Bioethicist Live-Tweets Her Son’s Sex-Ed Class (updated)
Alice Dreger, a professor in medical humanities and bioethics at Northwestern, sat in on her son’s sex-ed class at East Lansing High School and live-tweeted commentary about it to the world. The tweets were simultaneously disturbing and hilarious.
The kid has invited me to his health class on sex ed to see how bad it is, so I’m going. But hands over my mouth m..
Will Computers Do Philosophy?
Plus, an online magazine that “aims to introduce readers to the beauty and the practical applications of mathematics” has an interesting article on whether mathematicians will ever be replaced by computers. The article, “The Future of Proof,” by Marianne Freiberger and Rachel Thomas, reports on a recent British Applied Mathematics colloquium on the topic, and introd..
Five Philosophers Win NHC Fellowships
Five philosophers are among the winners of fellowships from the National Humanities Center. They are:
- Sara Bernstein (Philosophy, Duke University) What Might Have Been: Causation and Possibility (Philip L. Quinn Fellowship)
- Owen Flanagan (Philosophy, Duke University) The Geography of Morals: Varieties of Moral Possibility (Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship)
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ACLS Fellows in Philosophy
Seven philosophers were awarded fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). Johnny Brennan of the ACLS writes with the details:
- Jacob Beck, Assistant Professor at York University, “Beyond Language” How the Mind Represents the World”
- Tim Maudlin, Professor at New York University, “Space-Time and the Theory of Linear Str..
Logic Problem Goes Viral (updated)
Perhaps you saw this logic problem, purported to have been given to fifth graders in Singapore, flying around social media yesterday:
That’s right: a logic problem has gone viral.
It turns out that the problem was from a math olympiad test for high-school students, but perhaps the “are you smarter than a fifth grader from Singapore” framing helped propel t..
Paying Their Own Way For Job Interviews
A junior job candidate reports that twice this season she has been invited for on-campus interviews but told that the inviting departments would not be able to pay for her travel to the campuses. At all. This is like being invited over for dinner but then told that you will have to bring all of the food and drink. It’s like being taken out for a night on the town bu..
Center for Dewey Studies Is at Risk
The Center for Dewey Studies at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, is facing drastic budget cuts that would severely curtail its activities, according to a report in The Daily Egyptian, the school paper.
Over the past fifty years The Center for Dewey Studies put together and published 37 volumes of John Dewey’s Collected Works, and over 22,000 pieces of De..
Peter Singer’s AMA on Reddit
Peter Singer (Princeton) did an “Ask Me Anything” session on Reddit today to tout his new book, The Most Good You Can Do. He says he may come back tomorrow to answer some more questions. In the meanwhile, here are some excerpts:
Q: If you weren’t doing what you do now, what do you think you’d be doing?
A: I suppose I might be a political activist of some kind. B..
Pleshette DeArmitt (2015)
Pleshette DeArmitt, chair and associate professor of philosophy at the University of Memphis, has died. Professor DeArmitt work was in contemporary continental philosophy, feminist theory, psychoanalysis, and social and political thought. Before taking up a position at Memphis, she held held visiting positions at Grinnell College and Villanova University.
The dep..
Philosophers Pick Philosophical Movies
The Guardian had Julian Baggini, Christine Korsgaard, Ursula Coope, Peter Singer, Susan Haack, Kenneth Taylor, and Slavoj Žižek each pick a movie and draw out its philosophical themes. The movies picked were Memento, It’s a Wonderful Life, Gattaca, Ida, Galaxy Quest, Force Majeure, and Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter … and Spring. Can you guess which philosopher pi..
Sexism in Academic Hiring — A Myth? (updated)
A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences produced findings that appear to show that hiring practices in certain fields are not biased against women. Here is the paper’s “significance” summary:
The underrepresentation of women in academic science is typically attributed, both in scientific literature and in the media, to sexist ..
Philosophers Among The New Canada Research Chairs
The Canadian Minister of State recently announced the recipients of 150 new and renewed “Canada Research Chairs.” Two new Canada chairs have been awarded to philosophers: Travis Dumsday (Concordia U. College of Alberta), who works in philosophy of science, metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and medieval, and Gregoire Webber (Queen’s University), who works on quest..
Data on the Humanities
The American Academy of Arts & Sciences has published its Humanities Indicators report for the United States, “The State of the Humanities: Higher Education 2015.” Among its findings:
- Humanities represent a little more than 10% of all Bachelor’s degrees, slightly more than 8% of all doctoral degrees, and just under 4% of all masters degrees.
- The number of stu..
Norms of Self-Promotion (updated)
A graduate student in philosophy who prefers to remain anonymous writes in with questions “concerning self-promotion and marketing oneself in order to move up in the world of philosophy.” He asks: “Is blatant self-promotion just a feature of the discipline now? Is doing anything necessary to sway the public opinion a necessary evil? Or should we be calling these p..
No One Is Listening
Up to 1.5 million peer-reviewed articles are published annually. However, many are ignored even within scientific communities — 82 per cent of articles published in humanities are not even cited once. No one ever refers to 32 per cent of the peer-reviewed articles in the social and 27 per cent in the natural sciences. If a paper is cited, this does not imply it has..
An Exchange on Philosophy of Science
There’s an interesting post at NewApps by Roberta Millstein (UC Davis) on criticisms of philosophy of science that prompted a useful exchange between her and a critic. Professor Millstein writes:
Why is this philosophy? Most philosophers of science have been on the receiving end of this question at one time or another. A friend of mine recently called it a type o..
Alan Wertheimer (2015) (updated)
Alan Wertheimer, professor emeritus at the University of Vermont, has died. Professor Wertheimer worked mainly in ethics and political philosophy, both theoretical and applied, with well-known work on coercion, exploitation, and various topics in biomedical ethics. He spent most of his career at the University of Vermont, in the Department of Political Science, but ..
Jason Turner (St. Louis) to Univ. of Arizona
Jason Turner, currently associate professor of philosophy at St. Louis University, has accepted an offer from the University of Arizona and will join them as associate professor this coming August. Turner works in metaphysics, philosophical logic, free will, and philosophy of action.
Defending Philosophy Against the Physicists
In 2012, physicists Lawrence Krauss claimed that “…science progresses and philosophy doesn’t”, and Neil deGrasse Tyson infamously echoes such opinions… Lots of high profile physicists make dead wrong claims about a subject in which they are not experts, repeating misperceptions even after philosophers keep correcting them. This is like listening to creationists re..
Dominic McIver Lopes Wins Guggenheim / UPDATE: Gideon Yaffe Wins, Too
Dominic McIver Lopes, professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia, has been awarded one of the 2015-16 Guggenheim Foundation fellowships. McIver Lopes works mainly in aesthetics. He is president of the American Society for Aesthetics as well as Secretary-Treasurer of the American Philosophical Association Pacific Division. You can read more about ..
Answering the Taxpayers
I am a professor of philosophy at a public university. What is the value of philosophy to the taxpayers who subsidize my teaching? Philosophy is an abstruse and difficult field. Many of those whose taxes support higher education probably would have a hard time seeing the point of most philosophical debates. Why ask people to pay for discussions of seemingly arcane a..
Rise of the Intuitions
Is there a word more overused in philosophy nowadays than “intuition”? That is many people’s intuition sense of things, but why go with gut feelings when there is data? That’s right: data. James Andow of the University of Reading has just published findings on the use of the word “intuition” and its variations in an article in Metaphilosophy entitled “How ‘Intuitio..
Police Violence, Race, and…?
By now most of you will have heard about the two most recent publicized incidents of police killing unarmed black men in the United States. (Warning: the following videos are very disturbing.) One was a shooting that took place in South Carolina:
The other, even more horrifically, was the allowing of a police dog to maul to death a New Jersey man who had alread..
On Warwick’s Outsourcing (a few updates)
A few days ago news surfaced of the University of Warwick’s plan to outsource some of its teaching to a company called Teach Higher. According to the website Fighting Against Casualisation in Education (FACE):
Hourly paid academic staff… will no longer be employed directly by the university but by a separate employer: ‘Teach Higher’. Teach Higher has been set u..
Solutions to the Jobs Problem Revisited
Last year, Daily Nous reported that Eleanor Dickey, professor of classics at University of Reading, had been collecting various possible responses to problems associated with the high ratio of PhD holders to academic jobs. The full report is here, and the helpful summary, which groups the more popular responses by type, is here.
Professor Dickey (et al) report th..
Website Responsibility
“If Your Website’s Full of Assholes, It’s Your Fault” is a 2011 post from well-known blogger Anil Dash in which he writes about a specific kind of challenge faced by bloggers and online media providers. They are often forced to defend their enterprises “because so many of the most visible, prominent, and popular places on the web are full of unkindness and hateful b..
A Philosophy Department’s Impressive Fight For Survival
Robert Stufflebeam, chair of the Philosophy Department at the University of New Orleans, shares some of the challenges his department faces, and some of the measures they have implemented in order to survive in hostile circumstances. He writes:
I’m the chair of the only remaining Department of Philosophy at a public university in the state of Louisiana. (LSU has ..
Honoraria in Philosophy
A philosopher writes in with a query about paying philosophers for talks and the like…
I’d like to learn more about honorarium practices for philosophy talks. How common is it to offer an honorarium? Under what circumstances (e.g. departmental colloquium, conference, public lecture, etc.)? What is a typical amount? It would be especially helpful if respondents ..