Daily Nous

News for & about the philosophy profession

  • Open Access Philosophy Textbooks

    Open educational resources (OER) are “any kind of material that you can use in teaching and learning that is openly available.” Richard Zach (Calgary) explains that “openly available” in…

  • Back to the Future Day: To When Should A Philosopher from 2015 Go?

    In the movie Back to the Future II, Doc Brown and Marty McFly travel 30 years into the future, to today, October 21st, 2015. The…

  • Mind Chunks (Daily Nous Philosophy Comics)

    Mind Chunks by Pete Mandik

  • Frisch from Maryland to Hannover

    Mathias Frisch, currently professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland, is moving to the University of Hannover  to take up a chair in the…

  • Intellectually Safe Space

    What is an “intellectually safe space”? In “What Does Intellectual Safety Really Mean?” Katelyn Hallman (North Florida) notes: An intellectually safe environment, as typically construed,…

  • The Lecture Strikes Back

    Lecturing as a teaching style is not particularly trendy these days, but perhaps it is particularly well-suited for the humanities. Writing in the New York…

  • Philosophers on Rating People

    If you were to be rated—as a person—on a scale of 1 to 10, what do you think you’d get? Questions like that might have been…

  • Six Degrees of Francis Bacon

    You may have heard of, and if so probably by now forgotten about, “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.” A meme before the age of…

  • Challenges of Chairing Philosophy Departments

    One thing that a Philosophy Head or Chair has to bear in mind continuously is “out-of-sight, out-of-mind.” I’ve always made it a point to…

  • SEP, IEP, NDPR, Wi-Phi Weekly Update

    Below are last week’s additions and updates to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP), the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP), Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (NDPR), and Wi-Phi Wireless Philosophy, appearing here…

  • Grad Student Sues U. Miami, Colin McGinn, and Edward Erwin

    This Daily Nous item is temporarily unavailable while its historical content completes a security review. The title and publication record are preserved; the original…

  • When Non-Philosophers Teach “Critical Thinking”

    “Critical thinking” means a very particular sort of thing to philosophers (mostly identifying, reconstructing, and evaluating arguments), but in the desperate struggle to stay relevant,…

  • Bank Stops Paying Colleges to Teach Ayn Rand

    BB&T, a banking firm, has apparently stopped its multi-million dollar campaign to buy space in college curricula for the work of Ayn Rand. For…

  • The Future of Online Conferences in Philosophy

    The following is a guest post* by the organizers of the recent online philosophy conference, Minds Online, Cameron Buckner (Houston), Nick Byrd (Florida State), and…

  • Mistaking Criticism for Discrimination (Ought Experiment)

    Welcome back to Ought Experiment! This week’s question is a sensitive one, indeed. A professor writes that s/he’s struggling to reach a grad student who…

  • 18 “Hope & Optimism” Projects Receive $2m Funding

    Hope and Optimism: Conceptual and Empirical Investigations, an interdisciplinary initiative headed by Andrew Chignell (Cornell) and Samuel Newlands (Notre Dame) which last year received about $4.5…

  • Do the Tenured Speak Up Enough?

    Tenure is, in part, designed to protect one from retaliation. It’s the tenured that can make the culture of silence (and shame) within a…

  • Aldo Antonelli (1962 – 2015) (several updates)

    G. Aldo Antonelli, professor of philosophy at the University of California, Davis, died unexpectedly earlier this week. Professor Antonelli was known largely for his…

  • How to Encourage Service to the Profession?

    A professor writes in: We hear a lot of complaints about how the APA and about how journals are run from folks who don’t…

  • SEP, IEP, NDPR, Wi-Phi Weekly Update

    Below are last week’s additions and updates to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP), the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP), Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (NDPR), and Wi-Phi Wireless Philosophy, appearing here…