User’s Guide to Philosophy Without Rankings
A User’s Guide to Philosophy Without Rankings is a new site “intended for the use of prospective graduate students in philosophy, faculty (including chairs or heads) in philosophy, and deans, provosts, and other administrators, all of whom need resources for the decisions they make about philosophy programs.” It is based on the idea that “currently, there are no ran..
Philosophers and Theorists on the Charlie Hebdo Attacks (updated)
Yesterday, twelve people were shot dead at the Paris office of Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical magazine. It was reported that the gunmen shouted “We have avenged the Prophet Muhammad” and “God is Great” in Arabic (“Allahu Akbar”), and so the attack is believed to be the work of militant Islamists in response to offensive cartoons that appeared in the magazine.
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New Motion in Ludlow Case; Faculty Respond (with updates from Kvanvig, Garthoff, and Lockwood)
A new motion was filed on January 6th by lawyers for the undergraduate student allegedly assaulted by Northwestern University professor of philosophy Peter Ludlow (previously). The student’s lawsuit against Northwestern for mishandling her complaints was dismissed this past November. This motion claims to establish that there is newly discovered evidence that should..
Inclusive Philosophy Classroom Best Practices Site
A new website, Best Practices for the Inclusive Philosophy Classroom, has launched. It is an interdepartmental project, started by Minorities and Philosophy (MAP), which aims to be “an easily accessible launching pad for teachers who want to make their philosophy classrooms more inclusive.”
The site includes anthologies and other resources for diverse syllabi, ad..
Teaching As If Our Students Were Not Future Philosophers
Since most of our undergraduate students are planning to go to graduate school in philosophy and become professional philosophers, it makes sense that the undergraduate philosophy curriculum is typically filled with courses that prepare them for that future. Their courses should introduce them to the way that contemporary professional philosophers understand their f..
Amy Allen (Dartmouth) to Penn State
Amy Allen, currently Parents Distinguished Research Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy and Women’s and Gender Studies at Dartmouth College, will become head of the Department of Philosophy at Penn State, starting July, 2015. Professor Allen works in Continental philosophy, particularly critical social theory, poststructuralism, and feminist theo..
APA Wins $600,000 Grant for Undergraduate Diversity
The American Philosophical Association (APA) has won a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The grant will provide $600,000 over three years to support undergraduate diversity institutes in philosophy, including the expansion of the Philosophy in an Inclusive Key Summer Institute (PIKSI) program and the development of infrastructure to support it and other..
Joshua Cohen to Join Berkeley Faculty
Joshua Cohen, who had held appointments at MIT and Stanford before recently moving to Apple University, will be joining the University of California, Berkeley as a Distinguished Senior Fellow in its School of Law, Department of Philosophy, and Department of Political Science, starting July 1, 2015. According to a notice on the UC Berkeley Philosophy Department web p..
New Philosophy of Science Association Officers
Sandra D. Mitchell (Pittsburgh HPS) has been elected President of the Philosophy of Science Association (PSA). Professor Mitchell will serve a two-year term (from January 1, 2015 through December 31, 2016) as Vice-President and President-Elect of the PSA, after which she will serve a two-year term (January 1, 2017 through December 31, 2018) as President of the Assoc..
“Philosophy is for posh, white boys with trust funds”
Seven philosophers are interviewed in The Guardian in the wake of a recent report by the UK’s Equality Challenge Unit that found that “among non-Stem (science, technology, engineering and maths) subjects, philosophy is one of the most male-dominated, with men accounting for 71.2% of the profession” in the UK. They were asked “Why aren’t there more female philosopher..
Nietzsche’s New Year’s Resolution
This:
I do not want to wage war with the ugly. I do not want to accuse, I do not want even to accuse the accusers. Looking aside, let that be my sole negation!
Thanks to Maria Popova at Brain Pickings for highlighting this passage from Nietzsche’s The Gay Science. See her post here for the rest of his New Year’s resolution.
(art: detail of Mirror/Infinity Roo..
X-Phi Grad Programs Wiki
Another grad program wiki is up — this time for experimental philosophy. It was put together by Joshua Knobe and Christian Mott (both at Yale). Shawn Miller (UC Davis), who created PhilWiki and the template that has been used to make the various subject-specific wikis, writes:
Notable, perhaps, is that the total time it took Joshua and Christian to get the site..
Bob Hanna Retires from Colorado
Bob Hanna retired on December 31st from his position as professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado. Hanna had been “suspended without pay for a semester in 2013 for sexual harassment and unprofessional conduct” (previously). According to an article in the Daily Camera: “Hanna made frequent unwanted romantic advances, often in the form of emails, toward wo..
Philosophy of Police Violence and Mass Incarceration
Lisa Guenther, associate professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University, has developed a new philosophy course, “Police Violence and Mass Incarceration,” which she will be teaching this coming term. I think it is a great way of showing students a way in which philosophy can interact with current events. I asked her about the course, and in an email she writes:
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Laptops, Tablets, and Phones in the Classroom
I settled on my New Year’s resolution while giving a lecture to 85 masters students. It was one kid who unintentionally suggested the idea. He was sitting in the back row, silently pecking away at his laptop the entire class. At times, he smiled at his screen. But he rarely looked up at me. I had a choice. I could disrupt the class to single him out. Or I could do w..
Government Attempts to Interfere in Universities in Macedonia
Students and faculty in Macedonia have been protesting attempts by the government there to impose state-supervised exams for university graduates. Response to faculty involvement in the protests has been to propose a requirement that the government’s ministry of education approve the composition of thesis committees and be involved in thesis defenses.
Todd May (Cle..
UNC Trying to Fire Jan Boxill
The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, is trying to fire philosopher Jan Boxill for her role in widespread academic fraud at UNC, according to an Associated Press report:
Steps to terminate University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill philosophy professor and former faculty leader Jeanette Boxill started on Oct. 22, the same day that a scathing report into..
Bye, 2014
I wasn’t quite sure how to wrap up the year. A parody of Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off”? Too cheesy. A video montage of action sequences from a year of blogging (me, staring at phone; me, sitting in front of laptop; etc.)? Too boring. An ironic play in which an enormous baby keeps whining about infantilism? Too realistic. A grandiose statement about progress in the p..
Philosophy To Be Taught In Ireland’s Secondary Schools
Philosophy will become a part of the secondary school curriculum in Ireland, according to an announcement by Minister of Education Jan O’Sullivan, reported in the Irish Times. The country’s National Council for Curriculum and Assessment will develop a “short course” in philosophy that will be taught to students in the early years of secondary school (approximately a..
Eduardo Mendieta (Stony Brook) to Penn State
Eduardo Mendieta, currently professor and chair of philosophy at Stony Brook, will take up a position as professor of philosophy at Penn State, starting during the summer of 2015. Professor Mendieta works on critical philosophy of race, Latin American philosophy, the Frankfurt School, and issues relating to religion, globalization, global justice, and animality. The..
Theory of Jerks
The jerk himself is both intellectually and emotionally defective, and what he defectively fails to appreciate is both the intellectual and emotional perspectives of the people around him. He can’t appreciate how he might be wrong and others right about some matter of fact; and what other people want or value doesn’t register as of interest to him, except derivative..
Is Bio-Medical Ethics Failing?
What medical ethics needs is more and better philosophy—and a return to the adventurousness and originality of its pioneering days. There have been successes—euthanasia and better treatment of animals to mention just two. But the field has in many ways dried up or become dominated by moralists bent on protecting privacy and confidentiality at great cost and ‘getting..
Philosopher is State-Level Winner in Professor of the Year Contest
Karen Hornsby, associate professor of philosophy at North Carolina A&T, has been recognized by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching as the North Carolina winner in their Professors of the Year competition. You can read more about Hornsby and her approach to teaching here. She was the only ph..
Overheard at the 2014 APA Eastern / Open Thread
This could be a terrible idea. Let’s find out!
Any and all attendees of the 2014 APA Eastern are welcome to post their observations, news, comments, complaints, quips, etc., about stuff going on there, here.
Leiter Threatens Jenkins & Ichikawa with Legal Action (updated)
Jonathan Ichikawa (UBC) reports that he and his wife, Carrie Jenkins (UBC), have received from a Toronto lawyer a notification that Brian Leiter (Chicago) is prepared to take legal action against them in the Courts of Canada over “various Internet postings which he alleges defame him.”
Leiter claims to have been attacked or defamed by:
- Carrie’s pledge on her ..
Brandom Wins Prize
Robert Brandom (Pittsburgh) has been awarded the Anneliese Maier Forschungspreis by the Humboldt Foundation. The Foundation awards the prize each year to three or four people working in the Humanities and the Social Sciences. The prize amount is €250 000 (about $320 000). (via Anil Gupta)
This Year in Philosophical Intellectual History
This fall, one of the most powerful institutions in the field of philosophy in this country began to collapse…
In “The Rise and Fall of the Philosophical Gourmet Report,” a brief post at the U.S. Intellectual History Blog, historian Ben Alpers takes a look at one of the major stories in the philosophy profession this year. Alpers is cautious about his account o..