"guest post"
It’s All Too Hard to Get Plagiarizing Philosophy Publications Retracted (guest post)
“It can involve an unreasonable amount of time, an unreasonable amount of work, and an unreasonably uphill struggle to obtain retractions of philosophy publications, no matter how blatant the plagiarism discovered and how indisputable the documentation.” (more…)
Doctoral Program Attrition (guest post)
“s it turns out, the rate of attrition from philosophy doctoral programs often exceeds 30 percent.” (more…)
Dyslexia, Dysgraphia, and Academic Philosophy (guest post)
An undergraduate student in philosophy has been wondering whether their dyslexia gives them a strong reason to avoid pursuing graduate study and a career in academic philosophy. (more…)
Do Something! Reflections on MeToo and Philosophy (guest post) (updated)
When several years ago I posted the screenshot of a defamatory tweet by a serial harasser on my Facebook page (for “friends” only), I did not expect how people would react to this. Tenured philosophers, including many with left-wing or liberal politics cautioned me to take down the post. They private messaged me urging I should take it down, and even publicly chided..
What Do Experiments in Philosophy Teaching Look Like? (guest post)
“There is room to think creatively about how to improve learning and love of philosophy via innovation in pedagogy.” (more…)
2022-23 Philosophy Job Market Report (guest post)
How has the 2022-23 philosophy job market looked so far? (more…)
Are Philosophy’s Glory Days in Bioethics Over? (guest post)
How has philosophy’s role in cognate disciplines been changing? We could ask this question about philosophy and political theory, or cognitive science, or business ethics, or theoretical physics, and so on. In the following guest post, the focus is on philosophy and bioethics. (more…)
In Defense of Boring and Derivative Philosophy (guest post)
“Even if you prefer the sexiness of radicalism or the glory of revolution: you need boring, work-a-day normal conservative philosophy.” (more…)
Trade Secrets: From Academic Literature to Trade Books (guest post)
Erik Angner, professor of practical philosophy at Stockholm University, has authored a book intended not mainly for academic readers, but for the general public—a trade book, as they’re known. Switching from writing academic articles and getting them published to writing How Economics Can Save the World and getting it published was a process he found surprisingly ..
AI Images of Philosophers & Philosophy (guest post)
Simone Nota, a philosophy PhD student at Trinity College Dublin, has been using AI image generators to create philosophy-related images. (more…)
Progress at Philosophical Psychology (guest post)
Lisa Bortolotti (Birmingham), who took over the editorship of Philosophical Psychology following a publication controversy in 2020, and who announced some changes to the journal last year, writes in with an update about their implementation and results. (more…)
Citation Rates by Academic Field: Philosophy Is Near the Bottom (guest post)
Academia’s emphasis on citation rates is “mixed news” for philosophy: it can bring attention to high-quality work, but tends to make philosophy and other humanities fields look bad in comparison with other areas, says Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside), in the following guest post. (more…)
No Limit to Goodness: Remembering Sarah Broadie (guest post)
“When you manage to pin down a philosophical issue and give it a fully precise answer, often the answer turns out to be boring. Philosophy is just like that. But it also makes possible the most beautiful dreams.” — Sarah Broadie. (more…)
Why the History of Philosophy Matters to Philosophy (guest post)
“Studying the history of philosophy can help us see ourselves from the outside and that can help us inhabit philosophy from the inside.” (more…)
How Often Are Philosophy Articles Actually Cited? Encouraging News (guest post)
In the following guest post, Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) recounts what he found when, prompted by claims about how infrequently academic philosophy articles are cited, he looked at the citation rates of articles published in a few journals a decade ago. (more…)
A Philosophical Note #for Mahsa: Fighting for Truth in an Epistemologically Polluted Area (guest post)
On September 13th, 22-year-old Mahsa Amini was arrested in Tehran by the “Guidance Patrol” or “morality police” for allegedly not wearing a hijab properly. A few days later, she died in police custody “under suspicious circumstances, due to police brutality according to witnesses.” In the weeks since, large protests have taken place across Iran and elsewhere to cond..
Philosophy’s Happiness Literature: More of It, More Empirical (guest post)
In the following guest post, Michael Prinzing (Yale) discusses trends in philosophical discussions of happiness and well-being. (more…)
Conversation Starter: Teaching Philosophy in an Age of Large Language Models (guest post)
Over the past few years we have seen some startling progress from Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-3, and some of those paying attention to these developments, such as philosopher John Symons (University of Kansas), believe that they pose an imminent threat to teaching and learning (for those who missed its inclusion in the Heap of Links earlier this summer, yo..
The Philosophy Major Continues to Recover and Diversify in the U.S. (guest post)
The number of college students graduating with degrees in philosophy continues to increase, as does the gender and racial diversity of this group. (more…)
New Data about Philosophy Graduate Programs (guest post)
In the following guest post, Carolyn Dicey Jennings, associate professor of philosophy at UC Merced, shares some new data about graduate programs in philosophy that she and her team at Academic Philosophy Data and Analysis (APDA) have collected and analyzed. (more…)
The Philosophy Guild (guest post)
“Most contemporary philosophy writing is just bad writing… How did things go so wrong? It’s tempting to declare that philosophers are simply terrible writers, but I think that’s a mistake…” (more…)
Teacher, Bureaucrat, Cop (guest post)
“We can free ourselves up to pursue a wider range of educational goals when we see that fairness is not an absolute demand for all classroom life, but only one goal among many. And sometimes, we can trade away some degree of fairness in the pursuit of other goals.” (more…)
The Philosophy Special (guest post)
“I suspect I’m not alone among philosophers in finding colloquia almost universally frustrating: the speakers are more interesting than the conventional talk allows them to be…” (more…)
Deontology Is Compatible with Act-Consequentialism (guest post)
“It’s standard to divide the moral landscape into deontology, consequentialism, and virtue ethics, thereby assuming that these three are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive. I, like some others, find this deeply problematic…” (more…)
Potemkin U. (guest post)
“We are mired in inevitably betraying and ignoble practices, obliged to pay mindless obeisance to useless cant or to perform pantomimes of actually important values made ridiculous through endless, unanswered repetition…”
Intergroup Dialogue in the Philosophy Classroom (guest post)
“Over 70% of our students… reported being more likely than before to listen to someone who held an opposing viewpoint…” (more…)
Cancel Culture: A Cross-Generational Dialogue (guest post)
“Should we double down on generating controversy, or should we watch what we say? And if the latter, can we still participate in an open inquiry?”. . .
“Philosophers who ‘just raise the tough questions’ should reflect the discipline’s tradition of open inquiry back on themselves and consider the purpose that specific ‘tough questions,’ or even the call for philosop..
Why I’m a Shameless Sophist (guest post)
A “more vocational attitude to philosophy is a constant temptation; I still sometimes slip into it now. But what calls me away from it is always just being reminded of the mundane ways in which this is just a living.” (more…)