Daily Nous - news for & about the philosophy profession

Advice for Grad Students and Other Conference Goers

The Pacific APA is in session and so it might be a good time to share this helpful post about good conference-going behavior (via Hannah Bondurant). From the intro:

I do… have something to say about the unwritten rules that accompany your forays into the Greater Academic World. Because when you attend conferences, colloquiums, workshops, or other group activities ..

Mental Illness in the Academy

Last month The Guardian published a couple of pieces on mental illness in academia. The first was a blog post on the “culture of acceptance” of mental health issues in academia (in which “acceptance” is meant to be understood as something like “neglect”). A follow-up article remarked on a study of 14,000 university employees that showed “growing stress levels among ..

The makers of the video game, The Old City, say that it is “philosophically founded,” and this article about the game uses some version of the word “philosophy” about a dozen times. “Think of it like a Lewis and Clark diary to epistemology,” the lead designer says. Still, it is hard to get a grasp of what they are talking about, or whether they know what they are ta..

An “Oh, Yes!” for Continental Philosophy

Last month saw the opening of the Scottish Centre for Continental Philosophy at the University of Dundee. At their inaugural workshop, James Williams (Dundee) delivered a brief address entitled “Continental Philosophy? Oh, Yes!” In it, he describes the areas and topics he thinks are especially fertile ground for future work in continental philosophy, including econo..

More Millions for Mele

Alfred Mele (Florida State) has won another enormous grant from the Templeton Foundation, this time for $4.5 million, for his project on the philosophy and science of self-control. He had previously won, in 2010, an award for $4.4 million from Templeton for the study of free will.

Teaching Philosophy in Prisons

Currently over two million people in the United States are in prison, and about nine million worldwide. There are many questions worth asking about the systems of criminal justice that lead to that result. The focus of this post, though, is quite narrow. It concerns just one thing academic philosophers can do, as academic philosophers, in light of this: teach prison..

Accessing PhilPapers From Campus

PhilPapers announces that starting on July 1st, 2014, full access to the PhilPapers site from an institution of higher education will be by institutional subscription only. You will still be able to access the full site for free while off-campus, but if you want to access it all on campus you’ll need to get your library to subscribe. Given how long that could take, ..

Running Commentary

If there were a pill that could replicate all the benefits of running—heath, looks, even enjoyment—would you keep running? In my experience, the longer a person has been running, the more likely they are to answer ‘yes’: to say they would continue running. That is, I think, because running does something to you that is quite different from, and independent of, its h..

Is This Letter Addressed To You? Or you? Or you?

Dear Ambiguous Commentator,

Hi there. I don’t think we’ve met, but I appreciate your interest in the blog and I’m flattered that you have taken the time to share your thoughts. However, I read your comment and I am sorry to report that I won’t be publishing it. It’s not that I don’t want to hear from you, or that I don’t think your opinion matters. It’s just that I..

Philosopher Gets Google Doodle Treatment

The 888th birthday of Spanish Muslim philosopher Averroes (Ibn Rushd) is celebrated with a Google Doodle today, but not everywhere. Check out Google Spain to see it (today only).

New Report on Adjunct Faculty

A new study on contingent or adjunct faculty has been released. The New York Times comments on it, and then itself comes in for some criticism for being a little late with the news: “The issue isn’t that they’re ‘treated almost like transient workers’ but that they’reactually transient workers. “

The Philosopher-Politician Reflects

We all think we can teach politics, but there is some almost tragic sense in which it can only be learned… by the mistakes you make…. You can go to any number of lectures about what politics is like but it doesn’t survive contact with the enemy…. It’s not a seminar room. It’s not an exercise in persuasion…. Politics is an alternative to war, but you live it ..

What Is Philosophical Progress?

Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (previously) argues that philosophy is making progress, and argues for a particular conception of what philosophical progress is: increased coherence.

Nicholas of Cusa on the Radio

2014 is the 550th anniversity of the death of 15th Century German philosopher Nicholas of Cusa (aka Nicolaus Cusanus), and you are probably asking yourself what the folks at Australian public radio are doing about it. I don’t know why you are asking yourself this, as the answer is pretty obviously a radio program. Dermot Moran (University College Dublin) and others ..

What is Happiness?

Everyone thinks happiness is at least sometimes good, but what is it? Dan Haybron (St. Louis University) takes on some traditional accounts and defends the “emotional-state” view in the most recent edition of the The Stone.

2. Professors, you’ve been rated by your students, but have you been drawn?

3. Article on author Lucy Eyre, her philosophically-informed novel, If Minds Had Toes, and the value of teenagers studying philosophy (free registration required).

4. Raising a moral child.

5. An Italian philosopher who had been jailed for nine years fo..

Same Old Song and Dance?

Maybe you’ve always thought there was something off about Ayn Rand, but I bet you weren’t thinking off-Broadway. Well this May, The Anthem, a theater production inspired by Rand’s short novel Anthem, will open at the Lynn Redgrave Theater in NYC—and it is a musical. Sources have yet to reveal whether Rush has agreed to be the pit band. Perhaps The Anthem is meant ..

Political Theory Conference as Preparation for Lawsuit

The Manchester Centre for Political Theory (MANCEPT) hosts several events in political philosophy and theory, including a large annual conference each fall, the MANCEPT Workshops. One of the panels at the upcoming conference is entitled “No Reparation, Without Preparation!” and aims to provide preparatory assistance for the plaintiffs in a proposed lawsuit against t..

Good Philosophical Comic Strips (Friday Fun)

Let’s get a list of good philosophical comic strips going. Post one you like. If it is online, great; list a brief description along with the web address, like so:

Dinosaur Comics on philosophical progress – http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=787.

If you just have a hard copy, take a photo of it and post it somewhere online. Or, if you can’t do that, send the p..

Are Sperm Donors Deadbeat Dads?

“I… think that donor conception is irresponsible. I sometimes compare it to ‘deadbeat dads’: men who abandon their wives and children and don’t provide for them. I think a sperm donor is a kind of deadbeat dad who creates children and then doesn’t care for them.”

So says David Velleman in a brief interview in The Irish Times, in which he is also asked about the no..

Free Porn Studies

The inaugural issue of the academic journal Porn Studies is out, and it’s a big one, by which I mean it is a double issue. Not that size matters. The publisher, Taylor & Francis, has made the entire contents free to download, and after a cursory inspection I can report two things my readership probably wants to know: (1) it seems to be entirely SFW, and (2) it seems..

Philosopher May Hold Record For Most Letters To The Editor

Felicia Nimue Ackerman, a philosopher at Brown, has had over 200 letters to the editor published in the New York Times, The New Yorker reports. “She responds to articles on a variety of topics—ageism, fatism, ‘society’s tendency to medicalize virtually everything’—but her underlying interest is in personal freedom.” She was also profiled in an earlier article in the..

Philosophers Among the 2014 ACLS Fellows

The 2014 Fellows of the American Council of Learned Societies have been announced, and the winners include five people working in philosophy: Michael Brownstein (New Jersey Institute of Technology), Alyssa DeBlasio (Dickinson College), Richard Moran (Harvard), William Newman (Indiana), and Anat Schechtman (Chicago). The fellowships include 6-12 months of salary repl..

A Philosophical Look at Zoos

Lori Gruen (Wesleyan University) has a post at OUPblog in which she makes use of the recent giraffe and lion killings at the Copenhagen Zoo as a launching point for some brief reflections on the ethics of zoos.

Mark LeBar (Ohio University) to Florida State

Mark LeBar, currently professor of philosophy at Ohio University, has accepted a senior appointment at Florida State University, beginning January 2015. Professor LeBar works in moral, social, and political philosophy, as well as ancient philosophy.