Examples of Public Philosophy
Barry Maguire (UNC) is attempting to get a new prize for public philosophy up and running. By “public philosophy” he means “anything with significant philosophical content or method written by someone with significant philosophical trainining primarily for an audience of non-philosophers.”
He is collecting examples of public philosophy but is having trouble findi..
Problems with Academia.edu?
A professor who prefers to remain anonymous writes in:
Academia.com has recently, and without previous announcement, changed its appearance. This is, in itself, not remarkable, but the changes are vast and drastic and have an enormous effect on several of the features of the past; features which users used to have control over. For instance, they completely del..
10 Ways to Beat Writer’s Block (Ought Experiment)
Welcome back to Ought Experiment! This week’s question comes to us from someone dealing with a bad case of writer’s block. Maybe.
Dear Louie,
I’m sure you’re going to say this is one of those problems everyone has, but I really struggle with writer’s block. It can hit when I’m just starting a new paper, or it can hit me when I’m already several drafts into a p..
Bioethics Groups Win $3.6m NIH Grant on Pregnancy and HIV/AIDS
Georgetown University’s Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Johns Hopkins University’s Berman Institute of Bioethics, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Center for Bioethics, and the University of Washington School of Medicine’s Department of Bioethics and Humanities have won a $3.6 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for a project on ethi..
Bentham’s Cookbook
Jeremy Bentham’s Prison Cooking is a real book. Need I say more?
The book is based on a collection of Bentham’s papers marked “Panopticon – cookery, errors of present practice” and was put together as part of the Transcribe Bentham initiative at University College London. “The book features beautiful original illustrations by Jake Lamerton, and contains images, r..
Did This Monkey Intentionally Take A Selfie?
Some monkey business is raising questions in philosophy of action, philosophy of language, legal theory, and animal ethics.
British photographer David Slater traveled to the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, came across some macaque monkeys, and set up a camera with a tripod. One of the monkeys, Naruto, reportedly pressed the button on the camera, with the result be..
Philosophers On Drug Prices
The price of Daraprim (pyrimethamine), a drug that treats the parasitic infection toxoplasmosis and is used in some cases to treat cancer and AIDS, was raised from $13.50 to $750.00 per pill when sole rights to its sale in the United States were acquired last month by drug company Turing Pharmaceuticals. The news brought outrage from all corners, prompting the owner..
This One’s Not For The Ladies
You may recall that last week was the launch of the Job Candidate Mentoring Program for Women in Philosophy. As you also may recall, this announcement was followed by clamor for job market mentoring for others besides women. Well, from your lips to bloggers’ ears, folks.
Announcing: The Philosophers’ Cocoon Job-Market Mentoring Project, “a philosophy job-market m..
SEP, IEP, NDPR, Wi-Phi Weekly Update
Here are last week’s additions and updates to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP), the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP), Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (NDPR), and Wi-Phi Wireless Philosophy, appearing here via special arrangement with Philosophical Percolations. They were first posted in PhilPercs’ “Saturday Linkorama” along with lots of other ..
What It’s Like to Be Josh Knobe
A new interview is up at What Is It Like To Be a Philosopher?, this time with Joshua Knobe (Yale). Interviewer Clifford Sosis (Coastal Carolina) asks Knobe a range of questions about his life and ideas.
Some interesting excerpts:
On the job market:
I lived pretty far from campus and hardly ever came in. As a result, I was woefully ignorant about just about ..
Refutation Watch
Retraction Watch is profiled in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education (currently paywalled). The site keeps track of retractions in scientific research, with an emphasis on retractions owed to scientific misconduct.
Its founders, a pair of veteran science writers, were not just interested in big-ticket fraud cases; they were determined to apply scrutiny to scient..
Ethics of Suicide Digital Archive
In what is being referred to as “an unprecedented example of library-author-publisher collaboration,” a new philosophy book and accompanying digital archive of its material were recently launched. The book is The Ethics of Suicide: Historical Sources, by Margaret Battin (Utah). Professor Battin worked with her publisher, Oxford University Press, and the University o..
Reaching Under-Represented Job Candidates
Job search committees are asking the American Philosophical Association (APA) for help in reaching potential job candidates who are members of under-represented groups in philosophy, according to Teresa Blankmeyer Burke (Gallaudet), the acting chair of the Committee on Inclusiveness in the Profession. Of particular interest are email distribution lists (listservs) t..
AAUP’s 2015 Volume on Academic Freedom
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has published the 2015 edition of its Journal of Academic Freedom. The volume covers a variety of events and issues. Several pieces are on Steven Salaita’s “unhiring.” There’s a piece on the personal ethics of academic freedom, one on the emergence of institutional review boards as threats to academic freedom,..
Yogi Berra (1925-2015)
Baseball player Yogi Berra — whose birth name was Lawrence Peter Berra — died yesterday. Normally announcements of this sort on Daily Nous are reserved for academic philosophers, but I thought it would be appropriate to note the death of someone who is well known for sayings that have provoked the public to thoughts of puzzlement and paradox — and in such an amu..
Why You Should Teach Online Courses
“The more you hate the idea of teaching online, the more that online education needs you.”
That’s historian Joseph Rees (Colorado State – Pueblo), writing at Vitae. He is no fan of online courses, worried about their quality and effectiveness but notes that their increased prevalence is probably unstoppable. Here’s the context for the above quote:
I recently m..
Philosophy Majors Are Less Likely To Marry Each Other (updated)
Only 5% of “philosophy or religious studies” majors end up marrying other “philosophy or religious studies” majors, according to an analysis of census data by Dan Kopf at Priceonomics this past summer. This makes it one of the least common majors shared by married couples. Since, in the Census data, philosophy is lumped in with religious studies, we don’t know what ..
Philosophy Job Market Mentoring for Women
A program informally piloted last year is officially launching now as the Job Candidate Mentoring Program for Women in Philosophy. According to the program’s website,
the Job Candidate Mentoring Program for Women in Philosophy matches job candidates with junior faculty mentors who have recently been on the market. The program provides mentoring and peer support ..
Fire at University of Chicago Philosophy Department
This past Sunday, a fire broke out in Stuart Hall at the University of Chicago, home to the school’s Department of Philosophy. No one was injured.
While information is at the time a bit tentative, current reports are that a shredder motor overheated, starting a fire which moved down the Department of Philosophy’s hallway. No foul play is suspected. I am told that..
Philosophers Doing “Ask Me Anythings” on Reddit
The folks at Wi-Phi are interested in doing more to bring together philosophers and the public, and one avenue they’re tentatively pursuing is having philosophers take part in “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) sessions on Reddit (you may recall the AMA that Peter Singer did a few months back).
The first one is tomorrow (Tuesday) at 11am Eastern time and will be with Chris ..
How the SEP Works, and Why It’s a Model for the Internet
The problem with the internet is that “nobody trusts it, yet everybody is referring to it.” That’s Nikhil Sonnad, a reporter and former philosophy student, in an article at Quartz about how the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) is a model for improving the internet.
Its creators have solved one of the internet’s fundamental problems: How to provide author..
The Ethics Centre Invites Contributors
Matthew Beard of The Ethics Centre writes:
The Ethics Centre is an independent not-for-profit organisation that provides an open forum for the promotion and exploration of ethical questions. Part of our work involves producing ethics-related articles for our website. We invite a range of thinkers from various walks of life to write short, conversational pieces ex..
SEP, IEP, NDPR, Wi-Phi Weekly Update
Appearing here via special arrangement with Philosophical Percolations are last week’s additions and updates to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP), the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP), Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (NDPR), and Wi-Phi Wireless Philosophy. They were first posted in PhilPercs’ “Saturday Linkorama” along with lots of other philos..
Warning: This Post Is About Trigger Warnings
Kate Manne (Cornell) has an opinion piece in today’s New York Times about professors’ use of “trigger warnings,” by which she means “notice in their syllabuses, or before certain reading assignments” that the course material may discuss or depict “common causes of trauma.” Such warnings have been criticized (here, for example) as a sign of the end times of higher ed..
Progress in Philosophy
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is becoming the most well-known defender of the idea that philosophy makes progress. Last year, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, she wrote:
Philosophy was the first academic field; the founder of the Academy was Plato. Nevertheless, philosophy’s place in academe can stir up controversy. The ancient lineage itself provokes dissensi..
Daily Nous Seeks Cartoonist
I would like Daily Nous to run a regular humorous comic strip having something to do with philosophy, the philosophy profession, or academia. The strip would run every other week. The format (single or multi-panel, black & white or color, serial or stand-alone, etc.) and, of course, the content, would be up to the artist(s). The artist(s) will receive a small amount..
Who called it “Experimenting with Coffee” instead of “X-phresso”?
A pair of philosophers teamed up with a beautiful food website and a fancy coffee shop to bring some experimental philosophy to the people.
Shen-yi Liao (Leeds, soon Puget Sound) and Aaron Meskin (Leeds) served members of the public coffee at Laynes Espresso to investigate whether first-hand experience is required to judge something’s taste and whether knowledge ..
2014 Lakatos Award Given To Two Philosophers
The 2014 Lakatos Award has been won jointly by Gordon Belot (Michigan) for his book Geometric Possibility (Oxford University Press, 2011) and David Malament (UC Irvine) for his book Topics in the Foundations of General Relativity and Newtonian Gravitation Theory (Chicago, 2012). Each will receive the full award amount of £7500.
From the award website at the London ..