Friday Night Tunes… from a Philosophy PhD Student
Tom Krell, a PhD student at DePaul, records pop music under the name How To Dress Well. His latest release, What is This Heart, was just favorably reviewed in The New York Times. I’m enjoying it right now, and you can, too, right here.
Co-Authorship and Voice in Philosophy
Necessarily, it seems to me, a co-authored work, growing… out of collaborative discussion and intellectual exchange, cannot have an authentic and distinctive voice. Inevitably, unless one author completely dominates the others, it will be written in the flat, correct, acceptable one-dimensional language of the Academy. There will be no dark recesses or ironic ov..
Gideon Rosen on the Humanities’ PR Problem
Any educated person can rattle off a list of the great achievements of science and technology in the past 50 years: the Big Bang, cloning, the Internet, etc. People who have no idea what the Higgs boson is or why it matters still can tell you that it was discovered in July 2013 by a heroic team of scientists and that the discovery reveals something deep about the un..
Heap of Links
1. Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins makes some personal resolutions about how to treat other philosophers.
2. Students prefer administering painful electric shocks to themselves rather than just sitting and thinking.
3. On the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s website you can view 142 works of art with “philosopher” in their title and 149 with “philosophy“. (I haven’t checked wh..
The APA Responds to the New York Times
The New York Times recently published an article on a study about the relative difference in earnings between majors, particularly how much a recession affects the earning potential of different majors. Its conclusion was that “For high-earning majors, graduating into a recession increases their earnings advantage, and for low-earning ones, it increases their disadv..
Philosophy Tag
In the last round, University of British Columbia’s Roberta Ballarin tagged University of Georgia’s Anthony Shiver, and man, he is a fast it. Let’s see who he has tagged.
“A whole is nothing over and above its parts.” Taken at face value, this claim seems to imply that some individuals (i.e., complex wholes) are several things. But this is puzzling: how can w..
The Value of a Liberal Arts Education
It obviously would not have counted as the survival of, say, Plato’s Academy if, at some point in the waning of Athens’s golden cultural era it had taken up the training of military leaders, or merchants, or rhetoricians. Nor would it count as the survival of a Franciscan monastery if it responded to a decline in religious enthusiasm by filling its vacant rooms with..
Official Word on Ludlow from Rutgers
Following up on an earlier post, according to an official spokesperson at Rutgers, Peter Ludlow will not be joining the Rutgers faculty.
“When Rutgers learned of allegations against Professor Ludlow at Northwestern, the university requested relevant information from Professor Ludlow and his attorney,” spokesman Greg Trevor said in a statement. “This information w..
Insults and Obnoxiousness
On the second day of this blog’s existence, I wrote a post answering some questions I had received from readers, including this:
Is this blog an attack on Brian Leiter? Nope. Like many in philosophy, I have a sincere appreciation for Professor Leiter’s efforts over the years to disseminate information about the profession that had typically been known to and control..
Philosophize… Like a Boss
Bruce Springsteen was photographed reading a book about philosophers lately, and one result has been a jump in sales for the book, Examined Lives by James Miller (New School). Now if I could only get Beyoncé to read my manuscript… in public…
APA Creates Code of Conduct Task Force
In response to a petition received earlier in the year asking it to develop a professional code of conduct for philosophers, the American Philosophical Association has created a task force the aim of which is to “explore whether such a code of conduct is warranted and, if so, to develop one for board approval.” The task force was appointed by Chesire Calhoun (Arizon..
Philosophy with the Public
The widespread perception is that most faculty members do not engage with the public—either because they don’t want to or because they know they won’t be rewarded for it.
In The Chronicle of Higher Education, historian David M. Perry (Dominican University) discusses obstacles to public engagement by academics. This is something that should be of concern to philosoph..
New Site for Philosophical Interviews
The Center for Cognition and Neuroethics, a joint venture between the Philosophy Department at the University of Michigan-Flint and the Insight Institute of Neurosurgery and Neuroscience (IINN), has launched a new site called Philosophical Profiles, which features interviews of philosophers (video and written transcript). So far they’ve interviewed Elizabeth Anderso..
Immortality Project Grant Winners Announced
The Immortality Project at UC Riverside, headed up by John Martin Fischer, has announced the winners of grants totaling $1.5 million. The winners include a number of philosophers working on a variety of projects.
Philosophers among the winners include Yuval Avnur (Scripps), Christopher Belshaw (Open University), Stephan Blatti (Memphis), Ben Bradley (Syracuse), Mik..
Jeff McMahan (Rutgers) to Oxford
Jeff McMahan, currently Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, has accepted Oxford University’s offer of the White’s Chair in Moral Philosophy. He will take up the professorship, which was first endowed in 1621, around mid-October, 2015, in time for the start of Oxford’s Michaelmas term. McMahan is known for his work in theoretical and applied ethics, includ..
Heap of Links
1. Tonight, some PBS television stations will be airing a documentary on Grace Lee Boggs, a 98-year-old social activist who holds a PhD in philosophy from Bryn Mawr.
2. Some of Jeremy Bentham’s writings on sex, which fit with the characteristically progressive program of early utilitarianism, have been published under the title Of Sexual Irregularities, and Other Wr..
World Cup Philosophy
Existential Comics covers the Germany v. France game.
The goal by Sokratis in the soccer game between Greece and Costa Rica is sort of like what happens in this scene in Monty Python’s Philosopher’s World Cup (via Kay Mathiesen).
Guillaume Attia is running a philosophy version of the World Cup, in which you can vote for your favorite team.
UPDATE: Philosophy Refe..
Philosophy in Figures
Ryan Reece, a post-doc in experimental particle physics at UC Santa Cruz, likes “carving out philosophical positions with diagrams.” It’s an interesting project, which you can view here. He welcomes comments. (Via David Grober-Morrow.)
Pasnau on Critiques of Philosophy
In dismissing philosophy as an antiquated relic of our prescientific past, the scientist is making a very large and dubious assumption: that the abstract methods of philosophy, despite the discipline’s string of successes over recent centuries, have nothing more to contribute to our developing understanding of the world. Perhaps scientists think they already have th..
Philosophy Tag
Last week, Sara Bernstein (Duke) made Roberta Ballarin (University of British Columbia) it. Who’s Ballarin going to tag? Let’s find out…
Atomicity is the thesis that everything is ultimately composed of atoms, entities that lack proper parts. Atomicity is standardly defined as “for every x there is a y such that y is an atom and y is a part of x”, i.e. ever..
Heap of Links
1. Charts and graphs may have their place in philosophy, but this is taking things too far.
2. An angel comes to the APA and offers to answer one question…
3. An audio illusion, via Lewis Powell, who reminds us of these words from Locke: “We are further to consider concerning perception, that the ideas we receive by sensation are often, in grown people, altered by..
Eulogy for Sidney Morgenbesser
Wittgenstein once remarked that you could write a book of philosophy consisting entirely of jokes. We all know who could have authored that book. Jonathan Lieberson, who made that connection to Wittgenstein, described Sidney as a combination of Spinoza and Groucho Marx. But Sidney worried about this very gift. He worried that all that people would know of him would ..
“What’s a well-intentioned single guy to do?”
Feminist Philosophers has posted an anonymous “open letter” about sexual harassment in philosophy. Part 1 of the letter lists “34 things NOT to say in response to complaints about sexual harassment in philosophy.” Part 2 provides some elaboration and explanation of the list, including what seems to be a central point: “Countering complaints about sexual harassment b..
Varieties of Understanding – Grant Winners
“Varieties of Understanding: Perspectives from Psychology, Philosophy, and Theology” is a project funded with $4.2 million from the Templeton Foundation, and which is lead by philosophers Stephen Grimm (Fordham), Michael Strevens (NYU), Gordon Graham (Princeton Theological Seminary), and others. They recently announced the winners of their grant competition, which i..
Science News of Interest
1. Cosmological study concludes that there should be nothing, rather than something.
2. Those with episodic amnesia are not “stuck in time“, says Carl Craver (Washington U. in St.Louis).
3. Does a simulation of time-traveling photons help resolve the grandfather paradox?
4. Biology and politics: people are more likely to vote if they have low levels of cortisol, a s..
New (?) Corollary of Frankfurt’s Conception of Bullshit
“The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.” (Seen here but apparently owed to Alberto Brandolini.)
Despite including the bullshit phrase, “order of magnitude,” this is useful to keep in mind, especially as one travels the internet, for both the folks who see bullshit and are tempted to respond to it, and f..
Mentoring Project for Pre-Tenure Women
Louise Antony (UMass) and Ann Cudd (Kansas) are co-directing the 3rd Biennial Workshop for “The Mentoring Project for Pre-trenure Women Faculty in Philosophy”, to take place next year in June, 2015. “The Mentoring Project aims to build long-term mentoring relationships between eminent senior women and junior women in the field of philosophy.” Applications are not ye..
Heap of Links
1. Heather Douglas (Waterloo) and others on how to fix Canadian science policy (audio here).
2. “Good luck idiots. I hope you enjoy your new kangaroo overlords,” said Machiavelli.
3. A continental philosopher complains about the “imperialistic approach of analytic philosophy.”
4. How confronting moral dilemmas in a foreign language makes you more utilitarian, in The..