and truths. There is conceptual rigor without existential superficiality." -- philosopher Steven DeLay (Woolf), in an in-depth interview on phenomenology with Richard Marshall at 3:16AM
"The academic freedom worries are overblown" -- Shannon Dea (Waterloo) on the discussion of transgender issues, academic freedom, and why "it is important not to allow social media flame wars to distract us"
"They thought that my rather different approach... was not only wrong, but it was stupid, and it was undermining philosophy." -- a brief interview with Patricia Churchland (UCSD)
"Conscience is not an isolated space, cut off from the rest of the world. It is what reminds us of our own fallibility, and what makes us accountable to others." -- author Eula Biss and philosopher Mavis Biss (Loyola Maryland) on conscientious objection, particularly in the context of vaccination
Aphorisms: the way thinkers have "encrypted their philosophies in brief bursts of memorable obscurity" -- Adam Gopnik looks at the literary form and some new writing about it (The New Yorker)
"I came at this expecting to find evidence of discrimination, but the data didn't support it." -- a new study on whether college professors discriminate against conservative students
“Medical Ethics in Sickbay” and “Time Travel, Transporters and the Terran Universe" -- two panels philosophy professor Beth Seacord (Southern Nevada) is putting on at the Star Trek Convention this week in Las Vegas
"If the artworld appears to cater increasingly to the desires of the global rich elite, we have to ask how this impacts the assessment of the value of an artwork" -- Sarah Hegenbart (TU Munich) on art, financial value, aesthetic value, and the responsibility of curators
The APDA blog compares details on philosophy PhD programs, two at a time -- this week it's Penn State and the University of Pennsylvania
"Know Thyself" is an interactive theater experience which "transforms abstract philosophy into a series of delightful and challenging analog games" -- it will run as part of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival in September
"The term 'medieval' is a sticky one and won’t go away, but in combination with 'philosophy' it will continue to sound like an oxymoron. " -- Martin Lenz (Groningen) on problems with "medieval philosophy"
The philosophy of smugness -- it's "akin to both bullshitting and epistemic insouciance in virtue of its normative carelessness" says Grant Rozeboom (St. Norbert)
Language, logic, and the future for the Anglo-American tradition in philosophy -- a conversation between Saul Kripke (CUNY) and Timothy Williamson (Oxford)
"When you act wrongly, you incur a debt of sorts" -- and this helps get at the difference between good and bad excuses, according to Pauline Sliwa (Cambridge)
"I think the better way to look at the world is as structured around the 'stuff we’re all going along with'" -- Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò (Georgetown) is interviewed by Richard Marshall on political philosophy, race, climate change, and other topics
"If cryonics works, then society---including law and ethics---will radically change" -- Patrick Lin (Cal Poly) discusses the ethics of waking the dead and other issues related to cryonics
"Since pro-choice positions depend on more precise and complex theoretical thinking, they are harder to effectively communicate" -- Nathan Nobis (Morehouse) and Kristina Grob (South Carolina, Sumter) on the communication of arguments about abortion
Three disadvantages of treating English as the lingua franca of philosophy -- from Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside)
Senior academic brazenly encourages his followers to help him gaslight a younger philosopher -- the person he's trying to encourage others to think of as "crazy" happens to be the author of a book that discusses gaslighting and other forms of misogyny
The Logos Institute for Analytic and Exegetical theology at the University of St Andrews has a blog and podcast -- with several philosophers contributing
"Already, it is clear that melding digital technologies with human brains can have provocative effects, not least on people’s agency" -- a survey of the variety of ethical issues arising with brain-computer interfaces
How to launch and run a summer diversity institute in philosophy -- a guide from the American Philosophical Association
Quantum supremacy (in computing) -- what is it? why is it important? and when will it happen? (maybe this year)
"9-5 I’m sat in the library in my track-pants, and for the last few months I’ve been whisked away to the most exotic places by SI" -- meet Erin Willerton (Manchester), philosophy student and Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, whose thesis is on diversity in philosophy
"Grand Theories" is a new podcast that "tells stories about highly ambitious but obscure ideas from philosophy... in a way that anyone can enjoy" -- from Mark Ryan
10 years ago a neuroscientist announced his plan to simulate a complete human brain on a computer within a decade -- He didn't succeed. Why not? And why do it at all?
Roger Scruton rejoins British government’s Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission -- he had been let go after the publication of remarks of his selectively edited to appear maximally offensive
Philosophizing about pregnancy -- Elselijn Kingma, Fiona Woollard, and Suki Finn (Southampton) discuss their work on BBC Radio
"Owning one’s own luck is an unavoidable part of being an agent who takes responsibility for herself and the impact she has on others in the course of leading her own life" -- Alec Walen (Rutgers) is interviewed by Richard Marshall on rights, killing, and other issues in moral philosophy
The Canadian Medical Association Journal Podcast has "philosophers on medicine" series -- four episodes so far
"Many of the acclaimed advances in modern fundamental theoretical physics have yielded no predictions that can be tested in the near future. But that is no reason to despair." -- a brief review of a new history of recent physics "where evidence is spare or absent" and "other criteria, including aesthetic ones, have been allowed to come into play"
"Humor is philosophically interesting because amusement can be justified... without any expectation that the reasons we give speak to rational beings, as such" -- Kieran Setiya (MIT) on Terry Eagleton's new book on humor
12 philosophers "condemn the too frequently cruel and abusive rhetoric, including accusations of hatred or transphobia, directed at [trans-exclusive] philosophers in response to their arguments and advocacy" -- at Inside Higher Ed
"Joe Biden is the old professor still teaching off of notes he typed up in 1975 who gets handsy at the holiday party after one too many scotch and sodas" -- Democratic Party candidates for president as members of a history department
The psychology and philosophy of perverse (not necessarily perverted) actions -- Paul Bloom (Yale) in The New Yorker
To help students avoid their knee-jerk political reactions, "look more globally, to contexts foreign to students so that they must try to use the philosophical tools and concepts in their interpretation" -- 廖顯禕 / Shen-yi Liao (Puget Sound) guides us through a good example
Lower-ranked PhD-programs in philosophy admit students from a wide range of U.S. undergraduate institutions -- data and analysis from Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside)
"The disagreement over scholarly debate about gender identity rages on" -- Inside Higher Ed covers the discussion of trans issues taking place in philosophy and elsewhere in the academy
An online Bernard Williams archive -- it includes work by and about him, videos and interviews, and more
"Sometimes, people who lack philosophical training write books and essays on philosophy. These books and essays are usually very bad." -- Michael Huemer (Colorado) on amateur philosophy
Bringing together philosophy of causation and philosophy of medicine -- an interview with Rani Lill Anjum (NMBU) on her CauseHealth project
More on Colin McGinn's "ethical awareness" and "catastrophe avoidance" business consultancy -- for example, if you are caught emailing a student about handjobs, argue that "virtually all jobs are 'hand jobs'... for all human work is manual work"
An interview with Aristotle on slavery and labor practices -- (via David Gross)
"How experimental methods and findings from psycholinguistics can be adapted to analyse philosophical arguments" -- a symposium at Brains on an article that seeks "to take experimental philosophy beyond the study of intuitions"
"While white supremacy places the white man at the centre of all things good, white guilt places him at the centre of all things evil" -- Karthick Ram Manoharan (Calcutta) responds to Crispin Sartwell (Dickinson) on the racism of Western philosophy (via Preston Stovall)
Cosmopolitanism, statism, and avant-garde political agency -- Lea Ypi (LSE) discusses her work and the role of political philosophy in current affairs with Carmen Pavel (KCL)
"There isn't a lot of room in philosophy---analytic philosophy---for somebody who wants to do something that has some kind of aesthetic value" -- Barry Lam (Vassar) is interviewed at The Public Life of the Mind
"It seems worth exploring ways to boost the philanthropic sector whilst avoiding the potential downside of concentrating power in the hands of the ultra-wealthy" -- Richard Yetter Chappell (Miami) has an idea: charity vouchers
Letter to a young black philosopher -- observations and advice from Liam Kofi Bright (LSE)
Text-reading algorithm uses word-association analyses of scientific works to predict ideas humans missed -- "In one experiment, researchers analyzed only papers published before 2009 and were able to predict one of the best modern-day thermoelectric materials four years before it was discovered in 2012" (via Gregor Flock)
Update on the philosophy teacher accused of trying to set fire to St. Patrick's Cathedral -- he will be undergoing psychiatric evaluation
An art exhibit all about Chinese philosopher Laozi opened earlier this week in Cairo -- with more than 30 works by 40 artists from 18 countries
The New Statesmen apologizes to Roger Scruton for not accurately representing his views -- at the bottom of the linked article (via David McPherson)
In 2015, bioethicist Travis Rieder (Johns Hopkins) was involved in a motorcycle accident that crushed his left foot -- he discusses his recovery, his struggle with opioid addiction, related policy matters, and the book he wrote about it, with Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air
Bringing together philosophy and archaeology -- a profile of philosopher Alison Wylie (UBC)
Have you heard of the Lawn Chair Philosophy Foundation? -- it donates philosophy library packages to Philadelphia’s local homeless shelters and half-way houses and provides free philosophy courses throughout the city
Using statistics to determine when humanity's time will be up -- a look at the Doomsday argument (Vox)
Using a graphic design archive to shed light on Otto Neurath's goals of unified science and informed democratic decision-making -- John Capps and Evelyn Brister (RIT) curate the fascinating online exhibit, "Words Divide—Pictures Unite: Otto Neurath, Isotype, and the Unity of Science”
Where are all the women in ancient philosophy? -- It's complicated, says Peter Adamson (Ludwig Maximilians Universität)
Sociologists on the belief that nature is good, cities, and conservationism -- Hillary Angelo looks at four recent works
"It requires an unsettling, introspective honesty about what moves and motivates me" -- Amy Olberding (Oklahoma) on one's own incivility
The true origins of famous philosophical ideas -- (EC)
Colin McGinn launches consulting firm handling matters "from workplace ethics to catastrophe avoidance" -- I'm assured this is not a joke. Do check out the list of advisors.
"Cute is one – perhaps very trivial, very tentative – way of exploring whether and how the paradigm of power can be exited" -- Simon May (KCL) on cuteness
"The hidden nature of imagery (and qualia more generally) explains why a significant minority of humans are shocked and dismayed when they learn that other people are capable of generating visual [mental] images" -- a discussion of aphantasia, with multiple links
How two ideas from Chinese philosophy are relevant to leadership in philosophy -- Helen De Cruz (Oxford Brookes) on cultivating propriety and instituting proper structures
A rather stunning optical illusion -- with a helpful animation
The ethics of the movie "Yesterday," in which a contemporary singer-songwriter is the only person to be aware of the Beatles ever existing -- a writer consults with philosophers Elizabeth Anderson, Louise Antony, Benjamin Chan, Barry Lam, Todd Lekan, Ben Lennertz, Todd May, and Neal Tognazzini
"It’s unsettling to witness the ease with which a few men writing over two millennia ago laid the groundwork for centuries of sexism. It’s crushing to realize that so many of our contemporaries embrace the logic of those ancient arguments" -- Christia Mercer (Columbia) in The Nation
Using the witch scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail to teach logic -- a lesson plan from William A. B. Parkhurst (South Florida)
"The sort of metaphysics and ethics they [Plato, Descartes, or Kant, Fischer, Korsgaard] all endorse grew up in connection with white supremacism and helped shape it." -- Crispin Sartwell (Dickinson) on western philosophy and white supremacism
A new open access philosophy book on the arguments and controversies regarding abortion -- by Nathan Nobis (Morehouse) and Kristina Grob (University of South Carolina, Sumter)
Wittgenstein's hut in Norway -- it has recently been restored and is now open for visitors
Philosophers and physicists on whether new findings have implications for the "black hole information paradox" -- Eric Winsberg (South Florida), Sean Gryb (Bristol) and others quoted on a new "sonic black hole" discovery
"Leave the most important and complicated items until the end of the meeting." -- advice on how to chair an academic committee from Robert S. Coleman
A symposium on Down Girl by Kate Manne (Cornell) -- with contributions from Kate Norlock (Trent), Agnes Callard (Chicago), Briana Toole (Claremont McKenna), Ishani Maitra (Michigan), Audrey Yap (Victoria), and Elle Benjamin (U. Mass)
"Information is the real vital force: it is what separates living from nonliving" -- two scientists reflect on what life is
"With my concussion, I found myself suddenly freed from the professional obligation to think. I even had a doctor’s note" -- Megan Craig (Stony Brook) on how "a concussion has a way of changing one’s sense of the balance between mind and body" (NYT)
The World Phenomenology Institute is now on Facebook -- (via Randy Dible)
"Causation is one of the most fruitful concepts in philosophy... but it is at the same time one of the most intriguing and controversial" -- Carolina Sartorio (Arizona) on causation and free will in an interview with Richard Marshall
Don't "referee-proof" your paper -- for one thing, "it's a buzzkill," says Helen De Cruz (Oxford Brookes)
Book XI is a new journal of literary philosophy -- it's "dedicated to publishing personal essays, memoir, fiction, science fiction, humor, and poetry with philosophical themes"
Should you apply to graduate school in philosophy, and if so, where? "Warning: This might be depressing!" -- advice from Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside)
"Academic freedom does not exempt philosophers and other academics from the duty to treat their colleagues and students with dignity and respect" -- Chris Bertram (Bristol) on a recent letter some philosophers and others sent to The Times complaining about trans-inclusive policies at UK universities
Why is a crater on the moon named after Anaxagoras? -- the story involves his arrest, trial, and being sentenced to death
Wabash College adds "Philosophy, Politics, and Economics" to its list of majors -- and an endowed professorship to lead the program
Understanding and assessing China's "social credit" system -- an online symposium
"They were some of the most intelligent, kind and real people I have interacted with" -- students at the University of Texas San Antonio took part in a "Philosophy and Literature Circle" with inmates at a local prison this past semester
"How, then, do corporate executives---who, through manipulation and deception, sell products they know to be potentially lethal---differ morally from ordinary murderers?" -- Jeff McMahan (Oxford) on this and related questions
"One can wonder whether the next generation of young people will be as focused on and obsessed with discussion as their predecessors were between 1950 and 2000" -- Jürgen Habermas turns 90, and Raymond Geuss reflects critically on his legacy
A history study using machine learning vindicates... Hegel? -- "many events that will one day be viewed as historic attract little attention at the time" (from the abstract linked to in the article)
"How much does it matter that our future is biological?" -- an interview with David Chalmers (NYU) in the NYT
The Symposia on Gender, Race, and Philosophy has a new website -- and a new editorial team
An internet radio station churning through nearly 900 episodes of some of the best philosophy podcasts, playing them on continuous shuffle -- created by Kelly Truelove
"The thing that I learned from philosophy was an ability to articulate theories crisply, which led to an ability to express crisp theories of human nature, which aligns with some of the most interesting things around" -- an interview with tech entrepreneur and investor Reid Hoffman, who has an MA in philosophy, in the NYT (via Eddy Nahmias)
A virtual conference, "David Lewis and his place in the history of analytic philosophy," is taking place over the next couple of days -- you can watch it live and submit questions for the q&a's
"No superintelligence could never become so intelligent as to put all philosophical questions permanently to rest" -- Eric Schwitzgebel (Riverside) on whether philosophy will ever come to an end
"Those who take themselves to be fighting for ethical and political progress ought to be fostering a culture in which critics feel free to challenge their beliefs and ideals" -- Jonny Thakkar (Swarthmore) on political correctness
The PEA Soup blog turns 15! -- reflections on its history from David Shoemaker (Tulane) and some of the site's other contributors
"The standard journal article has severe repercussions on the way we teach and practise scholarship in the history of philosophy" -- "It narrows our way of reading texts and counters attempts at diversification of the canon," argues Martin Lenz (Groningen)
"It is better when many people are at a lower quality of life than a few at a higher quality of life" -- Torbjörn Tännsjö (Stockholm) in an interviewed at Vox
Universities are under siege because they "represent an idea of society that contains freedom and social solidarity" -- Daniel Peres (Federal University of Bahia-Brazil) on the Brazilian government's attack on higher education
What can we learn from auditory illusions about the relationship between mind and reality? -- an especially delightful episode of Hi-Phi Nation, from Barry Lam (Vassar)
How much enhancement can the self take? -- Susan Schneider (Connecticut) on the philosophical issues raised by the prospects of human-AI mergers
"The devised multi-disciplinary program failed to transition to a mature inter-disciplinary coherent field" -- doubts about the field of cognitive science (via Evan Thompson)
"The graduate students are on strike, and I have crossed picket lines to be in my office. Later today, I will cross them again to teach my class" -- Agnes Callard (Chicago) on civility, Socrates, and strikes
and one of the striking graduate students responds
The conditions under which "morality unseats humour" -- Noël Carroll (CUNY) in The New Statesman
"This is a world in which unsubstantiated opinion is treated as logical simply because those peddling this opinion know how to speak in the language of analytic philosophy––and thus don't have to do any research" -- J. Moufawad-Paul on recent discussions of trans issues in philosophy
Is Trump eroding people's respect for our Constitutional system? -- David Lay Williams (DePaul) tries to figure out what he can learn from his students' changing reactions to The Federalist Papers
"The internet logic fan imagines that [better logic] would often lead to us agreeing on what is true---by contrast, I imagine it would lead to us agreeing on how much we don't know" -- brilliant post from Liam Kofi Bright (LSE) on how logic opens up possibilities
With new forms of convincing fake video, epistemologically, "we ought to think of images as more like testimony than perception" -- Regina Rini (York) on deepfakes (NYT)
"To claim that there is a debate with sides in it is itself not a neutral act" -- Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) on no-platforming
Because of philosophy's nature, "outsiders to the cultural mainstream and people who have lived with the disadvantages of existing cultural structures and worldviews, ought to be especially valued" -- but in reality... Eric Schwitzgebel (Riverside) with data & discussion
"What seemed to the quantum pioneers to be unavoidable randomness in the physical world is now shown to be amenable to control. We can take charge of the quantum." -- a physics experiment with possible implications for philosophy of science and other fields (via Joshua Synon)
"You are, in fact, being followed" -- conspiracy theories for the ultra-rational from philosopher-humorist Alex Baia and Thatcher Jensen, in The New Yorker
"Going for a Sunday drive has the expected effect of ruining someone’s afternoon" -- the NYT looks at the impact and ethics of your summer vacation travel, with several philosophers quoted. The above's from Av Hiller (Portland State).
"We may never completely realize the ideal of democracy as a space of reasons... But that does not mean that it is not ideal worth struggling to reach, and it would be perverse to give up striving for it just when it is under threat." -- Michael Lynch (Connecticut) on "information pollution"
Is it time humanities professors went on strike? -- Nathan Eckstrand (Fort Hays State University) thinks it may be
Southern Utah University hosts free philosophy summer camp for local middle and high school students -- it's led by professors Kris Phillips and Kirk Fitzpatrick
What can be learned from drawing or visualizing philosophical thought experiments? -- Helen De Cruz (Oxford Brookes), who has a book with 42 illustrations of them forthcoming, shares her thoughts
"Writing is an ethical activity, and becoming a better writer can make you a better person." -- Bob Fischer (Texas State) and Nathan Nobis (Morehouse) with the whys and hows of ethical writing
Program prestige and job placement in North American philosophy -- Jonathan Weisberg (Toronto) looks at the data
“To deny us this option is to not honor our humanness.” -- Karen Warren, a philosopher with a terminal neurodegenerative disorder, is fighting for right-to-die legislation in Minnesota
"The concept of knowledge is a hangover from a stone-age way of thinking that has long outlived its usefulness" -- so argues David Papineau (KCL), who notes, "this needn't mean anything goes"
A newly hired philosophy professor on their good luck -- "For all of the success I’ve had due to my hard work and 'talent”', there are people who were equally 'talented' and worked just as hard... but haven’t been recognized or rewarded"
"We found that people were more likely to judge that God could make logical contradictions true than that God could change foundational moral facts" -- an empirical study on beliefs relevant to divine command theory, metaethics, and the relationship between normative and non-normative cognition
"Perhaps we should presume that U.S. forces obey the law of war as DoD understands it. But we cannot presume that U.S. forces obey the law of war, since DoD misunderstands it" -- Adil Haque (Rutgers) responds to Paul Ney, Jr. (General Counsel to the U.S. Department of Defense) on civilian deaths and urban warfare
"Sound must be experienced as moving in order to be experienced as music... But once we experience sounds as moving, I don’t think we could stop experiencing them as expressive" -- Jennifer Church (Vassar) on how imagining contributes to our ability to hear sounds as music
The science and ethics of transplanting uteruses into transgender women -- in the British Journal of Obstetrics & Gynaecology (via Kathleen Stock)
"I had serious misconceptions about the job of philosophers. I thought you change the world through your thoughts and writings. Ha!" -- an interview with Saba Fatima (SIU-Edwardsville) on her life, education, religion, and philosophical work
"Democracy as a whole benefits from the non-conforming moral fanatics" -- Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) responds to Weatherson's piece (below) on political opponents
Should you respect your political opponents because they're principled? -- it depends on the principles, argues Brian Weatherson (Michigan)
What the re-evolution of an extinct species of bird has to do with philosophy of biology -- and questions about what would happen if we rewound evolutionary history and set it going again
Should radio stations stop playing Michael Jackson? -- Alfred Archer (Tilburg) and Benjamin Matheson (Stockholm) take up the question
"She was so dispirited that her prized capacity to reason had not worked, she decided to find out how we change our minds" -- an article about Eleanor Gordon-Smith (Princeton) and her book, "Stop Being Reasonable"
"What Climacus does... is to discuss (and enact) an alternative manner of doing philosophy... which he thinks can be practiced without interfering with an individual’s ability to live an ethical or religious life" -- Paul Muench (Montana) talks with Richard Marshall about Kierkegaard, Socrates, anger, philosophy, and more
"We owe each other not only better actions and better words, but also better thoughts" -- Rima Basu (Claremont McKenna) on the moral importance of seeing a person as a person
"I reject the idea that philosophy is argument" -- "Most real philosophy, as experienced by most people, takes the form of fiction" -- Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside)
"Lately, I’ve been wondering whether it’s OK for me to be a philosophy professor." -- Robert Gressis (CSU Northridge) lays out the case against... himself
A film about an "intense debate" between a longtime mayor in an existential crisis and a "brilliant, if dry, young philosopher" just won the best European Film Award at the Cannes Film Festival -- "Alice and the Mayor" is "beautifully written, clear, concise and intellectually stimulating without being at all pretentious"
20 ways to be a great--or not so great--literary citizen, gleaned from Leibniz -- or "How to Be a Dick If You Have Gout and/or an Arch Nemesis" by Adam Ehrlich Sachs
Several "gender-critical" philosophers jointly author essay responding to criticisms -- but the absence of citations and attributions raises questions: are these criticisms ones typically advanced by other philosophers in their scholarly work? are they the strongest criticisms? etc.
Online speech, varieties of pseudonymity, controversial ideas, and more -- Carissa Véliz (Oxford) in conversation with John Danaher (Galway)
"These new ‘pro-life’ laws are deeply inhumane" -- Neera K. Badhwar (Oklahoma) & Eva M. Dadlez (Central Oklahoma) on abortion at What's Wrong?
What can be legitimately expected if a piece of art? -- Sean T. Murphy (Indiana) takes up the question in light of the final episodes of Game of Thrones
"The return of this book is a nice reminder to anyone who has any overdue books not to be afraid" -- last week, someone returned a book to a library that was 80 years overdue
The unusual kind of typewriter Nietzsche used, of which only 35 are known to remain, just sold at auction for €100,000 -- it was so special a machine Nietzsche wrote a poem about it: "The writing ball is a thing like me..."
If avocados, almonds, and the like are not vegan, then what? -- Dominic Wilkinson (Oxford) on the implications for different moral arguments for veganism (via Jean Kazez)
A rope, a planet, Wittgenstein, and certainty -- a great animation to share with those other folks who are too confident in their beliefs, from Jonathan Ellis (UC Santa Cruz) & Adam Ansorge
"Conspiracy Theories are political gambits whose real function is to promote a political agenda" -- so argues Quassim Cassam (Warwick)
A school in London introduces a "Eudaimonia" program -- it uses "the teachings of Aristotle in an attempt to boost pupil wellbeing"
Trans women are victims of misogyny, "and we can see this without having to engage in debates over what 'makes' someone a woman" -- Robin Dembroff (Yale) in The Guardian
"If we are searching for free will at the fundamental physical level, we are simply searching in the wrong place" -- an interview with Christian List (LSE)
"Dying is worse for the last mortals than for earlier generations" -- Regina Rini (York) explains why, in this essay that won last year's Sander's Prize for Public Philosophy (TLS)
"Scientists have created a living organism whose DNA is entirely human-made — perhaps a new form of life, experts said, and a milestone in the field of synthetic biology." --- "the Cambridge team is just one of many racing in recent years to build synthetic genomes" (NYT)
A recording of the official soundtrack of "A Theory of Justice: the Musical" is now available for pre-order -- the musical features a time-traveling John Rawls visiting famous historical philosophers while being pursued by an evil Robert Nozick
(here's a preview of The Utilitarian Barbershop Quartet singing "The Total Happiness")
When we cry for fictional characters, what are we thinking? -- Elizabeth Picciuto surveys some options
An SEP secret -- hidden in plain sight
"The evidence points... towards there being genuine sensory changes due to learning and expertise" -- Kevin Connolly (Minerva Schools KGI) on how experts perceive the world differently
Dax Cowart, a man whose story became a famous example in the right-to-die literature, has died -- 46 years after his doctors refused his requests to be allowed to die from severe burns he sustained
An interview with legal philosophy Hillary Nye (Alberta) -- come for the discussion of eliminativism about law, stay for the Hume cross-stitch
Wondering how to get your students to come to office hours? -- prescribe them this video (via Danielle Wenner)
"When I consider each of these arguments on its own, I am convinced that it is sound. But when I consider all of them together, something strange happens. I am unable to form a belief in the theory they support" -- Bart Streumer (Groningen) on general error theory
An ethics bowl... for faculty -- John Ellis (UC Santa Cruz) has organized an ethics bowl on future generations in which the competitors will be faculty from a variety of disciplines
Should children have the right to vote? -- a "no" answer may be harder to justify than you think, argues Nicolás Brando (KU Leuven)
"Reductio: Adventures In Ideas" is a new philosophy podcast -- it's put together by recent UCLA philosophy PhD Andrew Lavin
"A Phenomenology of Professional Failure" -- an essay by Ben Sheredos (UC San Diego) is discussed at The Philosophers' Cocoon
Do wasps engage in transitive reasoning? -- scientists take a look (via Wes Hansen)
"The goal of the philosophical novella should be to show that ideas are alive and motivating features of people’s lives" -- an interview with philosopher and novelist Matthew McKeever (Oslo)
Trans women, penis panics, sociology, metaphysics, and the younger generation -- discussed by Barry Lam (Vassar), Holly Lawford-Smith (Melbourne), Robin Dembroff (Yale), and others in the latest episode of Hi-Phi Nation
The human experience of time -- Philosophers Keith Ansell-Pearson (Warwick), Emily Thomas (Durham), & Mark Sinclair (Roehampton) discuss ideas of Henri Bergson on the BBC
Use your own school's login when you're at or near other schools for free wifi access -- there's a good chance your school is a part of the eduroam network (via Samantha Brennan)
"If you take Collegra 256 times a year for four years, Collegra will improve your critical reasoning, moral reasoning, analytic, and quantitative skills" -- Jason Brennan (Georgetown) and Phillip Magness (AIER) argue that a lot of academic advertising is unethical
Cookbook ethics -- Andy Lamey and Ike Sharpless (UCSD) look at how many animals would have to die to prepare the recipes in various cookbooks
"We find that faculty’s work environments, not selection effects, drive their productivity and prominence, establishing that where a researcher works serves as a mechanism for cumulative advantage" -- a new study published in PNAS, discussed at IHE
Is "Philosophy, Politics, and Economics" (PPE) a viable research area, and if so, what could PPE research be? -- thoughts from Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) in the wake of a recent PPE conference
What is "compression plagiarism"? -- a brief interview with philosophy's plagiarism patrolman, Michael Dougherty (Ohio Dominion)
"Plato’s dialogues show possibilities for intellectual progress across disagreement...not in the first instance by coming to agreement, but by exploring one another’s points of view" -- an interview with Rachana Kamtekar (Cornell)
"We’re playing god every day" -- an interview with Julian Savulescu (Oxford) on reproductive technologies
Will biotechnology allow us to "have our meat and our ethics too"? -- moral philosophy, cultured meat, and "the pig in the back yard"
"The philosophy of business, innovation and technology" -- a new "three-course cognate and major specialization" at the University of New Hampshire
Current disputes over philosophical, political, and practical issues concerning transgender people go back to the 1970s -- those origins are the subject of the latest episode of Hi-Phi Nation, from Barry Lam (Vassar)
100 philosophers share what Iris Murdoch's philosophy means to them -- It's part of a public philosophy project called "Philosophy By Postcard" (see the update)
"The assessment of all against all" -- H.E. Baber (San Diego) rants, colorfully, against assessment culture
---but some people are really, really, really into it.
"Reducing the status divide between humans and animals helps to reduce prejudice and helps to strengthen belief in equality amongst human groups" -- Will Kymlicka (Queens) on the psychological aspects and political implications of our thoughts about animals
Joe Biden's preoccupation with Kant -- He doesn't appear to have heard that
Kant is wrong for America
Alone or as a subject in a study we may be poor at reasoning, "but in a more ecological setting, when we can argue and reason collectively, the right answer spreads like wildfire" -- thoughts about how we should be studying reason from Sacha Altay (École Normale Supérieure Paris)
"Postulate no entity / Unless it’s really necess’ry. / (And keep your poems short.) -- "O is for Ockham's Razor," from the growing poetical philosophical abecedarium of Sarah Adams
An online repository of material on debates about the centrality of work in human life -- maintained by Jean-Philippe Deranty (Macquarie)
A collection of links on issues concerning robots and artificial intelligence -- at Bookforum's Omnivore
Should I take a nap? -- what the ancients would say
"Before we create an AI with humanlike sophistication deserving humanlike ethical consideration, we will very likely create an AI with less-than-human sophistication, deserving some less-than-human ethical consideration" -- John Basl (Northeastern) and Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) discuss what that might be
"Testing quantum mechanics with a new, unique, ready-to-hand measurement apparatus---the human visual system" -- Rebecca Holmes (Los Alamos) on the whys and hows of doing so
Are philosophers underestimating the epistemic usefulness of imagination? -- Madeleine Hyde (Stockholm) provides some reasons to think so
"I place a lot of good things under the heading 'irrationality'" -- Justin E. H. Smith (University of Paris, Diderot) is interviewed at Vox about "the dark side of reason"
One problem may be that "the two sides are talking past each other" -- a response to a recent criticism of the gender-critical view, by Sophie Allen (Keele)
Mapping disagreement over freedom of speech -- Martin Lenz (Groningen) explores what we can learn by distinguishing two conceptions of what speech is
Teaching a philosophy course on the future -- Leigh Johnson (Christian Bros. Univ.) provides a helpful guide on why to do it and what to assign
Not from The Onion: Professor who sexually harassed a student will teach course on how "boundaries... limit the possibility of experience" -- Avital Ronell (NYU) will be back in the classroom this Fall
"I'm lucky to have gotten a tenure-track job, but... I'm still not sure it was worth it, all things considered" -- thoughts on what it takes to finally "succeed" in the philosophy job market, from Marcus Arvan (Tampa)
The Feminist Philosophers blog is closing down -- “Many of us, myself included, have become increasingly pessimistic about the potential for internet-based discussions of difficult issues to help us make philosophical and real-world progress,” writes Jenny Saul
Skill, thought, and a self-taught record-breaking runner -- Josh Habgood Coote (Bristol) on the role of thinking in practical skills
Beauty vs. Physics -- physicist Sabine Hossenfelder on how "relying on beauty as a guide to new laws of nature is not working"
Ethical loneliness, the moral psychology of human attitudes to animals, and the point of knowledge -- recent subjects discussed in interviews at New Books in Philosophy
Nietzsche was "someone who was really key to artistic discourses around 1900... [with] a huge impact on the arts, and not just visual artists" -- and now there's an art exhibit about him at the National Gallery of Canada
Philosopher charged with attempted arson after being caught with cans of gas and lighters at St. Patrick's in NYC -- the Brooklyn College adjunct prof, Marc Lamparello, had booked a one-way ticket to Rome for the next day
A surprising amount of the good things in life depend on obscurity -- Evan Selinger (RIT) and Woodrow Hartzog (Northeastern) explain the idea, its value, and how it is threatened. They're onto something important. (NYT)
Brexit and the problem that "the majoritarian definition of the popular will, uncritically adopted by the Prime Minister and many others, is not generally coherent" -- remarks from Christian List (LSE)
"Argument and inquiry are the engines of Tim Blake Nelson’s 'Socrates,'... a play that hums with intelligence" -- the New York Times reviews the new off Broadway production
"While we should want students to be free to speak their minds, we also want them to develop the skills necessary to navigate complex and diverse environments" -- Jeffrey Sachs (Acadia) on student self-censorship (Washington Post)
Contemplating "the possibility of a future in which human beings really do not need to do anything at all" -- Jeff Noonan (Windsor) on being needed
"What could be better than a good old-fashioned philosophy battle?" -- Agnes Callard (Chicago) likes a good fight, even (especially?) if she loses
"The process began with Emerson’s words as much as with the bombast of Public Enemy" -- sneakers, hip-hop, poverty, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the 80's
The "Philosophy as a Way of Life" project has a new website -- it includes course-building resources, grant opportunities, and a blog
"I’m sure Socrates would have been widely blocked on social media" -- Kwame Anthony Appiah (NYU) is interviewed in the NYT about Socrates, in light of the new play about him
"To write and rewrite with a roving eye on philosophical politics... in such a way that philosophical possibilities are constantly revived and re-opened" -- lessons from Eileen O'Neill on how to write the history of philosophy, as interpreted by Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam)
"The common claim that the brain is a computer is not, at the moment, a concrete, precise, well-understood scientific hypothesis" -- "Still, the claim is almost certainly true," argues Kevin Lande (Antwerp)
"Nobody goes home from Twitter" -- thoughts on what makes the platform problematic, and an interesting suggestion
Chinese scientists have created "transgenic macaque monkeys with extra copies of a human gene suspected of playing a role in shaping human intelligence" -- I, for one, welcome our new macaque overlords. Or overladies (they're matriarchal).
"Diametrically opposed assessments of the worth of Aristotle and his philosophy tend to derive from same source, namely a failure to read what he actually wrote" -- Christopher Shields (Notre Dame) talks about Aristotle in an interview with Richard Marshall at 3:16
Stories that have "the germ of philosophical argument without quite articulating it" -- the object of study of Hans Blumenberg
Some people think that to understand consciousness we need a very detailed map of the brain -- scientists are now using artificial intelligence to help produce that map
"Unsettling our conceptions of sex and gender... can be part of the solution to gendered... disparities" -- Georgia Warnke (UC Riverside) on the definition of "woman"
Roger Scruton remarks on a "Soros Empire", Muslim invasions, and the Chinese -- and loses his government position as Chairman of the Building Better Building Beautiful Commission
Psychology Today has launched a new blog on science and philosophy -- run by Walter Veit (Bristol), it features essays and interviews
Presidential candidate and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg talks philosophy -- in an interview with Meghan Sullivan (Notre Dame) (via Michael Morrisey)
Certain Doubts, an epistemology-focused blog that has been running for nearly 15 years, is coming to an end -- Jon Kvanvig (Washington U. St. Louis) makes some farewell remarks
Campus racial incidents -- the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education maintains a page listing them
You've heard of the Dark Triad? Psychologists have created a positive counterpart to it, the Light Triad, and one of its elements is Kantian ethics -- a description, with links to the original paper and to a Light Triad test you can take
"The result is an anti-'Godot': two and a half hours of non-stop talk, during which the Athenians bully Socrates... into shutting up or else" -- The New Yorker, on actor-writer-filmmaker Tim Blake Nelson's new play, "Socrates"
An interview with "The Philosophical Investigator" -- Todd Altschuler is the guest on Peter Limberg's "Intellectual Explorers Club" podcast
"To insist on calling transgender students (or faculty) by anything other than the name and pronouns they prefer is a gratuitous insult" -- a suggestion from Les Green (Oxford) to those who do this: "grow up"
Bringing "a needlepoint of detail to the ways in which different conceptions of both happiness and well-being are embodied in different traditions" -- a special issue of the open-access Science, Religion and Culture features 16 articles on well-being in different cultures
What kind of thing is race? -- a discussion with Quayshawn Spencer (U. Penn)
Is anxiety valuable? -- Charlie Kurth (WMU) on "an unappreciated variety of anxiety"
There's a story about the painting behind the podcast that uses literature to explore philosophy -- Jennifer Frey (South Carolina) explains
"We do not believe that campuses are experiencing a unique crisis" but there's a concern that "our bedrock faith in free speech... could give way" -- from the PEN America report on campus speech
"The dinosaurs did not go entirely extinct after all" -- Joyce C. Havstad (Oakland) on how to handle scientific disagreement
What is the most democratic way to solve the Brexit crisis? -- answers from several philosophers, political theorists, and others
"Applied Ethics April" begins -- a series of guest posts and discussions at PEA Soup
A smart, witty, and moving video that engages honestly with concerns some people have about trans women -- "Gender Critical" by Natalie Wynn / ContraPoints
Internet memes "afford us an entry point into thinking about communities, solidarity, performance, practice, and meaning" -- Simon Evnine (Miami) explains
Who gets to decide whether a territory can secede, and what reasons to secede are good ones? - David Miller (Oxford) takes up these questions in the latest installment of The Agora Series at The New Statesman
Raphael's full-scale preparatory drawing for his "The School of Athens" has undergone a painstaking 4-year restoration -- it is now on display in Milan
Various lessons to help bring philosophy, thoughtful conversation, and critical thinking to younger students -- developed by "The Enquiring Classroom"
One philosopher's response to a bill in Georgia that would practically ban abortion: "lawmakers, take a philosophy course" -- Nathan Nobis (Morehouse) asks legislators to consider some of the questions and complications of the ethics of abortion
Recent empirical work suggests people believe that in order to have free will, an agent must be capable of caring -- a fascinating post by Eddy Nahmias (Georgia State)
"Feminists have finally started to realize that the varied experiences of trans women have a thing or two to teach us" -- Carol Hay (U. Mass Lowell) on who counts as a woman
John Malkovich as Seneca -- the actor will play the Roman philosopher in an upcoming film, "Seneca - On The Creation Of Earthquakes"
Hundreds of medieval and early modern Greek manuscripts will be digitized and made available for free on the internet -- the project is a collaboration between Cambridge University, Heidelberg University, and the Vatican
It's Public Philosophy Week in Burlington, Vermont -- organized by Tyler Doggett (UVM), it includes many events aimed at bringing philosophy “out of the academy and into the public square”
“We’re just wicked people living among wicked people. Only one thing can give us peace, and that’s a pact of mutual leniency.” -- anger management with Seneca, by James Romm
Philosopher Luciano Floridi (Oxford) is part of a new independent panel set up by Google to review its AI projects and plans -- it's called the Advanced Technology External Advisory Council (ATEAC)
How a successful philosopher has "squeaked by" -- Michael Huemer (Colorado) tells his tale
Using cognitive psychology to show that philosophical concepts "are in certain important respects like natural kind concepts, rather than being built around mental definitions" -- Michael Strevens (NYU) is blogging at Brains this week
God's limits -- Peter Atterton (San Diego State) on the coherence of the idea of a morally perfect, all-powerful, all-knowing God
When it comes to talking about bodies, "the supposed conflict between trans inclusion and feminism rests on a simplistic understanding that ignores individual difference" -- Ray Briggs (Stanford) and B R George (CMU) offer tools with which to "engage critically with alarmist reports about the ‘trans language police’"
“Procrastination is an emotion regulation problem, not a time management problem” -- an explanation, along with advice for managing the feelings that bring on procrastination
"I feel as if I am... someone you can trust because [I am a scientist] honest enough to admit that the scientific enterprise has limitations---which doesn’t mean it’s weak!" -- physicist Marcelo Gleiser (Dartmouth), winner of the 2019 Templeton Prize, cautions against scientism & other departures from humility
"Giving a platform to... incitements strengthens them. Yet, de-platforming might turn their protagonists into martyrs." -- Martin Lenz (Groningen) on responding when propagandists are given a university platform
"Loss of intimacy... does not seem to be a concern among the young people actually growing up online. But do these young people even know what they are missing? And does it matter?" -- Stephen Asma (Columbia College Chicago) on friendship and online life
"There is an art to asking questions, and the leaders dealing with very hard problems in government are eager to master it" -- faculty at the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative are teaching mayors and others how to ask, widen, and deepen questions
A practical philosophy needs to acknowledge both "that this world of ours is full of piss and shit, death and suffering" and that it is "rich and lush, sexy and beautiful" -- an interview with Marcus Hedahl (US Naval Academy)
Academics and activists object to Peter Singer's upcoming appearance at Halifax -- what does the fact that Singer's talks and protests of them have been happening for 20+ years tell us about free speech on campus?
"I’m hostile to the pursuit of originality in legal philosophy---and also in most other areas of philosophy" -- an interview with Les Green (Oxford) on a variety of topics in and related to law
"Democratic governance requires the mediation of public emotion to promote the flourishing of political and social life" -- Danny Li (UCL) takes a look at the response to the Christchurch shooting through the lens of Martha Nussbaum's work on anger
Police stings and possible worlds -- philosophical problems related to entrapment and undercover investigations, from FBI-agent-turned-philosopher Luke Hunt (Radford)
The college admissions scandal, meritocracy, and equal opportunity -- thoughts from Thomas Mulligan (Georgetown)
The new president of the University of Dallas is a philosopher -- Thomas Hibbs is moving from his position as Dean of the Honors College at Baylor back to his alma mater
"Direct, unaffected, uncompromising and perhaps a little severe, but..." -- John Schwenkler (FSU) on Anscombe on the centenary of her birth
"We even have contemporaneous accounts suggesting Socrates doxxed his opponents, posting their addresses all over the Acropolis and inciting his followers to harass them." -- The Onion reports on some newly discovered Socratic dialogues
A course in 20th Century Analytic Philosophy that's all about women philosophers -- some suggestions for what to include, from Paul Franco (Washington)
The anti-semitism of the great philosophers -- Laurie Shrage (Florida International) on its significance for understanding and teaching the history of philosophy
"Who could possibly have the gall to tell the entire human race what it should and should not feel? Philosophers, that’s who!" -- Agnes Callard (Chicago) polices hatred
"If you want to judge the quality of a food culture, don’t look at its finest restaurants and best food. Look to its low-end." -- C. Thi Nguyen (Utah Valley) presents a "Rawlsian Theory of Food Culture"
How scientists are using some work of Thoreau's to observe the effects of climate change -- specifically on wildflowers
"Today I’m overcome with astonishment / At the way we girls denied all that was mean / In those revered philosophers we studied; / Who found us loathsome, loathsomely seductive; / Irrelevant, at best, to noble discourse" -- "The Erotic Philosophers," a poem by Carolyn Kizer (1998)
The problem is "the comprehensive infiltration of politics into our social lives" -- and bipartisanship, which "still puts politics at the center of our collective lives" is not the solution, argues Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)
Academic networks exist owing to "academic friendships," and so need "functional institutional structures to... counterbalance the threat of nepotism" -- Martin Lenz (Groningen) reflects on networks, friendship, and merit in the wake of receiving a weird conference announcement
"The ultimate life coaching team: Marie Kondo and Socrates" -- Freya Mobus (Cornell) explains
A philosopher is running for a seat in the European Parliament -- Alicja Gescinska has a PhD in philosophy from Ghent, hosted the Belgian philosophy interview show Wanderlust, and is running for the Flemish Liberal Democrats (via Helen De Cruz)
Is "locker room culture" a good subject for a contemporary moral problems course? -- some thoughts about how to approach the subject as a teacher, from Jeff Frank (St. Lawrence)
Via a television screen embedded in a robot wheeled into the room, the doctor told the patient he did not have long to live -- Evan Selinger (RIT) and Art Caplan (NYU) on hospital policies, body language, empathy gaps, and the need for face-to-face dialogue
The effects of newer technologies on the workplace, employee relations, and power -- Lisa Herzog (Technical Univ. of Munich) on "whether the digital transformation of work redounds to the benefit of workers, or to the benefit of capital"
The origin of Peter Singer's Instagram account -- a student asked herself, "what's the most good I can do?" (The New Yorker)
The campaign to raise awareness about Lady Mary Shepherd -- one of Scotland's earliest female philosophers
Curved Spacetimes: where Friedrich Nietzsche meets Virginia Woolf -- an upcoming performance by philosopher Barbara Gail Montero and the Logos Dance Collective
"Into the Coast" is a site of video interviews with philosophers -- 10 so far (the site's name comes from Gareth Evans' metaphor for the rare times in which philosophy comes easy: "like riding a surf into the coast")
Philosophy professor by day and bassist by night -- a brief article on philosopher Marc Bobro (City College, Santa Barbara) and his punk band, Crying 4 Kafka
How to write better when you're working in the more formal parts of philosophy -- advice from Richard Pettigrew (Bristol)
Philosopher wins defamation lawsuit -- against someone on Twitter who accused him of being a pedophile
Landmark moments for women in philosophy -- a timeline from the Oxford University Press blog
What is a just wage? -- a series of posts by philosophers and economists begins at the Justice Everywhere blog
Women philosophers suggested by women philosophers -- Elizabeth Anderson, Michelle Moody-Adams, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein and others make some recommendations
As machines come to be more sophisticated, look more like us, and interact with us more, fundamental aspects of human behavior may change -- "humans do not have the time to evolve... innate capacities to live with robots"; we must begin to take explicit steps to protect what we value (The Atlantic)
"Anti-depressants can have genuine, and very powerful, individual-level effects" -- Marcus Arvan (Tampa) replies to the piece by Jacob Stegenga on the evidence for the effectiveness of anti-depressants (linked to earlier)
Assholes: A Theory -- the documentary -- the book by Aaron James (Irvine) is the basis of a new documentary featuring him, John Cleese, and others
"Undergrads Stage Philosophy Takeovers in Area High Schools" -- a look at the philosophical outreach work developed by David Levy (SUNY Geneseo)
Did Socrates get his ideas from his girlfriend? -- an argument that the Symposium's "Diotima" is a thinly-disguised Aspasia, with whom Socrates appears to have had a relationship early in his life.
17 black women philosophers -- an unprecedented philosophical event
"We have plenty of reasons to think that antidepressants have no clinically meaningful benefits for those suffering from depression." -- philosopher of science Jacob Stegenga (Cambridge) looks at the evidence
"Success at something difficult is one thing we can rightly care about. It’s present in a pure form in games, which can enrich our lives in a way that more passive forms of entertainment cannot." -- Thomas Hurka (Toronto) revisits a classic philosophical work on games
If the brilliant philosopher or artist was a bad person, use that to help understand their work, not as a reason to ignore it -- especially if they're dead, argued Les Green (Oxford)
The ethics of Instagram's new slider emoji -- thoughts from philosopher Evan Selinger (RIT) and his 7th grade daughter, Rory
We aren't playing a 'language game,' Wittgenstein, we are playing Scrabble! (EC)
Michael Cohen said Trump used "code" to direct him to lie -- but a little philosophy of language can explain why that's not correct, as Jennifer Saul (Sheffield) explains
Smarter parts don't necessarily make for a smarter whole -- the counterintuitive science of systems
Does merit deserve a place in our political and moral thought? -- Thomas Mulligan (Georgetown), Jo Littler (City University of London), Stephen McNamee (UNC Wilmington), and Christopher Paul (Seattle) discuss it on ABC's "Future Tense"
A good comedian faces the darkness, knows what she's talking about, and preserves the "eternal balance of shitposting and snowflakery" -- Natalie Wynn does some philosophy of comedy
University of California system cancels its multi-million dollar subscriptions to Elsevier journals because of disputes over open-access. -- "UC has been pushing for a so-called read-and-publish deal with the company, which would offset the cost of open access publishing against the cost of access to subscription content"
Joint know-how: an overlooked part of the story of human evolution? -- Jonathan Birch (LSE) explains
"I have to admit that one of the best parts of philosophy conferences is being corrected" -- Landon D.C. Elkind (Iowa) finds his inner Socrates
How can we learn from humans what they actually value? -- a philosopher and a computer scientist working on AI safety call for social scientists to take up specific questions central to this inquiry
"Many members of the academic philosophical community continue to hold on to and actively promote a kind of faux meritocracy" -- Helen De Cruz (Oxford Brookes) on aiming for greater inclusiveness in philosophy
What is probability? -- Chances are, philosophers disagree over that, too. Nevin Climenhaga (Australian Catholic Univ.) explains.
Scientists appear to have discovered a new way neurons communicate, even if they aren't physically connected to one another -- "unprecedented weirdness" (via MR)
Is your notion of democracy personalist or populist? -- Philip Pettit (Princeton) on the difference and its implications for Brexit and other refererendums
A philosopher's three rules for deciding what to write: it must be delightfully interesting, elegantly argued, and actually helpful -- Thi Nguyen (Utah Valley) overcame writer's block by making sure he wouldn't be boring himself with his writing
Pain, parts, and consciousness -- Luke Roelofs (Ruhr-University Bochum) thinks that "minds built out of other minds may be quite common"
Are you indoctrinating your students? -- David Gooblar (Iowa) suggests professors model open-mindedness and intellectual humility
"I didn't go into philosophy because I thought it would make me a lot of money; I found it intellectually interesting. But I was pleasantly surprised to find that it had great instrumental value as well." -- investor Bill Miller on how his study of philosophy contributed to success
"I have mostly become less harshly critical. Many of the views that I formerly thought to be false, absurd, and evidence of feebleness of intellect, I now think merely to be false." -- an interview with the ever-amusing Alastair Norcross (Colorado) at What Is It Like To Be a Philosopher?
Could there ever be an AI that's an artist? -- no, argues Sean Kelly (Harvard), for we must be able to interpret an artist's work as responding to "social necessity" or as expressing value, and we can't think of AI as doing that
Protecting cultural landmarks from destruction by terrorists and others is often justified by connecting such protection to the saving of human lives -- but what, precisely, is the nature of that connection? Erich Hatala Matthes (Wellesley) breaks it down
It turns out that, contra the Telegraph's reporting, that letter from Einstein about Hume's influence on him is not newly discovered -- here's a paper by John Norton (Pittsburgh) about it (via Kevin Meeker, who contacted the person supposed to have made this "discovery" and confirmed that the journalist misrepresented the situation)
Would you like a visit from Henry David Thoreau? -- Brent Ranalli, a Thoreau scholar, portrays him and is available for visits and performances
To be a good academic philosopher, you need to be more than just a good philosopher -- Ian James Kidd (Nottingham) discusses this difference and the skills of each
"The multifariousness of the laws suggests a different conception of what physics is all about. We’re not building a machine that calculates answers... instead, we’re discovering questions" -- a way physics is similar to philosophy, in The New Yorker
This month is the 200th anniversary of "one of the most significant statements of the principles of liberalism" -- that would be "The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns" by Benjamin Constant. Jacob Levy (McGill) celebrates.
A newly-discovered letter from Einstein in which he discusses Hume's influence on his work -- “It is very possible that without these philosophical studies I can not say that the solution would have come." (The Telegraph)
"Most people do not realise that Aristotle wrote works designed for the general public" -- they did not survive, but we know something of them, and they provide a model for public philosophy, argues Edith Hall (KCL)
In 1964 John Stewart Bell published his eponymous theorem, now regarded by many as one of the most important discoveries in physics. -- 55 years later, BJPS is commemorating this by making available a selection of past papers exploring the implications of Bell's Theorem
On deriving an 'ought' from an 'is' -- Rick Lewis at Philosophy Now recently discovered a note Philippa Foot wrote to him about this 18 years ago
Online, "I want... to be boring to argue with... That way, the only people who will do it are the ones who sincerely care about the argument" -- Regina Rini (York) on arguing on the Internet
An important lesson for academics: saying no -- Kevin Timpe (Calvin) shares some advice
"As a professor who regularly teaches East Asian philosophies, I die a little inside every time we experience a cultural phenomenon with a veneer of ‘wisdom from the East’ on it." -- Amy Olberding (Oklahoma) on Marie Kondo, tidying, plain sense, joy-sparking, and usefulness
If there are epistemic facts, does that imply there are moral facts? -- Spencer Case (Colorado) says yes. David Enoch (Hebrew University) and others discuss.
Mary Whiton Calkins studied philosophy and psychology under William James and was the first woman president of the APA -- there's now an effort underway to get her the PhD she appears to have earned but which Harvard refused her
The high price of justice is an injustice -- three posts from Michael Huemer (Colorado) on the subject
Wrestling with the Stoics -- a discussion with philosophy PhD student and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu competitor Michael Tremblay (Queen's) and others
"Nationalism and cosmopolitanism are, far from being incompatible, actually intertwined" -- Kwame Anthony Appiah (NYU) on global citizenship in Foreign Affairs (via Paul Wilson)
Marx's grave vandalized again -- "Memorial to Bolshevik Holocaust... 66,000,000 Dead" was part of the graffiti written on it
A philosopher's new band aims to make music for kids that the adults like, too -- check out Louis & Dan and the Invisible Band from Daniel Groll & Louis Epstein (St. Olaf). Also available on Spotify, Apple Music, etc.
"A diverse elite is better able to advance the interests of all sectors of society. Unfortunately, the way that this principle has been practiced is too narrowly focused on the demographics of elite institutions." -- Jennifer Morton (CUNY) on elite education, diversity, and "real difference"
The mascot for a new museum about poop in Japan is a philosopher named Unberuto --he's "an anthropomorphized poop pile who carries his toilet around with him" when he's not sitting on it pondering "the nature of universal truths" (via Tanya Kostochka)
"By looking carefully---by looking with love---we can see others for who they are" -- Anil Gomes (Oxford) on Iris Murdoch, morality attention, and love
"Planned, coordinated violence gave us a social order that made virtue adaptive. But that social order also made exploitation and oppression possible." -- a primatologist's attempt to explain the development of morality
Google Translate and philosophy of language -- "Wittgenstein’s theories gave them a breakthrough in making their translation services more effective," reports Olivia Goldhill at Quartz
The life of the mind is being destroyed by technological distraction and administrative overload -- Cal Newport (Georgetown) discusses what can be done about the "crisis of concentration that has hit higher education particularly hard"
"Having applicants provide letters of recommendation only after the initial screening stage can reduce stress and unnecessary paperwork for candidates, letter-writers and hiring committees" -- the American Historical Association changes its hiring process guidelines
"The philosophical community needs to do some soul searching about how we managed to unnecessarily isolate ourselves and what can be done to reverse that trend." -- Kevin Zollman (CMU) has some ideas
"Is there in your opinion, professor Carnap, also in philosophy any progress that corresponds to the idea of progress in science?" "Yes" -- a video interview with Rudolf Carnap (link to downloadable English captions in the credits)
"'Socrates' is a witty and endlessly fascinating new drama about a complicated man who changed how the world thought." -- it opens in NYC in April
"Rawls maintains [that] the stability of otherwise just institutions depends on their embodying an idea of reciprocity." And "reciprocal" is "one of Mr. Trump's favorite terms." -- Samuel Scheffler on liberalism in theory and politics in practice (NYU)
"The Encyclopédie was expressly designed to pass on the temptation and method of intellectual freedom to a huge audience" -- the creation and significance of "the supreme achievement of the French Enlightenment"
Just released: 10 new conversations with women philosophers -- at Myisha Cherry's UnMute Podcast
"All emotions represent a contrast between the current state of affairs and some other state not in the here and now" -- Tom Cochrane (Flinders) shares his theory of the emotions at The Brains Blog
"The purpose of a scientific approach to art is not to take the mystery out of the art. It’s to give you new insight into why you think it’s so wonderful and mysterious." --neuroscience, beauty, and art
"You can look at a human being as just a... bunch of circuitry of muscles and neurons... but if you want to find things that are relevant to their accountability... you have to zoom out" -- a brief interview with Helen Beebee (Manchester) on free will
Sometimes political institutions should apologize -- Allison Don and Per-Erik Milam (Twente) at the Ethical War Blog
Karen Detlefsen (U. Penn) is bringing philosophy to the Philadelphia community -- check out this profile of her impressive, multi-pronged work
"Evel Knievel applied to graduate programs in philosophy with a writing sample that solved the trolley problem, the Ship of Theseus puzzle, and six other vehicular paradoxes." -- Alex Baia with an over-the-top funny tale of academic dare-devilry
"Did the philosophy professor – just this once, of course – overthink it?" -- a philosopher is asked by his four year old: "Daddy, why are we real?"
"Futuremakers" is a podcast about the future of society, and season 1 focuses on artificial intelligence in various contexts -- hosted by philosopher Peter Millican (Oxford)
Can we finally be done with the "campus free speech crisis"? -- yes, according to a variety of metrics
A man plans to take his parents to court for creating him without his consent -- anti-natalism in (legal) action
"Criminal convictions should not lead to the denial of basic rights and human dignity" -- Jennifer Lackey (Northwestern) on the treatment of prisoners in the United States
"If you think cronyism in academia is a thing, wait until you’re leaving academia and spending time in the business world. It’s a way of life." -- a philosopher who left academia to enter the business world shares some advice (via the Philosophers' Cocoon)
"During the night, each cyclist will dig a trench in the snow and burrow into their sleeping bag" -- Jose Luis Bermudez (Texas A&M) is embarking on a 1000-mile bike race through the Alaskan winter to raise $20,000 for charity
"I thought that the armchair was at the end of its useful life. But I have become convinced otherwise." -- Michael Strevens (NYU) uses empirical psychology to defend armchair philosophy
The rich, complicated, and difficult philosophy of transitional justice -- explained by Colleen Murphy (Illinois) in an interview at 3:AM Magazine
A petition to erect a statue of Lady Mary Shepherd, considered the first Scottish woman philosopher, in Edinburgh -- her works in metaphysics and epistemology were highly regarded by her contemporaries, but after her death received little attention until relatively recently
The philosophers are in -- what happens when three philosophers open an advice booth on a corner in NYC? A report from Lee McIntyre (BU)
The philosopher who created a book of over 100 versions of the Batman-slapping-Robin meme sits down for an interview to explain what he was thinking -- the interviewer? Himself. "KAPOW!!"
A series of videos elaborating on the philosophy discussed in the TV sitcom "The Good Place" -- featuring Todd May (Clemson), who is one of the philosophy consultants for the show
Short videos for philosophy students on skills useful for finding and evaluating arguments in texts -- a growing collection from Mark Schroeder (USC)
Attempts to control what Muslim women wear -- Alia Al-Saji (McGill) takes a closer look at the justifications for doing so
The Karl Marx memorial at Highgate Cemetery has apparently been vandalized -- no witnesses have come forward, leading some to conclude that the memorial contained the seeds of its own destruction
Is the dominance of liberal views in U.S. academia owed to the fact that most research universities and liberal arts colleges are located in liberal communities? -- if so, those interested in pushing for more "viewpoint diversity" should convince policymakers and taxpayers to fund more institutions of higher education in underserved areas
Academics should be more respectful in how they refer to each other in writing -- says Professor Benatar (Cape Town)
"The challenge is not getting them to talk, but doing so without sacrificing too much rigor" -- Harry Brighouse (Wisconsin) on "how to ensure high-quality thinking and talking which engages the whole class"
How a philosophy professor is making a difference in health care across her state -- a profile of Jessica Miller (University of Maine) (via Paul Kelleher)
The tendency to "focus our discussions of sexual negotiation on consent and refusal has resulted in a narrowed and distorted view of the pragmatics of sexual communication." -- Rebecca Kukla (Georgetown) on the overlooked variety of norms related to good sex
How could algorithmic decision-making driven by "bias-free math" and "clean data" be racist? -- Danny Li (UCL) explains
New moral concepts come into use and become authoritative for us. How does that happen? -- Henry Richardson (Georgetown) explains
Philosophy for Music for Airports -- John Lysaker (Emory) uses Eno as an entry point to the philosophy of listening
"If the hoax shows anything, it’s that uncritical reverence for ideas clad in scientific clothing... is at least as much a problem as progressive political bias" -- scientism and the recent hoaxing of academic journals
Interested in philosophy at the intersection of ethics and aesthetics? -- perhaps you should join the new Aesthetics & Ethics Research Group
Students, GIF your comments -- how one professor got her students to read the comments she makes on their papers
A new anime series about the life of Karl Marx, produced by China's Communist Party, appears to be a hit -- "This Marx is so cute" writes one commenter
What was prescient and what was problematic in Andrea Dworkin's feminism -- a look back on the controversial thinker and activist
Do philosophers care enough about economic growth? -- polymath economist Tyler Cowen, emphasizing pluralism and epistemic modesty, explains his "stubborn attachments"
“Philosophy tends to equip you well for reasoning through ambiguous and interdependent problem spaces, by equipping you to objectively identify what really matters, separate concerns and produce a practical, success-maximising plan." -- how an education in philosophy "arms one well" for a career in data science
Is social media killing democracy? -- Regina Rini (York) talks about it with Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)
Sometimes your gut feelings might clue you in to important details about the world; sometimes they might be a lead you to act wrongly or irrationally -- Michael Brownstein (CUNY) on the virtues and vices of spontaneity
Logic is under attack from the Social Justice Warriors! -- and a real practical epistemological problem regarding experts and novices
Which edition of Hobbes' Leviathan should researchers reference? -- a discussion at the European Hobbes Society in the wake a of new and costly scholarly edition
“Dad, do you know where my sunglasses are?” “No, do you know where my dad glasses are? If you find them, give them to someone whose eyes have not yet forsaken the noxious tedium that surrounds us all.” -- more nihilist dad jokes from Alex Baia
"In a future dominated by driverless cars, moral texture will erode away in favor of a rigid ethical framework." -- subtlety, relativism, and moral machines, discussed in The New Yorker
Frank Ramsey's rebellion against Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle -- Cheryl Misak (Toronto) on the the importance of the "subjective side" to philosophy
Addressing hermeneutic injustice "is about ensuring that epistemic barriers are not in place for individuals themselves to understand and articulate their experiences, and to self-advocate" -- how philosophers are working to improve the treatment of the mentally ill
Erik Olin Wright, influential sociologist and theorist of "real utopias", has died -- an appreciation at Dissent
-- and reflections on Wright by Harry Brighouse (Wisconsin) at Crooked Timber
"Suppose that I could look into a crystal ball and see myself twenty or forty years after the decision to go to college or emigrate or get married or have children. What do I look for to check whether the undertaking was a success?' -- Agnes Callard (Chicago) on making big decisions
When Socrates chatted with the Marie Kondo of ancient Greece -- is there something to be learned about today's fad of "the life-changing magic of tidying up"?
"Vengeful approaches [to politics] deny others the capacities for moral learning... foreclose unanticipated forms of reconciliation and community, and judge, a priori, the life horizons of others based on their worst transgressions" -- Yet at the same time we must engage in "unyielding confrontation in pursuit of the greater goods of a more just world". Brandon Terry (Harvard) on what to learn from Martin Luther King, Jr.
W.E.B. Du Bois, race, power, and how art can transform society -- Liam Kofi Bright (LSE) on the BBC radio's "Start the Week" (at around the 11:30 mark)
"The right question to ask is: what can I do without an arbitrary deadline that I could not do with one?" -- Lawrence Solum (Georgetown) with some advice for post-tenure life (via Elizabeth Cohen)
To beard or not to beard? -- Henry Pratt (Marist) takes up philosophical questions about facial hair
"The top people in our discipline are such a bunch of delusional narcissists" -- Dan Kaufman (Missouri State) and Oliver Traldi (Notre Dame) discuss the philosophy profession
The circular reasoning at the heart of the fable of the ant and the grasshopper -- elucidated by Stephen White (Northwestern)
"We should see one important social function of practical ethicists as widening the Overton window" -- Rebecca Brown (Oxford) explains
"It remains to be seen how much of embodied-cognition theory will remain intact following the replication crisis" -- at Quartz
"There is very good reason to expect that she will produce sound and interesting work in philosophy" -- a letter of recommendation for G.E.M. Anscombe, written by Wittgenstein
"What are the cognitive processes that underlie successful social understanding and interaction---and what happens when we misunderstand others"? -- Shannon Spaulding (Oklahoma State) is guest-blogging at Brains
Is it gay for me to love Natalie Wynn? -- the philosopher takes on tough questions, and just when you think "but what about this further question she definitely won't ask because it raises politically incorrect problems for her own view?" she asks it. Watch the whole thing.
How to make big decisions wisely -- the ideas of L.A. Paul, Agnes Callard, and others are discussed by Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker
"Du Bois - never did a day's real work in his life and most certainly did not even lift, but without anybody forcing him to wore a top hat and Prussian cavalry officer gloves, so maxing out on preppishness at least." -- Liam Kofi Bright (LSE) locates philosophers on the Jock-Nerd-Prep-Goth map
"Efforts at silencing academics seem to me often unjust and almost always self-defeating" -- Jeff McMahan (Oxford) on campus speech, in The New Statesman
"Academic freedom is a principle worth defending, but it is foolish to ignore its costs, and who (disproportionately, quietly) bears them" -- Sophie Smith, a colleague of John Finnis, on the (complicated?) issues publicized by the recent petition to have him removed (via John Bogart)
"I found a manuscript a friend had asked me to read so long ago the book had since been published and gone out of print." -- a professor cleans his office
Should the journal hoaxters have submitted their project to an IRB? -- yes, say the experts (via Justin Tiehen)
Socrates the human being, who danced for exercise and conversed as friend and flirt -- one of several pictures of the ancient world we get from Xenophon, according to Eve Browning (Texas San Antonio)
The inaugural issue of Open Philosophy, a new open access journal, is now available -- the journal "does not favour any particular philosophical school, perspective or methodology"
Should philosophers think more about the fact that we're born? -- Alison Stone (Lancaster) thinks so
"A space for publicly minded thinkers to draw on their education and experience in order to address contemporary social, cultural, and political issues from a philosophical point of view" -- The New Statesman is starting a philosophy column, curated by Aaron James Wendland (Higher School of Economics)
Why we need more science and philosophy books for children and teenagers -- a brief from Massimo Pigliucci (CUNY), who is currently co-authoring a graphic novel-style philosophy book
Ethics blog PEA Soup will begin awarding various prizes to its contributors -- some will be offered on an annual basis, others quarterly
"Almost every paragraph of the chapter contains at least one misleading claim, problematic quote, false assertion, or selective presentation of the evidence" -- an expert on existential threats writes a detailed and informative critique of Steven Pinker's take on the subject that's fascinating in myriad ways (via Eric Schliesser)
A play, a song, and now a mini-opera based on "the doomed relationship of the great David Hume and society beauty Nancy Ord" -- you can catch a new production of the play this coming weekend if you happen to be in Edinburgh
"For each relevant submitted article, create a prediction market estimating its chance of replication, and use that estimate as one factor in deciding whether to publish that article" -- an opportunity to contribute to an experiment in improving editorial decision-making
Who stabbed Spinoza? And why? -- Steven Nadler (Wisconsin) investigates
"Wynn has managed the remarkable feat of bringing the spirit of Socratic dialogue to one of the most vicious battlefields of the online culture wars." -- Natalie Wynn, the philosophy-student-turned-YouTube-sensation, is profiled in The Atlantic
"If you reject and ridicule philosophy altogether, you probably end up doing bad philosophy" -- a look at a supposed empirical refutation of panpsychism
"I have roughly three weeks left of existence." -- influential sociologist Erik Olin Wright (Wisconsin) is dying of leukemia, and is blogging about his condition, treatment, and thoughts
"Should we not think that a paper is particularly promising when met with two opposing reviews?" -- if we value risk-taking in philosophy, as we should, what institutional implications follow?
A roundtable on empirically-informed approaches to weakness of will -- at Brains
Does the prestige of a philosophy PhD program affect how long it takes to get a tenure-track job? -- Jonathan Weisberg (Toronto) investigates
A series of posts about philosophy podcasts by the podcasters themselves -- at the Blog of the APA
What you think you know about genetics is wrong -- genes "cannot possibly serve as instructions for the more complex task of putting the proteins together into a fully functioning being, no more than the characters on a typewriter can produce a story"
"Philosophy’s getting a lot less boring" -- Rebecca Kukla (Georgetown) in conversation with Tyler Cowen (George Mason)
A world without humans would not be a regrettable state of affairs -- but even so, we shouldn't attempt extinction, argues David Benatar (Cape Town)
"Plato’s whole defense of philosophy as a way of life rests on the idea that there’s more to human motivation than our desire for pleasure alone" -- a conversation with Tushar Irani (Wesleyan) in the LA Review of Books
A new blog on "biopolitical asymmetries and other mechanisms and effects of power in philosophy and beyond" -- from Shelley L. Tremain and Melinda C. Hall (Stetson)
"We don’t have to give up on market society if we can recognize and correct for its limitations---it may even be our best hope, because it’s friendlier to pluralism than most alternatives are" -- a lengthy profile of Elizabeth Anderson (Michigan) in The New Yorker
Holding a coherent set of philosophical views may be more difficult than you thought -- Liam Kofi Bright (LSE) provides some examples of the trouble
"Defying an explicit directive from his government, Sousa Mendes issued visas to tens of thousands of refugees" fleeing Nazis -- including the family philosopher Sylvain Bromberger, who died this past year (NYT)
"Our creation is now coming back to devour our souls" -- Justin E. H. Smith (University of Paris, Diderot) with moving thoughts on the "gutting of our human subjecthood"
Some structural disadvantages of interdisciplinary research, and what to do about them -- thoughts from Eric Schwitzgebel (UCR)
Is conscious thought an illusion? -- an interview with Peter Carruthers (Maryland) in Scientific American
The all-night philosophy extravaganza will be taking place in five US cities -- Houston, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington, DC
"The two disparate bodies of work share an uncanny ability to invite an easing of traditional boundaries of understandings and experience" -- a review of adjacent exhibits of artwork by Adrian Piper and Victor Hugo at the Hammer Museum
Should parents lie to their children about Santa? -- James Mahon (CUNY) considers the arguments
"The important thing this time is to appreciate the importance of freedom of expression to the development of philosophy" -- commentary on the decision to teach philosophy in high schools in Saudi Arabia
A must-read letter from a chemistry professor to a university president on the latter's decision to close some departments -- from 2010, but just as relevant today (via Laurie Paul)
Big philanthropy versus democracy -- an interview with Rob Reich (Stanford) at Vox
"It may well be... that the extinction of humanity would make the world better off and yet would be a tragedy." -- Todd May (Clemson) on the value of humanity
A new interdisciplinary podcast about the mind -- philosophy, neuroscience, and psychiatry
The task is feasible. But there's one problem. It's logically impossible. -- The Web Page That Cannot Exist, by Geoffrey Pullum
Unconventional teaching ideas that work -- a new series of posts at the Philosophers' Cocoon
Ethical issues in conducting research on using artificial intelligence to help solve difficult social problems -- David Gray Grant (MIT) at the Phenomenal World blog
Is "shmidentity" culturally shminsensitive? -- on the philosophical practice of using the “shm-“ prefix for properties that resemble other properties but for some stipulated feature
Nervous about that philosophy exam? Does it help to learn that David Lewis failed his metaphysics exam when he was a grad student? -- he mentions this in a letter to David Armstrong
Fortunately, very few philosophers have signed onto the latest episode of academic mobbing -- it concerns a fellowship appointment in psychology (via Nathan Cofnas)
A key machine learning task is "modeling fuzzy, changeable patterns implicit in human behavior" -- and that's a central goal of the humanities
The New X-Phi Blog, focusing on the "new experimental philosophy" -- it's new
The two types of Jane Austen fans -- a philosophical look at the distinction by Eva Dadlez (Central Oklahoma)
Where's that paper you once glimpsed at on the web that you're now trying to recall the details of for something you're writing now? -- here's a free tool that makes that search much easier
Martha Nussbaum on her work, Mozart as a philosopher, and what she plans to do with the $1 million Berggruen Prize -- an interview in The New Statesman
Can we separate the art from the artist? -- several philosophers contribute to the latest "Artworld Roundtable" at Aesthetics for Birds
A new Facebook group focused on the teaching of philosophy -- professors and graduate students who teach philosophy can ask to join
"A couple of old blokes dominating a dinner party with old insider jokes" -- Martin Lenz (Groningen) discusses problems with allusions in scholarly writing
"The philosophical profession runs on institutional logic rather than philosophical logic" -- a collection of responses to Bryan Van Norden's "Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto" (quote from David Seltzer's piece)
Each month, a different philosopher writes about a different piece of correspondence from David Lewis -- it's part of the "Age of Metaphysical Revolution" project
A new blog by a philosophy graduate student is a place "for fellow graduate students to relate, commiserate, and enjoy" -- "PhDoing Life"
Three arguments for the thesis that sex is socially constructed -- deconstructed by Alex Byrne (MIT)
"A student at the local state university... was questioned by police after proposing a rally in support of the philosopher on his social networking page" -- "the philosopher" is Kant; vandalism of the statue of him last week was owed to growing tensions over whether to name the local airport for him
"Being a physicist gives a person a certain standing in conversations that have something to do with physics. So why shouldn’t being a woman give me a certain standing in conversations that have something to do with gender?" -- Agnes Callard (Chicago) on "managerial standing" in conversations
"Do we have the right to defend [possibly with violence] ourselves and others from government injustice when government agents are following an unjust law?" -- yes we do, argues Jason Brennan (Georgetown)
Central European University is moving from Budapest to Vienna -- owing to the Hungarian government's Hungarian government refusing to let it continue to offer U.S. degree programs
A political philosophy experiment at an arts and sciences festival -- conducted by Ingrid Robeyns' Fair Limits Team
"Our fervor for democratic politics bears seeds of democracy’s undoing" -- a closer look at political polarization, from Scott Aikin and Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)
An free, online intro philosophy text in which "each chapter offers a sustained argument for some controversial thesis, specifically written for an audience of beginners" -- by Dan Korman (UCSB)
"Philosophy in plain Arabic" -- a program in Cairo aimed at bringing philosophy to the public and improving its image (apparently in Egypt philosophy is an undergrad major with very low standards, according to the article)
The illiberalism of ordinary police practices -- a brief survey of some issues by Luke Hunt (Radford)
"The resentment of the left behind" -- thoughts on #MeToo and the distribution of compassion, from Mikhail Valdman (VCU)
Was Nozick correct about why academics tend to dislike markets? -- yes, according to a study of 1500 French academics
"Perhaps the problem is not that insects lack an inner life, but that they don’t have a way to communicate it in terms we can understand" -- a philosopher and an ecology professor on evidence of "consciousness-like phenomena" in insects
We should be wary of approaches to history that present "a false picture of the impossibility of independent thought, against the grain, of one's own times" -- Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) on recent discussions of the racism and sexism of canonical philosophers
Having trouble figuring out whether your syllabus is gender balanced? -- there's an app for that (via Colleen Murphy)
David Hume's shiny toe -- featured at Atlas Obscura
"The exclusion of non-European philosophy from the canon was a decision, not something that people have always believed" -- and Kant and his defenders are among those responsible for this exclusion, argues Bryan W. Van Norden (Vassar, Yale-NUS, Wuhan)
Vandals threw paint on a statue of Kant and on his tomb -- will their defense be that it's universalizable?
Polls conducted by the people who brought us Cards Against Humanity -- not sure how rigorous they are, but they do (amusingly? despairingly?) motivate the "against humanity" part (via Jason Brennan)
Skeptical pressure and climate change -- N. Ángel Pinillos (Arizona State) on how some epistemology can help improve discourse about the environment
A Chinese researcher claims to have used CRISPR to edit the genes of two humans to improve their resistance to HIV -- "If true, this experiment is monstrous," says Julian Savulescu (Oxford)
A Nordic perspective on applying to graduate programs in philosophy -- from a Swedish philosophy PhD student
"The present warrants criticism, but it will do no good if it’s based on a myth about some glorious, dispassionate past that never was" -- the Enlightment: both its celebrators and detractors are "deeply mistaken"
Is the reason to give great historical figures of philosophy a pass on their racism and sexism also a reason to not consider them great? -- Martin Lenz (Groningen) on the downsides of "greatness"
Is it immoral to keep using Facebook? -- it depends on whether the company "has crossed certain moral 'red lines,' entering the realm of outright wickedness," argues S. Matthew Liao (NYU)
Eddy Nahmias talks free will -- on Robert Wright's Blogginheads.tv show
An NGO which uses art and philosophy to help the homeless, the poor, and other populations "at risk of exclusion" -- this story at the CBC has some information, but check out its website (Exeko.org) for more details
"Philosophy was once a woman’s world." -- on the women who "helped to shape the world's oldest philosophy"
"Both novels depict a profession in severe decline. But in their speculative leaps, they offer different strategies for the defense of humanities scholarship." -- some recent fiction on "saboteurs in the modern academy"
Michael Huemer (Colorado) has started a blog called "Fake Nous" (smart branding!) -- check out his tips for political debate
"Personal autonomy is valuable for many reasons: some of them do bear, in the way Mill stressed, on our capacity for and success at self-creation" -- "but others bear even on those aspects of ourselves that lie beyond choice," says Les Green (Oxford)
A depiction of philosophical integrity? -- from Reza Farazmand
A recent study shows that "exposure to a Singer-style philosophical argument had no statistically detectable effect on charitable giving" -- "but exposure to a narrative about a family rescued from slavery did have a detectable effect"
A journal encourages authors to "cite inclusively" -- in attempt to take concerns about status signaling seriously
"Sometimes they are offensive and terrible and bad, but you don’t win by saying that." -- a profile of Natalie Wynn, a former philosophy PhD student who now makes a living making excellent Youtube videos on politics and ideas (via Matt McAdam)
A conversation about sexism, misogyny, pyschology, politics, and more -- with Kate Manne (Cornell) and Robert Wright
What would a non-ideal theory of academic freedom look like? -- thoughts from Shannon Dea (Waterloo)
The first traffic jam on Broadway was caused by a philosophy lecture -- before clicking, can you guess who it was? Hint: this was in 1913
How not to be an atheist -- an interview with Tim Crane (CEU)
A philosophy graduate student lost his eyesight while working on his PhD -- what he learned has changed the way he teaches
"Sartre helps us to appreciate how individuals come together to create hope where there was none by acting collectively." -- Ronald Aronson on Sartre’s existentialist Marxism
A fictionalized biography of Hannah Arendt in the form of a graphic novel -- by well-known cartoonist Ken Krimstein
"The deeper reason that technology so often disappoints and betrays us is that it promises to make easy things that, by their intrinsic nature, have to be hard." -- on Plato's prescience regarding social media
Is this an argument for corporal punishment? -- Or a reductio of retributivism?
"You hear about the moon restaurant? Good food, no atmosphere! If you eat there, you forfeit your life, which would make no difference to the universe as a whole." -- nihilist dad jokes by Alex Baia
"I think we’ve demonstrated between us that it is possible to debate this issue frankly and even bluntly, and without agreeing on everything---and still get somewhere." -- Sophie-Grace Chappell (Open University) and Holly Lawford-Smith (Melbourne) discuss transgender identity
Over 55% of the Members of Parliament who majored in philosophy support Brexit -- the second-highest proportion, after classics (via Mihail Evans)
Is sex binary? A response to Alex Byrne's recent essay on the subject -- from Ellen Clarke (Oxford)
and a rejoinder by Byrne
Are these student's tweets advocating genocide? -- even if they are, they should be allowed, argues David Benatar (University of Cape Town) (via Rob Sica)
"Reason and argument are the best tools we have, but... they get little purchase without good stories, empathy and understanding too" -- Andy Clark (Edinburgh) answers questions about his work and life, at IAI
Do the stories of your life contribute to the meaningfulness of your life, and if so, how? -- the ideas of Helena de Bres (Wellesley), critically discussed by Antti Kauppinen (Helsinki)
Should search committees be looking for kindness and compassion in prospective colleagues? -- can we get "decent" colleagues while avoiding harmful stereotyping?
The institutional and intellectual issues at the heart of the replication crisis in psychology -- a discussion with Brian Earp (Yale, Oxford)
"Things Ought To Make Sense" -- a song by Rachel Lark which she wrote for her mom, Louise Antony
“A lot of people ask me, ‘Philosophy---do you even use that in business?’ And I actually do all the time, especially in the world of Silicon Valley." -- entrepreneur and venture capital fund director Dan Peate
Too many interesting podcasts with philosophers at the Panpsycast recently to pick just one to post about -- have a look and a listen
"Since we broke up, I’ve come to realise that we’re just very different in terms of what we value." -- a philosopher who has found success in the public realm writes to his old love, academia
It looks like sociology is about to have its own Ronell case -- Philosophy students: if something like this is happening to you, I can put you in touch with people who can help.
The play "follows the philosopher's growing prominence in democratic Athens through the military and social upheavals that led to one of the most infamous executions in Western history" -- "Socrates," the play, will be premiering in NYC in May
On academia and activism -- Mark Lance (Georgetown) reflects on 35 years of "a second career in activism"
Philosophy and magic -- interesting interview with Jason Leddington (Bucknell) about his research and teaching on the subjects and how he got into them
In pursuing the good life, can too much reflection be dangerous? -- Valerie Tiberius (Minnesota) is the guest in the latest episode of the On Wisdom podcast
"Why do so many find it impossible to believe that any so-called genius could fail to see that their prejudices were irrational and immoral? One reason is that our culture has its own deep-seated and mistaken assumption..." -- Julian Baggini on admiring the racist and sexist philosophers of the past
The power of imagination, or care, or sugar, or what? -- a fascinating possibility researchers are exploring: some placebos are not placebos
The ethical issues in play in the police-informant relationship -- Luke Hunt (Radford), an FBI agent-turned-philosophy professor, investigates
Poster advertising an Africana philosophy course defaced with racial slur at Midwestern State University (Texas) -- the course will be taught by Nathan Jun, who praised the university administration's quick condemnation of the vandalism
What the folk really believe about mental states: our beliefs, desires, emotions, and judgments are under our control -- results of six studies (via Fiery Cushman)
Is sex binary? That question doesn't have the relevance many seem to think it has -- so argues Alex Byrne (MIT)
We're neglecting the future -- how can we change that?
The risk faced by "those who would jettison civility in the interest of justice" -- Matt Dinan (St. Thomas) on whether niceness is a virtue
The UK Government's new commission on architectural design will be chaired by a philosopher -- Roger Scruton. In related news, Leon Kass has been appointed Secretary of Ice Cream.
What universities are doing to shore up humanities majors -- philosopher Debra Satz, dean of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford, is among those consulted for the article
"Calling bullshit might be one of the most insidious forms of bullshit." -- three articles on the anxieties, insecurities, and insights of the humanities, in light of the recent hoaxing, at The Point
Varieties of nothingness -- in science and philosophy
What were the most influential academic books of the past 20 years? -- the Chronicle of Higher Ed gets answers from a variety of academics
A competition to encourage non-Christian philosophy of religion -- from the Journal of Analytic Theology, funded by the APA
"Questions about what categories should guide our social lives cannot be answered by simply describing the world, because they ask how we should describe the world." -- gender nonbinary people and the messy details about (and uncertain future of) sex and gender
Reincarnating a Rawlsian device for a discussion of climate change -- Michelle Alexander in the NYT
Open Culture puts up a lot of philosophy-related content -- here are their philosophy-tagged posts
When it comes to perception, "your brain is doing a lot of work behind the scenes" -- and that is one reason these optical illusions work
Is there a cherished ethical ideal that the academic study of ethics tends to overlook? -- yes, says Amod Lele (Boston U.): "be yourself"
The Constitution and the oath of office can function as applied ethics texts for U.S. Presidents -- one lesson from a discussion on the presidency with Corey Brettschneider (Brown)
A table that plots the pragmatists along dimensions of quietism/metaphysics and humanism/scientism -- from Joseph Clark
"Even if you work 60 hours a week and sleep eight hours a night, that leaves you 52 hours a week---a full seven hours a day---to do other things" -- how a time audit can help academics
Who will teach Silicon Valley to be ethical? -- Chief Ethics Officers, perhaps
How do stereotypes distort our perception of the truth? -- Greg Restall (Melbourne) is interviewed on the subject on ABC Radio
Life in academia can be great. So can life outside of it. -- on being encouraging to grad students in philosophy while being realistic about job prospects
Steven Pinker's "silly interpretation" of Nietzsche is a lesson on the value of the humanities -- Robert Crease (Stony Brook) in the WSJ
When was a word first used in print? What words were first used the year you were born? -- check out Merriam-Webster's new "Time-Traveler"
Podcast discussions with philosophers, economists, and others interested in altruism -- at 80,000 Hours
PhD Students, a show on CBC Radio wants to turn your research into a 54-minute episode -- well, maybe yours.
Virtual reality, sympathy, and empathy -- Erick Ramirez (Santa Clara) on what the technology can and cannot do
"If anything, our current post-truth moment is less a product of Latour’s ideas than a validation of them." -- a lengthy and interesting NYT profile of Bruno Latour and discussion of his ideas, philosophy of science, and "post-truth"
CEU is likely moving from Budapest to Vienna -- Tim Crane (CEU) explains why in a Twitter thread
A wine bar named for Diogenes will be opening next month in London -- one wonders how closely the staff will follow his example
"I am a sexist!" proclaims one philosopher -- George Yancy (Emory) says to other men: "We need to tell the truth about ourselves."
In praise of "author-meets-critics" events -- they help counter "one of the more dispiriting elements of our profession," says Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam)
What one learns running a public "ask a philosopher" booth -- Ian Olasov (CUNY) reflects on his two years of distinctive public philosophy
Commit to encouraging your students to vote on Election Day (Nov. 6th) -- a pledge for educators
There's a new open access philosophy text: "Introduction to History and Philosophy of Science" -- by Hakob Barseghyan, Nicholas Overgaard, and Gregory Rupik (all Toronto)
"I prioritize and protect my weekends, evenings, holidays, and sleep. And yet I maintain a productive academic career." -- important advice for philosophers & other academics
Add “Zombies, Serial Killers, and Madmen” to the "interesting philosophy courses" file -- Eric Smaw (Rollins) is interviewed by the Miami Herald about his course
"What, morally speaking, are journalists doing in conflicts?" -- Richard Stupart (LSE) and Katherine Furman (Cork) on the moral role of "bearing witness"
"A feminist case against the feminist case against trans inclusivity" -- by philosophers Lorna Finlayson (Essex), Katharine Jenkins (Nottingham), Rosie Worsdale (Cambridge)
Most humanities PhDs---inside and out of the academy---think getting their PhD prepared them well for their jobs and would do it again if starting over (via IHE)
An Italian philosopher has received over 40,000 hostile messages, including death threats -- philosopher Raffaele Ariano (Vita-Salute University San Raffaele di Milano) had published an open letter objecting to a train conductor's racist announcement
Challenges confronting the online philosophy community -- remarks from Adriel Trott (Wabash)
We should think of philosophy talks as taking place in "intellectual safe spaces" -- "where one’s ideas are bracketed from certain social contexts in order to examine them simply as ideas," says Bharath Vallabha
The creation of a database of materials on Zhu Xi is underway -- estimated to be completed in 5 years, it will contain books, videos, audio, academic articles, and other items related to Zhu Xi and those influenced by him
"How does one decide the potential of an as yet un-had dialogue?" -- Liam Kofi Bright (LSE) on disputes over the absurdity and/or plausibility of ideas (and the recent academic hoax)
Is Bojack Horseman a story about Stoicism? -- an interesting look at the acclaimed television show (but too many spoilers if you haven't watched through season 4) (via Chike Jeffers)
The American Society for Aesthetics issues an apology for its handling of a sexual harassment allegation -- and has appointed an ombudsperson
Figuring out the costs and benefits of cognitive biases in light of the multiplicity of epistemic goals and different types of epistemic agents -- it's complicated, as Lisa Bortolotti, Andrea Polonioli, and Sophie Stammers explain
"What is particularly troubling about some societal disagreements is that they concern factual matters that tend to be almost impossible to resolve" -- Klemens Kappel (Copenhagen) on the problem of "deep disagreement"
How to recognize fascism before it's too late -- a brief video primer from Jason Stanley (Yale)
In support of the college lecture -- new study finds that undergrads taught via lecture are less likely to drop out
A look at what's happening to our reading brains at this historic juncture between the old ways and the new" -- what does it mean for the future of reading, learning, and teaching that the average person now reads 100,000 words a day on electronic devices?
A philosopher is the first transgender athlete to win a world championship cycling event -- Rachel McKinnon (Charleston) won the gold in the sprint at the 2018 UCI Masters Track Cycling World Championships. See her Twitter for an informative discussion.
Kindness in academic philosophy -- Em Walsh (McGill) on why and how
"To fight fake news, we need to take the same norms that keep us (relatively) honest over cocktails, and apply them to social media" -- Regina Rini (York) on a way to do that
"Critical theories of the post–Frankfurt School period... can be viewed as plausible rearticulations of a project of critique initiated by Kant" -- Seyla Benhabib (Yale) on the "illuminating pluralization of critical theories"
An esoteric reading of "The Good Place" -- Robin James (UNC Charlotte) thinks the show is more progressive than it appears
Human experience in the aggregate -- "more of human experience has happened recently than time would suggest"; what should we take from that? (via MR)
Political success is not moral victory nor legal vindication -- Jacob Levy (McGill) on Kavanaugh, with the help of Bernard Williams
Philosophy and race in South Africa? -- David Benatar (Cape Town) responds to a recent article in Quartz
"What does philosophy have to teach us about running a business?" "Oh, I think everything..." -- a discussion with a philosopher-turned-plumber (who still teaches some philosophy courses part time)
"I have to find a new question now" -- Urmila Mahadev, a graduate student who recently solved the fascinating quantum verification problem
"How can we get better at talking civilly to people who are very different from ourselves?" -- maybe we need billy goats, says Agnes Callard (Chicago)
Does Harriet Taylor get too little credit for her role in Mill's writings? -- or too much?
"Even if right-leaning authors appear on syllabi as frequently as left-leaning authors, students remain at risk of receiving an unbalanced presentation of the views." -- one reason Christopher Freiman (William & Mary) argues for "viewpoint diversity"
"Democracy depends on the capacity of citizens to sustain their commitment to the political equality of even those who they regard as their most benighted, vicious, and depraved political opponents." -- It ain't easy, observe Scott Aikin & Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)
"What is more practical than thinking hard about how to live one’s life?" -- in a local Texas paper, a defense of philosophy's "messing with minds," by Robert Baird (Baylor)
The optimal number of academic hoaxes is not zero -- Justin E. H. Smith (University of Paris, Diderot) offers some examples to show why
Is the United States on its way to having something "quite a bit like law, in several respects, but not actually a legal system"? -- In a few ways that seems to be the case, says Les Green (Oxford)
A good look at the show-nothing hoax -- by Daniel Engber in Slate
"Narratives seduce you into thinking you really understand what’s going on and why things happened, but most of it is guessing" -- Alex Rosenberg (Duke) is interviewed about how narrative thinking leads historians astray
"If scientists can disagree for years on end, what does this mean for the objectivity of science?" -- Scientific American brings in a philosopher---Kevin Zollman (CMU)---to discuss a philosophical question---and he picks a good one
“The types of skills we’re bringing in are psychologists, philosophers, that type of profile, that can solve really complex philosophical problems" -- IBM exec Ana Paula Assis, speaking at Fortune’s "Most Powerful Women Summit"
What does the latest academic hoax show? -- ten things, says Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam)
The meaning and value of interestingness -- discussed by Lorraine Besser (Middlebury)
"One of the biggest things I have experienced as a trans student [in philosophy] has been silence" -- and "in the face of intensifying anti-trans rhetoric... silence begins to look like complicity."
"This hoax thus doesn’t tell us anything at all about the overall quality of the academic subfields targeted" -- James Stacey Taylor (College of New Jersey) argues that the hoax was neither interesting nor unethical
Should we be held morally responsible for our actions? -- a discussion between Gregg Caruso (SUNY Corning) and Daniel Dennett (Tufts)
Hiking with Nietzsche -- John Kaag (U Mass, Lowell) reflects on Nietzsche's life, his own, and philosophy
Minorities and Philosophy (MAP-UK) now has a blog -- and a revamped website. Check it out
Connecting philosophy to a character's fortune and building a story around it -- Barry Lam (Vassar), the creator of the marvelous Hi-Phi Nation, shares some of his secrets
"So much ingenuity wasted" -- Stephen Yablo (MIT) discusses the problems of philosophy, and the philosophical problems he has worked on
The racial politics of philosophy--African and Western--in South Africa -- includes remarks from African grad students and their white professors, including David Benatar and Thaddeus Metz
"Being hyper-alert to whether one is being philosophical enough can prevent one from yielding to the creative process that is required for doing philosophy" -- Subrena Smith (New Hampshire) on questions about what makes for a good philosophy paper
"I just thought of a bad opinion someone could have, and now I'm searching to see if anyone does" -- philosophy research or unhealthy internet tendency?
Philosophy professor who was charged with possession of child pornography this past February has been convicted and sentenced -- Scott Lowe will serve 1-2 years in prison and pay a fine
Sarah Silverman talks with Socrates (Will Ferrell) about democracy -- and panini. (some NSFW language)
"Even as I argued and swore... I could see that this wasn’t a productive way to engage. That people were getting more angry. More hurt. More frustrated." -- Tracy Isaacs (Western) on the lure and limits of calls for kindness
What's going on at the Blog of the APA? -- new editors are joining the team, for one thing
Are boring talks that seem to go on forever really longer than non-boring ones? -- Yep (via Matt McAdam)
The largest statue of Confucius has just been unveiled -- it's 236 feet tall
The Kavanagh hearings and "himpathy" -- Kate Manne (Cornell) in the New York Times
and on a similar theme -- here's a piece in Pyschology Today by Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin (Sam Houston State)
Increasing the diversity of philosophy you're teaching -- a discussion with John Ramsey (Northern Colorado)
Is this philosopher "a hidden giant, a profound thinker who... has been unable to commit his ideas to paper"? -- the NYT writes about Irad Kimhi, who got his PhD from Pitt in '93
"Formal Africana philosophy conspicuously refutes the old Eurocentric lie that only European thought has developed ideas which are appropriately universal" -- thoughts from Liam Kofi Bright (LSE)
Waxing philosophical about fantasy football -- "You can take a reflective attitude to just about anything," says Theodore Bach (BGSU-Firelands) in USA Today
What are you going to do with a degree in that? -- it turns out that physics majors get that question, too. What are physics departments doing about it?
"We can identify some patterns that keep women who have been assaulted conveniently quiet---especially when the assailant is a privileged boy or powerful man" -- Kate Manne (Cornell) writing at CNN on the Kavanaugh nomination
"The way this debate is conducted is unedifying... [and] even the philosophers party to the debate seem to be unable to recognize explicitly each other's vulnerabilities" -- Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) on discussions of transgender issues in philosophy
Academics "work inhumane hours; are grossly underpaid; face unstable future prospects; and rarely have access to basic professional resources" -- maybe *staying* in academia, not leaving it, is "the real failure"
"A surprise second-place showing in a local beauty contest provides temporary relief, but an academic conference at Marvin Gardens wipes out your savings" -- board games for adjunct professors
"Know thyself". Sure. But how do the 140 or so other Delphic maxims fare? -- Charlie Huenemann (Utah State) on which may still serve us today
A first edition of Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" is going up for auction -- it is expected to sell for over $65,000
The epistemic advantage of being susceptible to confusion -- a human quality that's difficult to build into artificial intelligence
Where Friedrich Nietzsche meets Virginia Woolf -- philosophy of time through dance, happening this weekend
"Should we get lobsters high on marijuana? Let's ask a philosopher" said no one -- until the other day.
More tricks for teaching Aristotle -- from Adriel Trott (Wabash)
Great Grannie's pie, the stolen watch, the drowning child, and the imperialist queen -- misleading metaphors in philosophical work on global justice
"How The Light Gets In," the world's largest philosophy festival, is happening this weekend -- Daily Nous readers can get 20% off ticket prices by using the code DNous20
Philosophizing about animals, women, the disabled, and prisoners -- an interview with Lori Gruen (Wesleyan)
Students, take that philosophy course -- the president of Johns Hopkins makes a case for the humanities in the Washington Post
"The Trolley Problem is not a problem or a puzzle to be solved." -- how a philosophy professor responds to students who want to know what its solution is
To know the answers to many philosophical questions, "one must gain knowledge about metaphysical possibilities and necessities" -- and "we typically cannot," argues Edouard Machery (Pitt), guest blogging at Brains this week
On humility, kindness, and professionalism -- in academic philosophy
Newly found, heretofore unpublished fragments of Husserl---or Heidegger? -- (via Sebastian Luft)
How one professor teaches students to ask philosophical questions of complicated texts -- and gets them to do the reading, too
Can today's musicians sell out? -- six philosophers consider the question
"Good parenting is not about providing as much advantage for your kid as you can harness" -- Gina Schouten (Harvard) on tradeoffs in parenthood
"You cannot understand Paleolithic cave art if you have not seen it in situ... the works gain their sense from their milieu." -- Justin E. H. Smith (University of Paris, Diderot) on the meaning of cave art
What is to be made of Mill's distinction between higher and lower pleasures? -- "what matters is how we enjoy them," argues Julian Baggini
On the prospects for "real, open conversation" in philosophy on trans issues -- Asia Ferrin (American U.) takes a look at recent exchanges
A list of known sexual harassers in academia -- the database is limited to cases in which there is “an institutional finding of some sort of sexual misconduct,” says its creator, Julie Libarkin (MSU)
John Locke's complicated relationship with slavery -- "attention to historical context matters," argues Holly Brewer (Maryland)
Philosophy is "thinking about precisely the kinds of things that ordinary people think about all the time, without distraction" -- a journalist reflects on lessons learned about philosophy from Stanley Cavell (via Daniel Brunson)
Santa Barbara City College settles with philosophy prof accused of harassment -- Mark McIntire will receive $120,000 from the school
Hiring in philosophy is "not a matter of giving out awards for philosophical worthiness" -- it's about a department trying to solve problems or meet goals, argues Meghan Sullivan (Notre Dame)
In 2014, hundreds of political scientists signed a petition *opposing* greater data transparency -- has the field made any progress since?
The coddling of the "heterodox" professor -- add some facts and subtract some bias, and the central thesis of the Lukianoff-Haidt book gets turned upside down (via Tamsin Shaw)
(related)
"A college---the very place devoted to complex, contextualized consideration of the most challenging questions facing human beings---is the place where a simplified memorial makes the least sense" -- Steven Miller (Ripon College) on campus 9/11 memorials
"An uncomfortable feeling follows from knowing that one has enjoyed the work of a vicious person." Why? -- Nate Sheff (Connecticut) takes a stab at the question
When the reasonable people drop out of online discussions -- "that can't be good," says David Sobel (Syracuse), even if it may be reasonable
"There’s little research on our reception of work such as 'Artist’s Shit,'" but that is changing -- Paul Bloom (Yale) discusses some recent work on the psychology, science, and philosophy of modern art
Should you teach grad students the work of an accused harasser who is still a professor in your department? -- Claire Newfeld (UC Berkeley) on the Searle situation
How researchers and doctors are determining whether patients in apparently persistent vegetative states are actually conscious -- Mackenzie Graham (Oxford) on the technology of ethics
Philosophy as the study of philosophers' misunderstandings -- Guy Longworth (Warwick) reminds us of the lessons of J.L. Austin
A philosopher and one of his undergrads read through 63 transcripts of the Rush Limbaugh Show to research "concept doubling" -- interesting work and great mentoring from Jeff Engelhardt (Dickinson)
"We need to return philosophy to its previous wide perspective." How? -- by looking at The Tractatus, argues Hans Sluga (Berkeley)
You've heard of Mandeville's "Fable of the Bees," but what about his heretofore unpublished "Parable of the Ants"? -- "discovered" by Julia Driver (Washington Univ. St. Louis)
Is your cat a mind reader? -- Ali Boyle (Cambridge) unpacks the philosophy in that question and considers some answers
How to get students into Aristotle's Metaphysics -- Adriel Trott (Wabash) shares an "active classroom" technique
Looking to bring texts from philosophy in the Islamic world into your philosophy courses? -- check out this guide from Peter Adamson (LMU)
"Should I get a PhD and become a professor?" -- Jason Brennan (Georgetown) offers some career advice to those considering the question
Sneaking libertarian ideology into elementary schools in the form of critical thinking software -- even if you agree with the politics... why, Elon Musk, why? (via Daniel Brunson)
Effective altruism and moral uncertainty -- the Very Bad Wizards talk with Will MacAskill (Oxford)
With increased use of AI, "companies will require more philosophy graduates in... roles to look into AI-related outputs through a human lens” -- so says Pratik Dattani, Managing Director of Economic Policy Group (EPG), a London and Bangalore-based consulting group
"I realized better what it means to be American. It is not simply about an economic dream. It is about a lived, philosophical project" -- an immigrant's letter to Western Philosophy
How should we explore and learn about Mars? -- philosopher Ian Stoner (St. Paul College) makes some very interesting points in a discussion on BBC Radio
In philosophy, the professors and the formal institutions are like the classically trained musicians at a big concert hall. What about philosophy's club scene? -- an interview with Kilian Jörg, the founder of Philosophy Unbound
"Philosophy of science can’t simply be based on what scientists say and do... ...But, on the other hand, there are other aspects of what scientists say and do that need to be taken more seriously," argues Angela Potochnik (Cincinnati)
"Up to a certain level, leisure time should be understood as a basic need, analogous to education" -- Blain Neufeld (Wisconsin-Milwaukee) on justice, fairness, and free time for adults and children
"Are trans women really women?" "Do I really have to respond to that?" "Yes, yes you do" -- a debate over trans women, the use of "TERF", and how to eat ribs like a lady
What are jokes? -- It's a very serious question, says Justin E. H. Smith (University of Paris Diderot)
Move over analytic and continental and philosophy, there's a new (old?) game in town: synthetic philosophy -- Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) explains what it is, and why Daniel Dennett is an exemplar of it
Surviving getting your Ph.D. -- helpful advice from Asia Ferrin (American University)
And some more advice for new grad students -- from Dorsa Amir (Yale)
A new multimedia play on the life and philosophy of Simone Weil makes use of dialogue, dance, video projections, animation and original music -- it begins its run at Merseles Studios in September
Diversity within identities, blameless privilege, essentialism, and more -- an interview with Kwame Anthony Appiah (NYU)
"Beg the question" has a new meaning -- and it's perfect
An update on how the American Society for Aesthetics has dealt with recent accusations of sexual harassment -- the accused has agreed not to attend the conference, but is there more the ASA should do?
How can a woman have a penis? -- Katharine Jenkins (Nottingham) provides a primer on how "gender/sex is actually a complex, multifaceted cluster of things that interrelate and interact in myriad ways"
"The idea was to approximate... the experience of going out for a beer with fellow students after the seminar and continuing to talk about the material---and share this with the world" -- about the "Partially Examined Life" podcast and the folks behind it
Hypatia, the feminist philosophy journal, has a new editorial team in place -- the new co-editors are Bonnie J. Mann, Erin McKenna, Camisha Russell, and Rocío Zambrana (all at the University of Oregon)
Take some things for granted -- it will make for a better life, argues Neal Tognazzini (Western Washington)
Should the "empirical falsity of claims in an article published in [a philosophy journal]... be a condition of retraction, correction, or apology"? -- a discussion by Eric Schliesser (Amsertdam) at Digressions & Impressions
A philosopher's interdisciplinary project on pain reveals findings about the doctor-patient relationship -- Adam Swenson (CSUN Northridge) looks at what makes patients seem trustworthy
There is a Medieval canon: it's shaped by "the dominance of theology in the Middle Ages" -- and it should be challenged, argues Martin Lenz (Groningen) in response to Bob Pasnau (Colorado)
Enlightenment is "a tender thing, worth cultivating, coaxing, exercising, smiling on---worth succoring" -- even (especially) when its your "enemies" who are seeking it, says Jennifer Uleman (Purchase)
Should you "fake it 'til you make it"? -- philosophy and psychology raise some helpful follow-up questions to that, argues Julia Staffel (Colorado)
The virtue of dark humor -- Mark Alfano (Delft, ACU) delivers the Simone Weil Lecture on Human Value
"People who are better at distinguishing the pseudo-profound from the actually profound are more prosocial" -- recent social science (via Jason Brennan)
Movies about logic -- a list compiled by Mats Volberg (Tartu)
"I wanted to... explore not what technology is doing to us, but what we’re doing to technology" -- Nolen Gertz (Twente) is interviewed about nihilism and technology
"It is our pervasive irrationality that in some circumstances contributes to our success" -- Lisa Bortolotti (Birmingham) on reaping the "benefits of positive illusions" while avoiding the "dangers of optimism"
When is cultural appropriation permissible? -- several philosophers contribute to a post at Aesthetics for Birds
There's no "common core" in Medieval philosophy -- but it would be good if there were, argues Bob Pasnau (Colorado)
How does our biology constrain our imagination, and, in turn, our knowledge? -- Max Jones (Leeds) and Tom Schoonen (Amsterdam) consider the question
What 30 terms should every student know at the end of an introduction to philosophy course? -- "argument," "ethics," "epistemology,"...
What does it mean to be human? -- the question "is not just narcissistic, it involves a culpable obtuseness," writes Martha Nussbaum (Chicago)
"The reasons one gives to ban speech---where there are good reasons to do so---are complicated, must be drawn with as much clarity as possible, and will inevitably be subject to misuse." -- Gerald Dworkin at 3QD
"You should never, ever, edit a volume" and other blanket early career advice -- to what extent is it warranted?
"The humanities are subversive" -- what a prof at a science-oriented school tells his students about why they should care about the humanities
An online magazine the contents of which is viewable only on devices not connected to the internet -- an interesting response to the distractions of online reading (via Nautilus)
What is rationality and why is it valuable? -- a discussion of "The Value of Rationality" by Ralph Wedgewood (USC)
To reduce the risk of moral catastrophes, should society hire lots more philosophers? -- Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) is somewhat skeptical
"Odysseus texts Penelope to let her know that he’s running late." -- Classical tragedies that could have been prevented with smartphones
Chico the Philosurfer has a series of videos aimed at bringing philosophy to high school students and others -- he's a former teacher at a prep school in California
"Let me admit up front that, until this interview, I hadn't thought much at all about disability's relations to philosophy" -- Stephen Yablo (MIT) is interviewed at Discrimination and Disadvantage
"We can never really be post-truth" -- Simon Blackburn (Cambridge) interviewed at Vox
"Professors with voices critical of dominant ideologies have long been targets" -- Jason Stanley (Yale) interviewed about fascism and anti-intellectualism
To really expand the canon, philosophy needs not just more historical texts but "a way into them" -- Lisa Shapiro (Simon Fraser) on the importance of secondary literature on non-canonical figures
"The reason to cultivate hope in uncertain times is Kant's reason: we have a duty to work for the improvement of our societies, but energetic action to serve the public good is not possible without hope" -- an interview with Martha Nussbaum (Chicago)
18th Century fan art by Jacob Böhme enthusiasts -- who is going to make a pop-up book of your philosophy?
A philosophical appreciation of the hip-hop magazine "The Source" -- from Lawrence Ware (Oklahoma State)
Avital Ronell (NYU), a professor of German and Comparative Literature known for work in contemporary Continental philosophy, is found to have sexually harassed a male student -- NY Times looks at the case and a now infamous letter from other academics defending her
What is media impartiality? -- Joe Mazor (LSE) offers an account
"The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood" by Tommy Curry (Texas A&M) is one of the winners of the American Book Awards -- awarded by the Before Columbus Foundation
"An incident of sexual harassment occurred at the annual American Society for Aesthetics conference last November. ... I am the accuser."
A philosopher is writing a book composed of "Batman slapping Robin" memes and commentary thereon -- the author is Simon Evnine (Miami), and he's blogging about it
What's going on when people preface their remarks with phrases like, "as a [member of some demographic group]"? -- Kwame Anthony Appiah (NYU) takes a look
The ethics of miscarriage, reproductive loss, and fetal death -- Kathryn Norlock (Trent) on Radical Philosophy Radio
"Historians [of philosophy] will chide you for claiming something about the past that they are happy to claim about the present" -- Martin Lenz (Groningen) on "myths in the history of philosophy"
Novel teaching practices in philosophy courses -- share yours
Black Mirror & Philosophy: The Syllabus -- as if philosophy itself weren't disturbing enough!
The costs and benefits of philosophical argumentation -- Stephanie Kapusta (Dalhousie) is inteviewed on the discursive norms of obligation, trans* issues, feminist philosophy, and more
"We would rather secretly believe we are special than confront the real consequences of the paradox" -- ruminations on Fermi's Paradox from astrophysicist Milan Ćirković (University of Novi Sad)
Do Parfit’s “Harmless Torturers” hang out on social media? — Paul Bloom and Matthew Jordan think so
"The accused harasser is on the program" -- the American Society for Aesthetics has new discrimination and harassment policies but some have raised concerns about its upcoming meeting
What is it to be fit? -- Self Magazine interviews philosophers Samantha Brennan (Guelph) and Tracy Isaacs (Western)
Are universities trying to do too much? -- a professor and an administrator agree on the answer: yes
"Academic philosophers are slow to accept outsiders as thinking with the depth and rigor that they expect from their peers" -- Tommie Shelby (Harvard) on the philosophical thought of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Enraged by idiots? -- maybe they're not idiots
"I'm really very proud to be following on in the footsteps of people like Peirce and James and Dewey, even" -- Simon Blackburn (Cambridge) talks about truth
Feminism and philosophy -- Elinor Mason (Edinburgh) is interviewed as she prepares for her upcoming show at the 2018 Edinburgh Festival Fringe
Ethics vs. Batman -- action, intention, and responsibility (via Paul Bloom)
A venue for "in-depth discussion of scholarly works published within the last year" in the History of Modern Philosophy -- check out The SGIR Review
Buy Thoreau's house: 6 bedrooms, 5 bathrooms, 3-car garage, updated kitchen -- They even quote Thoreau in the sales blurb. Yours for just $3 million (via Carol Hay)
Moroccan government reintroduces philosophy into its high school curriculum -- it had been removed in 2017 following controversy over its content
The Western canon "challenges both the political left and the political right" -- argues David Lay Williams (DePaul)
When is a ban on the development of technology the wisest course? -- a balanced yet frightening look at a possible future with widespread facial recognition technology
A philosopher is helping develop appealing diets for cancer patients and others with altered taste -- Barry Smith (UCL) is known for his work on the senses
Originality in philosophy is "nothing but the reformulation of theses or arguments" -- but that's not a dismissal, as Martin Lenz (Groningen) explains
The Nietzsche-inspired playlist -- a lot of heavy metal, plus some... David Bowie?
DC and Maryland have a philosophy-trained law professor to thank for a decision allowing their anti-corruption lawsuit against Trump to proceed -- John Mikhail (Georgetown) was mentioned 17 times in the decision
"Researchers who leave academia are not failed academics" -- what to do to change perceptions and prepare graduate students for professional careers outside academia (via Branden Fitelson)
"Whether an influence is manipulative depends on how it is being used" -- Robert Noggle (Central Michigan) on the difference between persuasion and manipulation
How to teach usually neglected women philosophers by showing them as "active participants in the philosophical dialogues of their era" -- new teaching materials from Project Vox
"The Good Place," NBC's philosophy-centered sitcom, has a podcast (via Philosophy Matters)
"It is not the transition from premises to conclusion that is often at fault but the premises themselves." -- Gerald Dworkin on the need to adjust critical thinking courses in light of current information technology and its abuses
Philosophy begins with doubt, some say, but what is doubt? -- Andrew Moon (VCU) introduces his view of doubt using ants (see the fuller argument in the linked paper)
"Though some think that Western philosophy has entered a golden age, others of us fear that it may have ended, that there is and will be no next member of the series after Cavell, after Lewis, after Derrida" -- Abe Stone (UC Santa Cruz) on lessons learned from Stanley Cavell
Over 20 interviews with philosophers on philosophy of action -- at the Philosophy of Action website (via István Zárdai)
Against trends, this university just last semester launched a philosophy major -- it is based in UC Merced's Cognitive and Information Sciences Department
Academic books are not meant to be read cover to cover -- they are meant to be "gutted" or "broken"
A philosophy PhD student at Oxford takes on the pseudo-science of anti-Semitism -- but would it have been better to leave it ignored? (via Benjamin McKean)
"We have the aspiration to the domestic rule of law, an international arena where it is only ever partly at work, and the problem of what happens---literally and figuratively---at the border between the two" -- Jacob Levy (McGill) on the Trump administration's battle against the rule of law
"I do remember the surprise I felt at her anger. I remember expecting her to understand." -- the ethics of privacy-violating art (via Michael Spicher)
From Trolleyology to vaccination policy -- can the former help us understand the latter? (via Danielle Wenner)
Watercolor and ink chibi-style portraits of philosophers -- by Yuzuko Nakamura (via Liam Kofi Bright)
"There’s no reliable way to separate free will from luck." -- The Boston Globe takes up questions of luck, freedom, and criminal law (via Gregg Caruso)
Is the key to further advances in artificial intelligence teaching machines about causation? Is a clue to their autonomy their engagement in counterfactual reasoning? -- a pioneer in AI talks about possible next steps for the field
"An unfortunate side effect of democracy is that it incentivizes citizens to be ignorant, irrational, tribalistic, and to not use their votes in very serious ways" -- an interview with Jason Brennan (Georgetown) who discusses his "attempt to correct for that pathology while keeping what’s good about a democratic system"
An invention to solve the trolley problem -- from SMBC
Is the passage of time an illusion? -- Huw Price (Cambridge) and Alison Fernandes (Warwick) discuss time with physicist Erik Verlinde
Students are required to attend three Phish shows during the course -- in the philosophy of Phish course taught by Stephanie Jenkins (Oregon State)
Some instruments used to understand conservatism may, in a way, beg the question -- a look at the social science of political identity, in New York Magazine
"Deciding what we eat and why is very much a reflection of our character" -- Massimo Pigliucci (CUNY) on the Stoic case for vegetarianism
"Your dissertation will be the longest and most thorough thing you've ever written. That's all." -- Check out "Dr. Eric's 3-Step Remedy" to get your dissertation moving
"Historical evidence regarding the influence of philosophy on science is overwhelming" -- physicist Carlo Rovelli at Scientific American
Discovered under the hardened lava of Vesuvius, the 2000 blackened papyrus scrolls are "the only intact library known from the classical world," and were thought mostly unreadable -- until now
The Jean-Paul Sartre welcome mat -- you know what it says (via Nigel Warburton)
Skepticism about some forms of service-learning in philosophy courses -- "Diverting attention away from theoretical concerns in an effort to make philosophy ‘relevant’ will instead make it redundant and irrelevant," argues Spencer Case (Colorado)
"The logic puzzle you can only solve with your brightest friend" -- can you figure it out?
Women thinkers in antiquity and the middle ages -- a 10-lecture series by Peter Adamson (KCL/LMU) on YouTube
Of all the possible titles for a guide to the poisonous plants of Virginia, they chose "The Socrates Project" -- further evidence that philosophy is in, right?
What is meat? -- if you're interested in philosophy of language, philosophy of science, ethics, and food, dig in
How evidence, theory, models, simulations, probability, and values factor into climate science -- Eric Winsberg (USF) in conversation with Carrie Figdor (Iowa)
"Love and envy thrive in the same conditions of similarity and equality... Is that as bad as it sounds?" -- it depends on the kind of envy, argues Sara Protasi (Puget Sound)
To credibly and responsibly call Russia on its electoral interferences, we need to establish multilateral norms for such interference in general, and to do that, we need to be honest about what the US itself has done -- Jack Goldsmith (Harvard) discusses some "uncomfortable questions"
"If we’re not careful, we will be living in an entirely synthetic age," and we will have lost something very valuable: "the world outside our control" -- an interview with Christopher Preston (Montana-Missoula)
Wonder Cupboard is a new philosophy and history of science podcast aimed at non-specialists -- the latest episode asks: "why does science work?"
A philosophical project on powerlessness aims to change the care of terminally ill patients -- Béatrice Han-Pile (Essex) is interviewed about the work she has done with healthcare professionals
"We feel shame when something happens to make us feel like we’re no longer ourselves" -- Krista K. Thomason (Swarthmore) on how shame is about our identities
"Transwomen are to women as adoptive parents are to parents" -- is this a useful analogy? Sophie Grace Chappell (Open U.) thinks so.
Interviews with over 20 philosophers who each do some form of public philosophy -- at Engaged Philosophy
"Most of all, we feel like a bad joke... like impostors.... Why, from the top of a nasty gender hierarchy, should we feel so risible?" -- "What Is It Like To Be A Man?" by Philip Christman (Michigan)
"Psychology research by philosophers is robust and replicates better than other areas of psychology" -- a nice write-up of recent work, posted about here in May, on reproducibility in experimental philosophy
Martha Nussbaum discusses emotions, politics, philosophy, feminism and more -- in an interview at Moment
Four factors that explain how "Aristotelian metaphysics can be scientifically defensible" -- from Tim Crane (CEU)
Want to help transcribe letters by David Lewis on a variety of philosophical topics? -- Manchester's David Lewis Project is looking to "crowdcraft" some work
When philosopher Joel Kupperman (now emeritus at U Conn) was a kid, he was "the most famous prodigy in America" -- his childhood is now the subject of a graphic novel by his son, Michael Kupperman (via Benjamin McKean)
"Is the concept of being 'philosophically interesting' something other than a fancy way of re-stating one’s personal intellectual tastes?" -- one of several questions Ethan Mills (University of Tennessee, Chattanooga) asks at his blog, "Examined Worlds"
"The very atmosphere in which we move and breathe deprives us of the perception we need to recognize our predicament" -- reflections from Rochelle Gurstein on what we lose when we lose our privacy
"The people I know who have [been] the most successful in the profession have indeed been, by and large, those who developed good relationships" -- from an entry in the "Mid-Career Reflections" series at The Philosophers' Cocoon
"Socially-centered virtue ethics" -- Sebastian Purcell (SUNY Cortland) on what the Aztecs contribute to moral philosophy
"I would require all students to take two philosophy courses---one in their first year and another just before graduation" -- psychologist Howard Gardner (Harvard) on why philosophy is an important part of college education
"Until viewers do become better interpreters of photographic portraits, Pyke’s portraits will not always serve the public image of philosophers, and philosophy, well." -- Michael Newall (Kent) takes a critical look at Steve Pyke's portraits of philosophers
Are you opposed to meritocracy and the institutionalized celebration of genius? -- here's a list of readings that may convince you to be, curated by Liam Kofi Bright (LSE)
"An NHS doctor is teaching philosophy to eight and nine-year-olds in the hope of safeguarding their mental health" -- using Legos, costumes, conversations, and movies to give kids the skills to think clearly
The acclaimed anime of Miyazaki and the later thought of Heidegger -- Edward McDougall (Durham) on what we can learn about technology, nature, and transformation, by looking at them together
Are people who think we lack free will more likely to behave immorally? -- Surpisingly, no, according to a new study
"Facial recognition technology poses serious and imminent threats to civil liberties and human rights." -- philosophers & other academics make the case in The Guardian
Electoral reform, John Rawls, and... Dr. Who? -- Stephen Tweedale (Simon Fraser) is thinking philosophically about British Columbia's upcoming referendum
You'd think that Scientific American would be a publication that respects expertise -- so why do its editors choose to publish error-riddled columns on philosophy by Michael Shermer?
"Our moral relations to people are different from our moral relations to the other animals... -- But we have reason for treating what is good for an animal as good absolutely," says Christine Korsgaard (Harvard) in Prospect Magazine
Love, humor, and the good life -- Mark Alfano (Delft) on why we look for a sense of humor in potential mates
"If we measure the danger to our institutions by the number of disagreements they must manage, then diversity is dangerous. However, disagreement can also protect us from danger." -- Ryan Muldoon (Buffalo) offers a clear-eyed and empirically-informed account of the value of diversity
"Human anomalies receive little or no attention in philosophy, because they destabilize those deeply embedded conventions of thought in the field that undergird most of the research that goes on in it." -- an interview with philosopher and artist Adrian Piper, a self-described "anomaly", about her ideas and art, on the occasion of her MOMA retrospective.
The political philosophy of time -- Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt) talks with Elizabeth Cohen (Syracuse) about her innovative "The Political Value of Time: Citizenship, Duration, and Democratic Justice"
"Everyone knows about grade inflation, but this is GPA distortion, and few people looking at a student’s GPA know it happens" -- research by philosophy professor David Meeler (Winthrop) on grade forgiveness, discussed at The Atlantic
"I thought I would die. I assumed I would die... because if the symptoms didn't kill me outright, I'd kill myself." Travis Rieder (JHU), who has a bioethics research program on the ethical and policy issues surrounding America’s opioid epidemic, discusses his personal experience with opioid withdrawal and its lessons
"You need to be able to disagree, even strongly, with people and still respect and even trust them. This means thinking them people of good will who are trying, as you are, to solve problems, [but] there are limits" -- Martha Nussbaum (Chicago) interviewed about fear, trust, and hope in today's political climate
The philosophy of Mexicanness -- an excerpt from a 1951 essay by Emilio Uranga, introduced by Carlos Alberto Sánchez (San José State) & Robert Eli Sanchez, Jr. (Mt. St. Mary's, LA)
Don't raise the significance level; acknowledge the significance of Bayes -- David Papineau (KCL) explains Bayesianism and why it is important for addressing today's replication crises
Avital Ronell (NYU), accused of sexually harassing a male philosophy student, has horrible friends -- here's an article about that stupid letter they wrote in support of her, including their pathetic defenses of it and their bizarre conspiracy theories
The time before dystopia -- Is there a lesson in its omission from most dystopian fiction?
Waiting for a response from a philosophy journal? There’s an app for that. — from Jonathan Weisberg (Toronto), a little app that displays wait time forecasts and data from the APA Journal Survey
How to give a good gift -- Jennifer J. Rothschild (Florida) on giving gifts well
"Feminists should challenge the ways patriarchy and fear violently constrain the ways being a woman can be embodied and enacted" -- Aaron Jaffe (Juilliard) on recent discussions in philosophy about trans women
A bet made 20 years ago, for a case of fine wine, over whether, within 25 years, someone would discover a specific signature of consciousness in the brain -- Christof Koch, a neuroscientist, bet in favor. David Chalmers bet against.
Philosophy illustrated, New Yorker Style -- in the actual New Yorker, by Edward Steed
Two new operas: one about Walter Benjamin and one about Hannah Arendt -- debuting in Germany this season, and reviewed in the NYT
"Philosophy is a social institution with its own set of hierarchies, vested interests, and professional norms which can be quite orthogonal to truth, knowledge, and justice" -- Robin Zheng (Yale-NUS) interviewed about her recent work on contingent labor and gender in academia
"But new to me is this fresh, rude thought: This is it." -- Philosopher and poet Brook J. Sadler (USF) is the 2018 Spring Poetry Winner at Causeway Lit
Part of the practical value of philosophy, say, for businesses, is that it fosters "perceptive thinking" -- the "the art of... getting inside what something is, of assessing the web of relations that constitute a thing."
"Plato's Lair" is an immersive installation by Peter Hanmer -- and winner of the 2017 Gillian Dickinson North East Young Sculptor competition
The phrase "necessary and sufficient" is often misused by scientists -- and the result is sloppy neuroscience
The "Ask-A-Philosopher" table -- a wonderful example of public philosophy
"Access to the general public, granted by institutions like television networks, newspapers, magazines, and university lectures, is a finite resource" -- what is the just way to apportion that resource? Bryan Van Norden on the right to an audience
Philosopher Olufemi O. Taiwo (Georgetown) is also a musician -- do yourself a favor and check this out
There's no reason to believe in homeopathic medicine -- yet might there be a reason to allow NHS doctors to prescribe it? John Worrall (LSE) considers the question
Utilitarians try to ruin the World Cup -- or perhaps this is a reductio of utilitarianism?
The reversal of the Flynn effect -- what explains it?
Favorite philosophy article titles -- add yours
The Aristotle Menu -- developed by gastronomy professor Giorgos Palisidis, it has been served at 17 places in the Chalkidiki area of Greece
Swedish university libraries will stop their subscriptions to Elsevier journals as of June 30th -- the publisher refuses to meet the open-access demands of the library consortium (via Sebastian Lutz)
What is public philosophy, anyway? -- "It should be philosophy, in that it uses philosophical techniques, methods, and concepts. It should also be in the public interest, in that it addresses issues of civic import and in ways that are accessible to the general public."
"A deeper knowledge of philosophy would have lessened the need to go through some of the experiences I did to learn what I learnt. It would have made me better at my job." -- a soldier on how philosophy can help in battle and its aftermath
The Stanford Prison Experiment was a sham -- undisclosed acting and coaching in one of the most famous psychology experiments
Hans Sluga (UC Berkeley) has been blogging -- here's one entry on political philosophy as a "diagnostic practice"
Google needs help with the metaphysics and ethics of causation -- Ryan Jenkins (CalPoly) in The Washington Post
The luxury philosophy weekend getaway -- for people interested in talking philosophy during "sangria brunches, sundowners under the pear tree, and nightcaps by the fireplace"
The Time Project -- a collection of essays on time by painters, sculptors, musicians, filmmakers, curators, and a neuroscientist, to be published in Nautilus over the next month
More evidence that philosophy is "in": you'll be able to verbally spar with Socrates in the new Assassin's Creed "Odyssey" game -- "We wanted to make him feel different than every other quest-giver in the world because he did treat people differently and he thought very differently"
The aesthetics of music usually is focused on the listening, but what about the playing? -- Mary Beth Willard (Weber State) on how "there’s just something gorgeous about the feeling when the fingering, after lots of practice, becomes natural."
Friedrich Nietzsche or Janelle Monáe? -- can you guess who said what? (via Jean Kazez)
On productivity and types of careers in philosophy -- Schliesser replies to Aboulafia
"I would still say to anyone who might be considering getting a philosopher as a father, don’t do it!" -- philosophers on fatherhood, in the NYT
"Our political divisions... now run so deep as to subvert our attempts to explain the dangers they pose" -- Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt) on why "we ought to give up the idea that there is such a thing as fake news"
There has been more forced "eugenic" sterilization recently than you might think -- and the chair of a philosophy department signed off on some of it. Robert Wilson (La Trobe) explains.
DN readers can get 20% off tix for the big HowTheLightGetsIn philosophy festival -- just use the code "DNous20" at checkout
"The hand of Kant lies behind both Bohr and Kuhn." and it's Kant who "pulled off the grandest intellectual hocus-pocus in scholarly history" -- Tim Maudlin (NYU) reviews a pair of popular books on science and philosophy
Business Ethics Quarterly issues "Expression of Concern" over self-plagiarism case (via Michael Dougherty)
"Neither a victory for the right wing nor a tragedy for the left wing, but a call to both sides of the culture wars to cool off and do better." -- John Corvino (Wayne State) on the gay wedding cake case decision (via What's Wrong)
"Every well informed empiricist should be a standpoint epistemologist" -- so argues Liam Kofi Bright (LSE)
Unpopular opinion: philosophy edition -- Elizabeth Piccuito (Maryland) gathers some examples
Is philosophy as a profession harmed by findings that show that those who study moral philosophy are no more moral than anyone else? -- Eric Schwitzgebel (UCR) takes up the question
“So, what are you working on?” "Nothing." -- Mitchell Aboulafia (Manhattan College) on "the productivity syndrome" in philosophy
Moral inquiry, moral change, and lessons from history -- Elizabeth Anderson (Michigan) on the Examining Ethics Podcast
Rawls's real concern: "Can a society committed to the freedom and equality of its citizens... arrange social institutions [to] reliably cultivate within persons the attitudes and dispositions required for social justice?" -- William Edmundson (Georgia State) talks with Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt) about Rawls, the "reticent socialist"
"When the government or any other external power intervenes... in the university to mandate or censor its curriculum... its standards, then the autonomous judgment of the faculty is undermined, and knowledge is restricted and distorted" -- Judith Butler (Berkeley) on academic freedom
Do you dismiss x-phi work on folk intuitions because such intuitions are merely quick, unreflective responses? -- If so, then these x-philosophers have a new study for you
Do we have the right to believe whatever we want to believe? -- No, says Daniel DeNicola (Gettysburg)
Aristotle, Plato, and Thales are trending -- as baby names
"'How do we approach these [ancient Indian] texts scientifically and critically?' The answer was, 'Obviously not as Indians read them, for Indians never developed scientific, critical thinking.'" -- Vishwa Adluri (Hunter College) on Indology and the philosophical and ethical dimensions of interpretation (via Bharath Vallabha)
"We magnify our powers through trust in others, and we atrophy them through distrust. The solution to broken trust caused by gun violence may be investing more trust in each other, which is intuitive and counterintuitive at the same time." -- Mavis Biss (Loyola Maryland) in The Stone at The New York Times
"I’m not sure that philosophy as we know it has a future" -- an interview with Jürgen Habermas
"Dismissive claims by famous physicists that philosophy is a useless intellectual exercise... seem to start from the false assumption that philosophy has to be of use for scientists" -- Michela Massimi (Edinburgh) is interviewed on the occasion of her receipt of the Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Medal
Why do we need philosophers in order to adequately study character? -- "philosophers can be helpful in contributing... conceptual clarity and precision" and "psychology by itself can’t tell us what the virtues are," says Christian Miller (Wake Forest)
"If you say 'We know a movement isn’t being silenced because it’s got lots of supporters, is widely discussed, and has popular leaders' then you’re mixing up the numerator and the denominator" --interesting thoughts on silencing
A philosophy professor who moonlights as a mind-reader -- a profile of Alexander George (Amherst College), his act, and its connection to his teaching
"Sometimes we do want to ‘win’ an argument and convince our opponent. But too much focus on this may lead to something of value being lost, such as the deep understanding of the other that can come through conversation." -- Christina Easton (LSE) on public discourse
Why all theories of consciousness are question-begging -- "All general theories of consciousness commit to the falsity of some view against which there is no currently available decisive argument. They thereby commit beyond the evidence," argues Eric Schwitzgebel (UCR)
A book co-authored by a philosophy instructor-turned-psychologist is a best-seller in Japan -- it is called, "The Courage To Be Disliked"
"Peterson offers no effective antidote to the problem of the toxic masculine despair he reinforces and dignifies, having misrepresented it as a general and hence presumably equal opportunity crisis of Being." -- Kate Manne (Cornell) reviews Jordan Peterson's "12 Rules"
"A complete 100-percent-provable guarantee" that self-driving cars won’t crash into trees, traffic, etc. -- based on a problem posed in 1900 by David Hilbert called "sum of squares"
"People often say that philosophy has a lot to offer, and I think it’s true. But it has a lot to offer only if it’s participating alongside other people who have a lot to offer; listening as much as talking" -- an interview with Julian Baggini at Epoché
A single page of Marx's draft of Capital sells for over $500,000 -- buyer rumored to be Fulvia Morgana
The beginnings of a movement to stop relying on student evaluations of teaching -- and replace them with peer observation and more holistic teaching evaluation systems
"It’s pretty embarrassing to our profession that students can read, say, 500 or even 1,000 pages of material and come away thinking that the first time a woman had anything to say of any importance in philosophy was in 1970" -- an interview with Andrew Janiak (Duke)
Philosophy journal data analyzed, with attention to differences between information from author surveys and the journals themselves -- by Jonathan Weisberg (Toronto)
"That which escapes the sciences lies at the heart of the humanities, and the reverse is also true... they’re not rivals" -- OUP's Peter Ohlin interviews NYU's Richard Foley on the subject of academic research
"One of the norms governing ordinary conversation is that to disagree too much is to be disagreeable" -- but what if "disagree" was pretty much your job description (ahem, philosophers)? Jonny Thakkar's paean to pains in the arse.
How can A be convicted of murdering B when B was killed not by A but by C, and C's killing of B was found to be justified, i.e., not a murder? -- Zachary Hoskins on an unjust prosecution and sentencing
Where philosophy of perception meets applied ethics -- a fascinating look at visual phenomenology and virtual reality from Michael Madary (Johannes Gutenberg U., Mainz)
An infectiously enthusiastic, witty, and ebullient romp of a vendetta -- Philip Kitcher on Errol Morris on Thomas Kuhn
Defining "fake news" -- Scott Aikin and Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt) give it a shot
An excellent ethics exam question -- from Lewis Powell (Buffalo)
"Restrictive laws have a unique capacity to change the social meaning of a dangerous activity" -- so should we ban minors from purchasing items high in added sugar? Theodore Bach (Bowling Green - Firelands College) thinks so.
On calling immigrants "animals" -- David Livingstone Smith (New England) on dehumanizing language, on WNYC
The idea of a course on African, Latin American, and Native American philosophy raises lots of questions -- "but I do think that engaging in a detailed way with this work... helps us to think more about what philosophy is and ought to be," says Alex Guerrero (Rutgers) (p.4)
The moral dilemma at the center of "Avengers: Infinity War" -- Vox does some moral philosophy 101 at the movies
How to protect your epistemic environment -- Shane Ryan (Nazarbeyev U.) shares his ideas with Joe Humphreys in The Irish Times (via Daniel Brunson)
Near-death experiences -- a talk from John Martin Fischer (UCR), on the occasion of his appointment as a University Professor (he is the first philosopher in the UC system to hold that position)
Free speech, hate speech, respect, and human dignity -- Tina Botts (CSU Fresno) comments on the controversy regarding a professor's controversial tweets about Barbara Bush
In her new one-woman (and one-dog) show, Isabella Rossellini "transforms herself into Aristotle, Descartes, F.S. Skinner, Charles Darwin, and more, to deliver a vivid monologue about the brilliance of the animal kingdom" -- it's called "Link Link Circus" (via Jeff Sebo, who taught Rossellini in a course on animal minds & consulted on a draft of the script's philosophical material)
In modern investment terms, Thales bought call options on the olive presses and paid a small premium for the option -- why was this "one of the most important events... in market history"?
To say that "all accusations should be taken seriously and pursued" is "a way of saying we confer presumptive credibility on accusers, not that we simply believe without question every accusation" -- Linda Martín Alcoff (CUNY) on sexual assault, repentant sexists, and accountability
"Our common institutional setting induces social-epistemic similarities between philosophy and science, despite the cultural or methodological differences between us" -- an interview with Liam Kofi Bright (Carnegie Mellon)
A statue of Mary Wollstonecraft will be erected in Newington Green in north London -- it will be by artist Maggi Hambling
"I think that philosophy of science can be a great bridge between science and the public. It’s almost like science journalism at a very sophisticated level." -- Eric Winsberg (South Florida) is interviewed as part of the Dialogues on Disability series
Antiheroes (e.g., Tony Soprano, Walter White) are among people's favorite characters; what about antiheroines? -- Adriana Clavel-Vazquez (Hull) on aesthetics, imagination, and the "rough heroine"
Why honor matters -- Tamler Sommers (Houston) talks honor, dignity, courage, and philosophy with Robert Wright
The death of Wittgenstein's boyfriend almost drove him to suicide -- John Preston (Reading) on David Pinsent
Can the state recognition of marriage be justified? -- Clare Chambers (Cambridge) argues that it cannot
How philosophy became so important in Monaco -- a death, a princess, and a good teacher
"Philosophical and ethical discussion is impoverished" if certain issues are left out of the discussion of trans women -- Kathleen Stock (Sussex) lists several of them
New videos featuring Jenny Saul, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Nancy Sherman, Alexander Douglas, and others -- from the Royal Institute of Philosophy
The seduction model of online radicalization -- Mark Alfano (Delft) on when the internet says, "I know what you're thinking"
About the Bertrand Russell archives at McMaster University -- some details from librarian Vivian Marie Lewis (McMaster)
Administrative bloat? "Most of the growth in non-faculty employees is among lower-level student and academic affairs staff members, not among highly-paid deans" -- Robert Kelchen (Seton Hall) looks at the data (via MR)
How sexual harassment and assault distort scholars’ lives in the academy -- Janet Stemwedel (San Jose State) and others share their experiences
"Is anyone recording this particular juncture of the trolley route, and, if so, do I have access to that footage?" -- CIA nominee Gina Haspel is asked about the trolley problem
Should you be told if the "person" you're speaking with is really an AI? -- some of the ethical issues of advanced AI in the commercial domain
Interestingness: is it a fundamental value? -- Lorraine Besser (Middlebury) on "the sense of being engaged, enthralled, or captivated by a certain experience"
“I don’t like my mother,” a 38-year-old Nietzsche wrote to a friend. -- "In truth, at this point, Franziska Nietzsche probably didn’t particularly like her son either."
How did "imagination" become a hot topic in philosophy? -- Amy Kind (Claremont McKenna) tells part of the story
Where to find the left arm of Thomas Aquinas -- it's next to some unknown person's preserved heart
Experimental psychologists find that "responses to [trolley-like] hypothetical dilemmas are not predictive of real-life dilemma behavior" -- that such hypotheticals were not intended to generate predictions is only one problem with this research project
Filmmaker Errol Morris writes about Kuhn, Putnam, and Chomsky -- and includes excerpts from his interviews with the latter two
How "Spinoza's Dream," by David Nachmanoff, came to be -- it's an album on which each song is about a different philosopher
There is such a thing as character, but we mostly lack virtues and vices -- Christian Miller (Wake Forest) in conversation with Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)
Do we have a right not to be lonely? -- Kimberley Brownlee (Warwick) considers the question
Why the lecture has a place "at the cutting edge of higher education" -- Amanda Fulford (Leeds Trinity) and Áine Mahon (UCD) defend the much-maligned form of teaching
"The photographs in the exhibition are powerful expressions of that 'strange heart', of Parfit’s highly distinctive intellectual and aesthetic temperament" -- a review of an exhibit of Parfit's photographs
Experimental philosophy: its various research programs, criticisms, and defenses -- a useful overview
Using fMRI on brains to detect happiness -- why that's a bad idea
The Boston Public Library has put high-res, zoomable scans of its collection of M.C. Escher prints online -- The detail. Woah.
"Can we intend to be misinterpreted?" and other interesting questions about language -- an interview with Peter Pagin (Stockholm)
“We should never feel that we have reached that point in life where we no longer have the responsibility to ask questions and then pursue answers” -- 81-year-old John Voelpel just earned his PhD in philosophy from the University of South Florida
How to explain the value of citations to your students -- from Dan Martin (Central Florida)
The role of imagination in eating, drinking, tasting -- Aaron Meskin (Leeds) thinks it involves "cognitive penetration"
So maybe Wittgenstein didn't invent the emoji -- Landon D.C. Elkind (Iowa) sets the record straight
A new tool: search the websites of philosophers with over 1000 followers on Twitter -- from TrueSciPhi
Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" is famous, but it "was a step backwards, and its fame appears to rest partly on collective amnesia" -- during his formative years, Quine could have (but apparently didn't) consulted a widely read anthology "in order to find particularly neat statements of what came to be some of his central positions"
Philosophers on Kanye's recent philosophizing -- finally, something philosophers agree on
" We... ostracize and curse and damn Baruch de Espinoza, with the consent of Blessed God and with the consent of this entire holy congregation." -- Steven Nadler (Wisconsin) on which of Spinoza's ideas were responsible for that happening
Human artifacts don't last that long, geologically speaking -- so perhaps ours is not the first industrial civilization to have emerged on Earth (via Sammuel Byer)
Truth-conditional semantics, genetics, and race -- a brief look at the work of Quayshawn Spencer (U. Penn)
"Yeah, after I took mescaline, I started seeing crabs around me all the time. They followed me in the streets, into class. I got used to them. I would wake up in the morning and say, ‘Good morning, my little ones, how did you sleep?’" -- Sartre had a bad trip
"I think incivility is the kind of tool that would make us worse if we used it" -- thoughtful remarks from Liam Kofi Bright (Carnegie Mellon) on the importance of civility and "ostentatious decency"
Philosophers should be more willing to take up questions about the meaning of life -- says Kieran Setiya (MIT)
"People are mad at me again because they don't read carefully" -- a future classic
"Descartes was not nuts to ponder if everything he experienced was simply just a evil demon trying to troll him." -- media, information, knowledge, and the failure of expert systems (via Eric Winsberg)
A short story about transferring memories, with commentary by two philosophers -- at Slate (via Daniel Brunson)
"Dear Nigger Professor" -- George Yancy (Emory) shares and discusses the verbal abuse hurled at him following his NYT op-ed on racism
"Even if the corporation never hears your voice or your group’s, you will hear it. That voice needs to be one that you can respect." -- Brandon Hogan (Howard) on reasons for boycotts
How Wittgenstein invented the emoji -- “If I were a good draughtsman, I could convey an innumerable number of expressions by four strokes.”
"Total Eclipse of Descartes" -- a philosophical comedy performance / lecture from Rob Newman
"There is no campus free speech crisis: a close look at the evidence" -- we're at the debunking the debunking of the debunkers stage
Have a PopSocket on your phone? -- the invention of a former philosophy professor, its sales have increased "tenfold each year and delivered 35 million units in 2017 alone"
Search the websites of leading philosophy podcasts -- a new feature from TrueSciPhi
"He was wrong about the future of capitalism, he was wrong about what would happen when, after a revolution, workers took over government, he was wrong about the post-revolutionary decline of the coercive state..." -- Peter Singer on Karl Marx
Should we have fewer children in order to help the environment? -- Philippe van Basshuysen (LSE) and Eric Brandstedt (Lund) have a pair of posts on the questions
"If pleasures are so similar, why don’t people ever orgasm from pleasure associated with food or art? Actually some do." -- what do scientists know, and not know, about pleasure? (via Gerald Dworkin)
Why philosophy still matters -- Vermont Public Radio to host live call-in discussion with Terence Cuneo (UVM) and Kenny Walden (Dartmouth) today (4/24/18) at noon
"The question should not be how to exorcize even the hint of erotic ambiguity from the academic workplace, but rather how to allow our classrooms to remain safe spaces amid such ambiguities" -- a pair of Yale professors break the taboo on discussing the "erotic dimension of mentorship"
"One white reader said that his only regret was that he didn’t call me the N-word to my face and then beat me until I was half dead" -- George Yancy (Emory) is interviewed about the reaction to his NYT column on racism and the book that grew out of it
Repairing the culture of argument -- Robert Talisse and Scott Aikin (Vanderbilt) on what it takes
"Epistemic considerations matter for the legitimacy of democratic decisions" -- Fabienne Peter (Warwick) interviewed on epistemic democracy and more
Zeno: "Looking for someone willing to meet me halfway" -- dating profiles of antiquity's most eligible authors
How close are we to real-life Westworld-style robots? -- philosopher Jeff Sebo (NYU) and a variety of others take up the question at Vulture
The logic of time travel in the movies -- this fun video—-with film clips, helpful diagrams, and clear explanations—-was created with the help of philosophers Sara Bernstein (Notre Dame) and Ryan Wasserman (Western Washington)
"Lesser minds turned [postmodernism] into a crass attack on any claims to possess knowledge or truth" -- but in Jean-François Lyotard’s hands, it was "an often insightful analysis of the changing nature of the ownership and production of knowledge," says Julian Baggini
“Plato in L.A.: Contemporary Artists’ Visions,” a new exhibit at the Getty Villa, opened this week -- "every artist featured has made an effort to connect to and intellectually engage with Plato’s philosophy," says Getty director Timothy Potts
"JJ Redick's first slide posed the following to his teammates: 'Are we living in base reality?'" -- The 76ers discuss the simulation argument. Really (whatever that means). (via Seth Mayer)
Philosophical reflections on photography in the age of Instagram -- there is #nofilter on Daniel Star (Boston University)
Student evaluations (on Rate My Professor) suggest a bias in favor of "hot" professors and a bias against "difficult" ones -- but no significant gender bias
U. Wisconsin Stevens Point has the second-highest philosophy enrollment numbers in the Wisconsin System (Madison has just 4 more students) -- but they still might eliminate the philosophy program there
Philosophy students from Western Michigan University travel to Alaskan villages and towns -- to help people with their taxes
The movie "Lou Andreas-Salomé, The Audacity to be Free" will debut in the US this week -- "She initially sets out to form a “trinity” with Friedrich Nietzsche and Paul Rée... but, not surprisingly, the plan goes south because both philosophers want to marry her."
Is this the first ever conference on ethics in mathematics? -- it's sponsored by the Cambridge University Ethics in Mathematics Society, which helps mathematicians "understand that their work, output, insight and labour can be used not only for good, but also for bad" (via James Franklin)
"Man Fears He May Never Trust Again After Treasured Picture Of Duck Turns Out To Be Rabbit" -- "How was I such a fool?" (via Bob Kirkman)
On Wittgenstein's views about science, language, mind, and more -- an interview with Bill Child (Oxford)
A philosophy instructor at Boston College gives her students extra credit for going on dates -- a film about Kerry Cronin's "Dating Project" is airing at theaters nationwide tonight (April 17) only
Some knowledge is embodied, and some embodied knowledge encodes social norms. What does that imply for changing problematic norms? -- Madeline Eller (Georgetown) explores the topic
"Loss aversion proponents have over-interpreted [Kahneman & Tversky's] findings.... Studies have been systematically misrepresented to reflect loss aversion, though they did not find it" -- via @DegenRolf, who comments: "loss aversion, the first law of behavioral economics, enters psychology's reproducibility crisis"
When it comes to mental illness, both the "rescue" mindset and the "blame" mindset are problematic -- better is "Responsibility Without Blame," argues Hanna Pickard (Birmingham)
What do we get when we combine utilitarianism and strong AI? -- an even stronger repugnant conclusion, argues Alexander Pruss (Baylor)
Two philosophers get fit, "the feminist way" -- Samantha Brennan (Guelph) talks about the book she and Tracy Isaacs (Western) wrote, in The Globe and Mail
Should we even be trying to get in touch with aliens? That and other ethical and linguistic issues in astrobiology -- Kelly Smith (Clemson) discusses this with others on NPR's Science Friday
"To a student who has never encountered a discipline before, the professor teaching the introductory course is the discipline... If the professor is dull, the student will think the same of the discipline" -- why the best teachers should teach intro
A new play that explores the ethical and personal ramifications of brain-altering technologies will debut next month -- it's written by philosopher Karola Kreitmair (Stanford)
Why are so many graduate students depressed? -- some speculations in response to a recent study showing 40% of grad students suffer from some form of depression
Could philosophical debate aid prisoner rehabilitation? -- Kirstine Szifris (Manchester Metropolitan) on her experiences teaching philosophy to prisoners
The significance of philosophy to mathematics -- Richard Zach (Calgary) points to good account
"What could a philosopher have to offer a modern business?" -- Scotty Hendricks covers some real-world examples
"Epistemic bubbles are rather ramshackle; they go up easily, and they collapse easily, too. Echo chambers are far more pernicious and far more robust" -- a fascinating look at the social and psychological elements of our epistemic situation and its discontents, from C. Thi Nguyen (Utah Valley)
The call for a new academic discipline: Machine Behavior -- we need to study not only machines' source code and architecture, but also ethics, social effects, and the "opacity caused by complexity"
Top 5 philosophy TAs ranked by how cool their leather jackets are -- "You just know anybody who pops that baby on in the morning can really break down Plato's Allegory of the Cave in a way that a freshman business major trying to fulfill their humanities requirement can really 'get.'"
The Blog of the APA begins new interview series on diversifying the philosophical canon -- first up: Peter Adamson (LMU)
What makes heavy metal music *heavy*? -- Jay Miller (Warren Wilson College)
The impact of artificial intelligence: a new era? -- interviews with Luciano Floridi (Oxford), Huw Price (Cambridge), and others
"Look, we find ourselves living under certain kinds of pressures to make the world sensible to ourselves. How much and what kind of theory do we need?" -- a lengthy interview with Bernard Williams (published in Cogito in 1994)
"When you think a sentence in your head, your brain sends signals to your mouth and jaw. MIT Media Lab's headset reads those signals with 92 percent accuracy" -- more "mind-reading" technology
"I feel the weight of these huge questions. And I know I can’t get the answers to them, and I find that oppressive" -- a profile of philosophy popularizer Bryan Magee
"We can all know that we have rights without having to check our genes" -- Jeff Sebo (NYU) on chimps, persons, and rights (NYT)
Frog and Toad in philosophy -- noted at JSTOR Daily
Philosophers on politics in the Trump era -- Charles Taylor, Michael Sandel, Harry Frankfurt, and Joseph Heath on CBC Radio (via Dirk Felleman)
"As an academic, she devoted much of her career to social-justice activism and the philosophy of race and disability..." If she reneged on any claims she had made about... his capacity to give consent, she would be admitting... that she had become a vector of white, able-bodied supremacy — that that she was the boogeyman she had sworn to fight.
Descartes may have had "exploding head syndrome" -- which may be the condition with the greatest gap between how alarming it sounds and what it actually is
Prosblogion, the group philosophy of religion blog, has ceased operations -- Helen de Cruz (Oxford Brookes) eulogizes the site and discusses the future of online philosophical conversation
"Undercounting the undocumented might introduce bias into our public policy" -- Michael Blake (Washington) on the possible citizenship question on the 2020 census
The relatively unknown works of 18th century French philosopher Andre-Pierre Le Guay de Prémontval have finally been translated and published in English -- Lloyd Strickland (Manchester Metropolitan), who translated the works, calls Prémontval’s work "original and often provocative"
"There's much on the counter-insurgency battlefield not fully covered by the law...philosophy provided arguments to support the law and navigate issues not covered by it." -- a former army intelligence officer explains how philosophy can help soldiers cope in complex war zones
"Although part of our aim was to enhance the intellectual life of these kids, we had a simultaneous aim---a long game---to change how philosophy is viewed..." -- a detailed interview with Claire Katz (Texas A&M) on the pre-college philosophy summer camp she runs
Dennett responds to Strawson on consciousness, and Strawson replies -- in the NYRB
There's much of interest in this interview of Donald Davidson by Ernie LePore (from the mid-1980's) -- philosophy, life (including in the Navy, at war), and other tidbits, e.g.: Davidson and Leonard Bernstein were classmates who would play four-hand piano together
The "radical" way the department chair treated adjunct faculty -- "her goal was to get her adjunct faculty hired into tenure track positions" (via Justin Klocksiem)
"Ours is a species that dares to hope in the face of hopelessness; it is on this day that those hopes can be made to look even more forlorn." -- April Fools is the worst. Samir Chopra (CUNY) explains why.
A new series on Africana philosophy -- at the History Of Philosophy Without Any Gaps
"Given how biased these metrics are, institutions of higher learning simply cannot continue to allow them to influence tenure and promotion decisions" -- Carol Hay (U Mass Lowell) on student evaluations of teaching, in The Boston Globe
"What is the operation by which a self relates itself to its own self, transparently? Selfie." -- The Kim Kierkegaardashian twitter feed is now a book
"Seneca was torn. To the Stoics, contributing to public affairs was a critical duty of the philosopher. Could Seneca decline to serve because he disagreed with the emperor? Could he leave a deranged Nero unsupervised?" -- Stoicism and public service under a problematic leader
Argument mapping in an epistemology class -- Adam Elga (Princeton) shows us how it worked in his course
Against oversimplistic deployments of "trolley problems" -- "they are just tools for thought, not recipes for ready-made action," says Ian Bogost in The Atlantic (via Daniel Brunson)
"A philosopher can nudge and question, take leaders on uncomfortable journeys, even be a disruptive force" -- The Guardian writes about philosophers who've consulted for businesses
A philosophical look at Westworld -- Scott McLemee previews "Westworld and Philosophy" at IHE
"Seeing equality requires that you first believe it" -- Amia Srinivasan (Oxford) reviews "One Another's Equals" by Jeremy Waldron (NYU)
What does Spinoza have to do with transitioning towards environmentally sustainable habits? -- Andrea Sangiacomo (Groningen) explains
Moral philosophy shows how controversial issues like abortion are very complicated, and that can help public discussion of them -- Travis Rieder (JHU) is a guest on the Public Health United podcast
A few works by philosophers are on this list of "25 of the most expensive books you can buy on the internet" -- note that the one by Karl Marx is more expensive than the one by Adam Smith
Opaque power -- Åsa Burman (Stockholm) is interviewed about social ontology
Role playing games in philosophy class -- the students get into it, and end up doing more work for class, says professor Nicole Wyatt (Calgary)
You've heard of virtual reality, but what about virtual embodiment? -- how philosophers, computer scientists, and psychologists are using new technology to explore how we understand ourselves and the world, in The New Yorker
"The secret to happiness may be unhappiness" -- a neuroscientist looks at what unhappiness does to the brain
"The victims of the toxic idea that Americans with dark skin are biologically destined to be, on average, intellectually inferior to Americans of light skin are not the white men who have promoted it but the black Americans who have endured it." -- on the "courage" of those who complain about political correctness
The aesthetics of tattoos -- a new series by Roy T. Cook (Minnesota)
Julia Kristeva alleged to have been an agent of the State Security and Intelligence Services of the Bulgarian National Army -- now emeritus at the University of Paris Diderot-Paris 7, she was recruited in 1971 and went by the alias "Sabina"
"Looking at Jeremy Bentham’s auto-icon I pondered why we are so scared of what is both natural and indeed necessary, if life is to continue" -- Massimo Pigliucci (CUNY) visits Bentham during his stay at the Met-Breuer
"This exposure compromises our privacy, to be sure, but it also compromises our freedom" -- Philip Pettit (Princeton/ANU) on social media (updated)
Concrete suggestions for increasing diversity in philosophy journals sought -- at this link and at an upcoming Pacific APA session
The endless process of error detection and error correction -- it's just good intellectual hygiene
The life and ideas of Andy Clark (Edinburgh) -- a lengthy profile in The New Yorker by Larissa MacFarquhar
A look at the PGR's board -- does its composition help explain the rankings?
What it is like for women in philosophy -- quotes from women in philosophy and academic publishing
Lazy ants, Melville's Bartleby, and tenured professors -- Helena de Bres (Wellesley) sees if they have anything in common, with illustrations by her sister, Julia de Bres (Luxembourg)
Issues with the PGR's rankings in Chinese Philosophy -- "the ranking yields a list that looks decidedly weird"
"Our society lacks an information ethics adequate to its deepening dependence on data" -- Colin Koopman (Oregon) on the need for "an ethics of data to be engineered right into the information skyscrapers being built today"
The central character in James Wood's new novel, Upstate, is a philosophy professor -- a mixed review at The Guardian
A philosopher takes a close look at Steven Pinker's new book -- Gary Gutting (Notre Dame) notes the "impressive positive case for the Enlightenment" which nonetheless "falls short" when it comes to philosophy
New learning outcome assessment for philosophy courses -- the "Meaning of Life" quiz
Derek Parfit, wearing a leather cape, standing on a frozen river, holding a camera, facing down an approaching ice breaker -- when Parfit led a field trip to the USSR in 1981
The nature of hope -- Adrienne Martin (Claremont McKenna) talks with Myisha Cherry (Illinois, Chicago)
Do babies imagine? How? And how could we know? -- Claudia Passos-Ferreira (NYU) asks about the development of mental imagery in infants
"One can manifest all of these traits [of intellectual humility] without in fact lowering one’s confidence in one’s beliefs at all" -- that Duncan Pritchard (Edinburgh) is sticking to his guns on this doesn't mean he is intellectually arrogant
"Oh, the shit you'll do after you're tenured" -- McSweeney's Seussifies tenure
Fascinating series of articles on robots and ethics -- from Evan Selinger (RIT)
"Once you start measuring people's job perfomance, they will switch to optimizing for what you’re measuring, rather than putting their best efforts into actually doing good work" -- is there a lesson in this for academia (via Pekka Väyrynen)
Traffic lights, but instead of illuminated circles, they have illuminated images of Karl Marx -- part of Trier's celebration of the 200th anniversary of Marx's birth
"It just blew my mind... that's like the coolest thing I've seen" -- the product manager for Atomic Skiing on his first philosophy course and how studying philosophy helped his career
A philosophy and politics undergrad at Pittsburgh is running for a seat in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives -- philosophy helps with "trying to understand how you need to set up the problem," says 20 year-old Jacob Pavlecic
"There’s more to come" -- William H. (Bill) Miller III, who donated $75m to JHU's Philosophy Department, in an interview in The Chronicle
"What a good society does is based on a different set of considerations and principles than what a good person does" -- Laurie Shrage (Florida International) on how to think about abortion
Philosophy of race discussion -- with Kwame Anthony Appiah, Priyamvada Gopal, and Nasar Meer
"The number of study places available in each discipline should be linked to labour market need" -- a proposal in Denmark with potentially dire consequences for the humanities
Frankfurt's conception of "bullshit" has never been more relevant --alas
William Jackson Harper (Chidi from "The Good Place") and Kwame Anthony Appiah team up -- to answer ethics questions on NPR's "Ask Me Another"
"There is nothing unethical about reneging on a temporary, contingent position to accept a tenure-track offer" -- that and other judgments about the ethics of backing out of academic job offers
Landmark moments for women in philosophy -- including an interactive timeline
Creating brains in vats -- mini-ones, for now.
More than ever, there is too much to know -- the rational move is to know which knowers have good reputations, and rely on them
Bid on a replica of Thoreau's cabin at Walden Pond (or click on the banner at the top of the page for other items, like a pencil from the Thoreau Pencil Factory)
Public philosophy: kinds, challenges, and ideals -- Caleb Harrison and Macy Salzberger (UNC) talk with Skye Cleary
What exactly is wrong with the alt-right's anti-Semitism? -- Jonathan Anomaly (Arizona) and Nathan Cofnas (Oxford) take a close look
"Monuments make the public forget as much as they facilitate remembering" -- Alessandra Tanesini (Cardiff) on how the psychology of memory is relevant to the ethics of monuments
"The product is 100% fatal," yet is aimed at providing its users with an indefinitely long life... later -- the latest mind-uploading venture (via Ben Hale)
Buzzfeed tells its vast readership: here are 37 philosophers you really should know about -- and they're all women
No one has an obligation to have sex with you, but... ...there are important moral & political questions to be asked about sexual desire, argues Amia Srinivasan (Oxford)
When there's a better option, no matter what you choose -- Larry Temkin (Rutgers) shows us just how common failures of "the Axiom of Transitivity for Better Than" may be
What is a moment? -- the physics, neuroscience, linguistics, and philosophy of time
New feminist philosophy curriculum at Oxford -- with two recent hires in the area and two more to come
Philosophy, its history, and its relationship to religion -- a discussion with Peter Adamson (LMU) and Carlos Fraenkel (McGill)
Animated film portrays the philosophy of Zhuangzi -- it's called "The Country of Summer Insects"
A philosopher's case against feminism -- a draft for an upcoming "left and right" philosophy reader
"Humanists: we need to tell deans and legislators---even if they will not listen---that the university can be many things, but without us, a university it will not be" -- a thoughtful essay on the value of the humanities by Justin Stover (Oxford)
Derek Parfit's photography will exhibited this coming May -- at Narrative Projects, an art gallery in London
What is the silliest claim ever made by philosophers? -- Galen Strawson (Texas) tells us
Philosophy of Art and the PGR -- "to get into the top group... it apparently positively helps if you have at most one or two aestheticians (rather than a confusing plethora)"
Meeting with each of your undergraduate students -- philosophy professor Hollace Graff (Oakton) leads a project to improve student retention
The first in a series of articles on philosophical theories of art and their influence on artists -- the philosophy of Plato and the art of Greg Lookerse, from Michael Spicher (BU Met)
How academics used their research skills and social media to investigate and fight pension cut plans in the UK -- Michael Otsuka (LSE) has been one of the most vocal critics
41 lectures from Oxford's "General Philosophy" course -- taught by Peter Millican
Is Plato “one of the most profound liberators" of women? -- Emily Wilson (U. Penn) on Mary Townsend (Tulane) on the "woman questions" in The Republic
Our probabilistic memory systems and our counterfactual imaginations -- Felipe de Brigard (Duke) discusses his work on the connection between them
"Our resident microbes orchestrate the adaptive immune system, influence the brain, and contribute more gene functions than our own genome" -- what does this mean for our understanding of the individual human self?
When is it permissible to have sex with conjoined twins? -- the runner-up essay for the Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics, grad level, by James Kirkpatrick (Oxford)
Immigration and the natural lottery -- thoughts from Campbell Brown (LSE)
Trying to understand "academic mobbing" -- at Quillette
An empirically-informed account of the phenomenological and epistemological role of perception -- Susanna Schellenberg (Rutgers) is currently guest-blogging at Brains
An open-access symposium on John Martin Fischer's "Our Fate: Essays on God and Free Will" -- in Science, Religion, & Culture
Can teaching philosophy to prisoners improve prison culture? -- Kirstine Szifris (Manchester Metropolitan) thinks so
Philosophical views of the relationship between one's self and one's desires are relevant to drug policy -- Brendan de Kenessey (Harvard) explains, at Vox (via Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin)
The Princess of Monaco, Charlotte Casiraghi, has co-authored a philosophy book -- "Archipel Des Passions" is about the emotions
"The question is whether the fact of his victimization has the significance of a moral excuse. We believe that it does not." -- Matthew Talbert and Jessica Wolfendale (West Virginia) on the moral responsibility of child soldiers
“We might be the highest-paid philosophers” -- Comedians Keith and Kenny Lucas, philosophy majors, on how "we’re actually using our degree for something"
“When you have an old sofa, everything settles into the bottom and you have to plump up the cushions... Well the same thing happened with Bentham” -- getting Bentham ready for his trip abroad
"Let your child know that a liberal-arts degree can be a great launching pad for a career in just about any industry" -- Michael Zimm, classicist-turned-digital-creative-strategist, in the Wall Street Journal
In defense of complaining -- philosophers discuss "Can't Complain" by Kate Norlock (Trent)
An interview with Bill Miller, the investor who recently donated $75m to JHU's Philosophy Department -- at the Blog of the APA
"What makes systematic philosophy more than mere coherentism?" The former's starting points must be connected to reality -- Schliesser on Chappell on philosophical expertise
"There is nothing uniquely Western about humanity’s attempt to understand the world and our place" -- Lloyd Strickland (Manchester Metropolitan) on diversifying philosophy
The pleasures of cooking -- a neglected area of aesthetics, delightfully explorered by C. Thi Nguyen (Utah Valley)
Reasons for being mindful of prestige bias in philosophy hiring -- from Helen de Cruz (Oxford Brookes)
"My workload had become inhumane" -- an academic explains why she physically collapsed on the job
"Scan newspapers for incidents of censorship at universities, then weave them together into a narrative, without paying attention to which kinds of universities you’re talking about and how many universities there are" -- how to write your standard declinist commentary about free speech on campus
Could artificial intelligences ever create real art? -- and if so, what needs to happen so that it can?
"Philosophical expertise seems compatible with being completely off the rails when it comes to the substantive content of one's philosophical views" -- Richard Yetter Chappell (York) on whether there's a reason to defer to more expert philosophers
Philosophy, language, and epidemiology -- work on harm and language by Lynne Tirrell (Connecticut) featured in Epidemiology Monitor
The trailer for the new movie, "The Young Karl Marx" -- called "both intellectually serious and engagingly free-spirited" by the NYT
A new biography of Alain Locke -- reviewed in the NYT
"Because of my anxieties, I have come to understand why I’m the philosopher I am, why I hold the views I do" -- Samir Chopra (Brooklyn/CUNY) on the philosophical dimensions of anxiety
"Serenade (after Plato's Symposium)" for solo violin, harp percussion, and string orchestra -- by Leonard Bernstein
Philosophers are "probably just as susceptible to post-hoc rationalization, maybe even more, than the rest of the population" -- Jonathan Ellis (UC Santa Cruz) and Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) explain
"Mill’s distinctive form of liberalism, with its emphasis on individual freedom from the confining effect of social norms, had a great deal to do with his relationship with Taylor" -- Sunstein on Hayek on Mill (from 2015)
Anger, forgiveness, and public philosophy -- Myisha Cherry (Illinois, Chicago) talks with Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)
Two philosophers "overanalyze science fiction to mine it for delicious philosophical concepts" -- the new "Philosophers in Space" podcast
A regularly updated calendar of ancient philosophy events and CFPs -- visit, subscribe, or follow on Twitter; created by Caleb Cohoe (Metropolitan State)
A "more scientifically interesting and empirically tractable" version of the problem of induction? -- Stuart Glennan (Butler Univ.) on when and why generalizations hold and fail
Inclusion, improvement, and robots -- Evan Selinger (RIT) on some of the moral and legal issues arising regarding increasingly sophisticated robots
An overlooked philosophical aspect of "The Good Place" -- what is Janet?
A philosopher and a bat scientist get together to discuss -- you know
APA board endorses statement condemning Polish law criminalizing references to Polish complicity in Nazi war crimes -- "keeping with the APA’s broader support for philosophers whose professional rights are at risk"
"However good one is at this, philosophical training will make you better" -- investor Bill Miller, on how philosophy affected his career
Hi-Phi Nation is a genius work of public philosophy; if you are not listening to it and telling everyone you know about it you should be -- and here's an interview with its creator, Barry Lam (Vassar)
Possible worlds, impossible worlds, and whether some things do not exist -- an interview with Franz Berto (Amsterdam)
Recent changes at the journal Nietzsche-Studien -- including new editors and advisory board members
"The podcast that gets philosophical about everything" -- a conversation-based philosophy podcast from Dustyn Addington (U. Washington) & Whitney Johnson
"The world's top expert on impostor syndrome..." (xkcd)
New "women in philosophy" posters -- from the APA
"The most common explanation was that they believed the person they’d given the electric shocks to... hadn’t really been harmed" -- an analysis of interviews conducted right after Milgram's famous experiment raise questions about its lessons
"Although we are drowning in bullshit, cleaning up the mess doesn’t require Herculean labor." -- Philip Kitcher (Columbia) on the varieties of bullshit in current politics and what to do about it
"There is something quintessentially human about nonsensical conversations" -- something we shouldn't forget when developing the linguistic capacities of artificial intelligence, says Mariana Lin
"Where there is natural talk of right and wrong actions, there is also talk of good people and assholes. You don’t have to be a virtue ethicist to be interested in these things" -- Nomy Arpaly (Brown) on Aristotle, cool dudes, and virtue
"The Soul of Wittgenstein" -- a new play
"The complexity, difficulty, and artistry of Plato’s dialogues" -- an interview with Jill Frank (Cornell)
Animated videos of Plantinga's arguments -- from Notre Dame's Center for the Philosophy of Religion (via Josh Seachris and Dean Zimmerman)
"A form of academic disparagement that counts as perfectly acceptable in our circles and yet simultaneously seems a perfectly apt description of itself." -- thoughts on a recent critique of critical studies from someone who was once "thoroughly convinced that continental philosophy was bullshit"
Philosophical approaches to tragedy -- and their connection to "philosophical temperament"
The student wrote a lengthy email to her philosophy instructor, "trying to convince her Australia, the country, does indeed exist" -- unfortunately this does not appear to be part of a clever lesson about epistemology or social ontology
“I think you’re much better than her. I think you’re a real philosopher.” -- Kate Manne (Cornell) interviewed on her ideas about, and experiences with, misogyny
"Mr. Trump is purposely using the term in an offhand way so as to trivialize it, empty it of its gravity" -- Eva Feder Kittay (Stony Brook) on "treason" in a letter to the New York Times
The philosophers who consult on "The Good Place" -- Pamela Hieronymi (UCLA) and Todd May (Clemson)
The 4th volume of Foucault's "The History of Sexuality" will finally be published -- French publisher Gallimard will release "Confessions of the Flesh" this Friday
Some pragmatism and early modern philosophy texts online -- Peirce, James, Emerson, Hume, Berkeley, and more, courtesy of P.D. Magnus (Albany)
Why was Quine dissatisfied with "Two Dogmas of Empiricism"? -- Sander Verhaegh (Tilburg) explains
So many interesting questions -- this year, Edge.org asks its respondents for questions, not answers
"Critical studies" is supposed to be normative -- so why, asks Joseph Heath (Toronto), is there so little explicit normative argumentation and so much "vituperativeness and rhetorical overkill"?
Philosophy-related political cartoons -- sketched at the Night of Philosophy
Human dignity is an important but relatively recent moral concept; where did it originate? -- no, not from Kant, says Remy Debes (Memphis)
A pre-publication draft of Descartes' "Meditations" -- found by Jeremy Hyman (Arkansas, Fayetteville)
"Underestimating the imagination is itself a failure of imagination" -- Saam Trivedi (Brooklyn College, CUNY) suggests philosophers take some field trips
Changes at the Blog of the APA -- Skye Cleary will be the new lead editor
A philosophy PhD student at the University of Colorado is seeking a seat in the state legislature -- Jay Geyer is running as an independent
"There’s something intrinsically self-defeating about getting things done" -- The New Yorker's Joshua Rothman looks at Kieran Setiya's (MIT) book on midlife crises
If Bart Streumer (Groningen) is right, there's no reason to listen to him talk about his book at this link -- on the plus side, there's no reason *not* to, either.
Why should gender be the state's business? -- Robin Dembroff (Yale) in the NYRB
"Philosophy of science... can help us be better scientists" -- say two scientists, writing in The Guardian
Why moral philosophers should be reading anthropology -- are you aware of the field's "ethical turn"?
What is political theory? -- a working definition and five tasks for it, at Digressions & Impressions
"Free will can be injured just like other human abilities" -- Micah Johnson on criminal behavior, brain injuries, and free will
"They are the mechanical realizations of much larger sets of institutional intentions, involving the plans of designers and the decisions of people" -- Michael Robillard (Oxford) on moral responsibility and killer robots
"Apologists for empire are [not] simply living in the past. They seek, rather, to rewrite the past as a way of shaping current debates. That makes it even more important that their ideas and arguments are challenged openly" -- Kenan Malik on the "Case for Colonialism" controversy
There's no crisis in the humanities -- rather, "the democratisation of higher education has broadened the portfolio of courses, to a decline in the share of degrees awarded in... humanities and...sciences. By any measure, the humanities have weathered the transition better."
Philosophy, public debate, and respectful engagement -- a discussion with John Corvino (Wayne State) and Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)
"I... want to help philosophers connect with popular culture in a way that we academic types often find difficult" -- an interview with Micah Tillman, host of the Top 40 Philosophy podcast
A collection of Simone de Beauvoir's love letters were just sold to Yale University -- by a lover of hers who was worried about efforts to erase him from her life story
Perhaps philosophical education should concern itself with "raising apprentices of listening rather than masters of discourse" -- Pablo Muruzábal Lamberti on listening and philosophical dialogue
Free speech on college campuses -- Gerald Dworkin tries to "complicate in a useful way the tensions in the debate"
The varieties of introductory philosophy courses -- a new series at the Philosophers' Cocoon
Illustrations of philosophical thought experiments -- from Helen de Cruz (Oxford Brookes)
Former FBI Director James Comey will be teaching "Ethical Leadership" at William & Mary -- Which case studies will be on the syllabus? “I have no comment on that."
"My approach to deciphering the Critique has been no different than to cracking a safe" -- "I was a bank robber until I read Kant"
"The challenge is to find a policy that copes with the market failures while conforming to moral commitments" -- Daniel M. Hausman (Wisconsin) on health policy in the U.S.
The philosophy of jokes -- a discussion with Jack Weinstein (North Dakota) and Al Gini (Loyola, Chicago) on Why? Radio
"U.K.’s immigration officers have denied a Pakistani humanist’s application for asylum after he failed to adequately answer questions about Plato and Aristotle" -- because his knowledge of humanism was "rudimentary at best," the gov't dismissed his fears of religious persecution in Pakistan
A collaborative book by Heidegger and Spanish sculptor Eduardo Chillida forms the basis of an exhibit at the Guggenheim Bilbao -- it includes lithographic stones on which the philosopher handwrote the text of his essay
"Artificial intelligence can now bullshit its way through conversations just as well as humans can" -- the technique is called "lexical acquisition through implicit confirmation"
Corrupt The Youth -- Briana Toole (Texas) discusses the philosophy outreach program she created
"People in the assessment world have known for some time that their work was not producing results. It is also apparent that most of them assumed that the reason it did not work was not their fault. It was your fault." -- It's not.
How philosophy makes progress -- look at the questions we ask, says Daniel Stoljar (ANU)
A new exhibition space dedicated to Portuguese philosopher Damião de Gois -- a modern structure inside an old church
"I’m sure that I, too, will be blamed for calling Mr. Trump a racist." -- George Yancy (Emory) on American's choice: "King's Dream or Trump's Nightmare?"
How should philosophy be taught in Jordan? -- "Currently, there is an ongoing heated debate in Jordan at the official educational level over teaching philosophy after it had been suspended decades ago due to political and ideological considerations"
Another philosopher is running for Congress -- Richard Winfield (Univ. of Georgia) is seeking the Democratic nomination for Georgia's 10th District
(more on Winfield's bid for office here)
"Philosophy, at its best, embodies a kind of cosmopolitan ideal... superficial distinctions between people are erased, and what remains are opportunities for peaceful collaborative effort in a transnational and transtemporal republic of letters" -- as we learn from a look at Carnap & Xunzi
A new "angry professor book project" -- from Kieran Healy (Duke)
At Google, "each and every team member must feel confident speaking up and making mistakes" -- two things philosophers have lots of experience with, no?
Questions about the philosophy of math -- answered by Alexander Paseau (Oxford)
My letter writer has died; what do I do? -- Miss Manners did not cover this
How utilitarian are you? -- test yourself on the Oxford Utilitarianism Scale
What would make anti-racist optimism rational? -- thoughts from Gina Schouten (Harvard), one of the new bloggers at Crooked Timber
"If I am both my children and my mother, if I carry traces of my sibling and remnants of pregnancies that never resulted in birth, does that change who I am and the way I behave in the world?" -- genetics and the separateness of persons
Does philosophy advance "through singular, brilliant, novel insights" or through "the grind" of small changes to "a vast, complex network of well defended, nearly fully formed positions"? -- Charles Pence (LSU) on brilliance and merit in philosophy (via Liam K. Bright)
"Colors are not properties of minds (visual experiences), objects, or lights, but of perceptual processes---interactions that involve all three" -- Mazviita Chirimuuta (Pittsburgh) talks about color at Nautilus
What's sold in the Metaphysical Supplies Shoppe? -- Occam's Disposable Razors, Cartesian Candles, and "some kinds of crystals and shit"
Philosophers at CEU introduce the basic issues in philosophy of perception -- in a brief and stylish video made by Jonny Hunter, a student there
Needed: "a robust political ethics of resistance" -- an interview with Tommie Shelby (Harvard) on ghettos, justice, and philosophy
White nationalists (and others?) don't appreciate that they are "beings not merely stamped by culture but creators of it as well" -- Roman Altshuler (Kutztown) at the Philosophical Salon
The Breakfast Club and belief in God -- Agnes Callard (Chicago) on trying to believe
Which philosophy videos (under 20 min long) posted on YouTube over the past year are the most popular? -- Wisecrack's productions are doing especially well
Style, evidence, genealogy, metaphilosophy, and other problems Indian philosophy faces -- an account from Christian Coseru (Charleston)
The logic community -- Greg Restall (Melbourne) wraps up his series of 12 things he loves about philosophical logic
"Women perceived a deontological man as... more desirable for long-term mating" -- and even as "short-term mates", the study found, "utilitarian men were undesirable" (via Nina Strohminger)