public philosophy
Barthold Retaliation Case Settled
This past April I reported that Lauren Barthold, associate professor of philosophy at Gordon College, a Christian liberal arts college in Massachusetts, had filed a lawsuit against the college for retaliating against her for her public statements (such as a letter to the editor of a newspaper) disagreeing with college president Michael Lindsay over whether federal c..
APA Awards 2017 Kavka/UCI Prize
The American Philosophical Association (APA) has announced that the winner its 2017 Kavka/UCI Prize is Johann Frick (Princeton) for his paper, “Contractualism and Social Risk” (alt. link), which appeared in the June 2015 issue of Philosophy and Public Affairs.
According to the APA, the Kavka prize is awarded every other year, in odd years, to an APA member who h..
Dale Jacquette (1953-2016)
Dale Jacquette, Senior Professorial Chair in Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Bern (Switzerland), died this past Sunday. Prior to moving to Bern in 2008, he was professor of philosophy at Penn State University. He also held visiting appointments or was affiliated with the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, the Julius Maximil..
Return of the Intuitions
The word “intuition” has been deployed with increasing frequency in philosophy over the past 100 years. This may be owed to an increase in philosophers’ explicit reliance on intuitions, but also to the increasing critical scrutiny that philosophers’ reliance on intuitions has been facing for 3 to 4 decades now. Here’s Richard Brandt in A Theory of the Good and the R..
Essay Prize in Latin American Thought Awarded
The American Philosophical Association (APA has awarded its 2016 Essay Prize in Latin American Thought to Dr. L. Sebastian Purcell (SUNY Cortland) for his “Neltilitzli and the Good Life: On Aztec Ethics.” (more…)
The Conscious Thought of Expertise, The Distribution of Ideas, and the Truth about Chicken Sexers
In an entertaining and interesting interview, Barbara Gail Montero, associate professor of philosophy at CUNY and former professional ballet dancer, discusses, among other things, the role of conscious thought in the activities of experts. On one view (notably advanced by Hubert Dreyfuss and John McDowell ), experts get into the “flow” and act in a “nonminded” way:..
Philosophers Among Recipients of 2016 NEH Grants
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has announced the winners of several of its grants programs, totaling $79 million. 300 projects received support, and among them were a few philosophy professors. (more…)
What Philosophers Aren’t Talking About, But Should (Updated)
Occasionally a comment makes its way onto Daily Nous, or into the Daily Nous inbox, along the following lines: “I find it strange that no one seems to be discussing some important topic or defending some important thesis, T. Is it because the majority of philosophers, P, find T philosophically uninteresting? Or is the moderator censoring T? Or is it because P is too..
Philosophers On The DNC Leaks
Earlier this month, the website Wikileaks released a collection of over 19,000 emails from seven officials of the Democratic National Convention (DNC). You can search through them here. While Wikileaks will not disclose information about how it obtained these emails, many experts believe that two Russian intelligence groups were involved. The Russian government deni..
The “Grad School Takeover”
Even in four-year colleges that emphasize undergraduate education, new appointments are going to top graduates from a mere handful of prestigious doctoral programs that emphasize research and professional advancement over teaching. The academic job market and tenure expectations focus ever more intently on publications, whether in book or journal form, that tend to ..
What Are Philosophers Supposed To Do?
The summer issue of The Hedgehog Review is out and features a symposium, “On the Business of Philosophy.” The main element of the symposium is Richard Rorty’s Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia, with responses from Susan Haack (Miami), Robert Pippin (Chicago), and Matthew Crawford (Virginia). (more…)
Job-market Mentoring: How Are Programs Doing? (Guest Post by Marcus Arvan)
The following is a guest post* by Marcus Arvan (Tampa) seeking information about what graduate programs in philosophy are doing, doing well, or failing to do, in regards to job placement. It originally appeared at The Philosophers’ Cocoon. Of particular value would be the perspectives of those who have recently been on the market and current graduate students curren..
Police Shootings of Blacks in the U.S.; What Can Philosophers Do or Say in Response?
News from the past week:
- July 5th, 2016: Police officer shoots and kills Alton Sterling, a black man, while he was seemingly pinned to the ground, unable to move.
- July 6th, 2016: Police officer shoots and kills Philandro Castile, a black man, after he was pulled over for a broken tail light.
- July 7th, 2016: Five police officers killed by sniper fire durin..
Enormous Open Access Phenomenology Project
A new project—The Open Commons of Phenomenology—aims to provide an open access digital platform for “the entire corpus of phenomenology,” including canonical texts, research related to phenomenology, and other materials, by 2020. (more…)
Allegations of Ideological Policing via Refereeing
The refereeing of academic papers in philosophy has its share of problems. Is one of them ideological policing? That is an allegation made by Dan Demetriou (University of Minnesota, Morris) in regards to an article he co-authored with a student, Michael Prideaux. (more…)
Philosophers On Brexit
Last week, a majority of voters in the United Kingdom supported Brexit, the proposal for Britain to leave the European Union. The referendum’s outcome was a surprise to many elites, journalists, and academics, and even some pro-Brexit voters are experiencing “bregret” (aka “regrexit”). A petition has been circulating to run a second referendum, but exercising that o..
A Question About Journals’ Style Requirements
Dear Journal Editors,
On behalf of those submitting articles to your journals, I write with a question about your house style requirements. (more…)
Open Letter Regarding Thomas Pogge (a few updates)
Over 160 academics have signed an open letter regarding the allegations of sexual harassment and professional misconduct of Thomas Pogge, Leitner Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Political Science at Yale University, including at least 16 of his colleagues at Yale. (more…)
Martha Nussbaum Wins Kyoto Prize
Martha Nussbaum (University of Chicago) is this year’s winner of the Kyoto Prize. The prize is offered by the Inamori Foundation, an organization created by Kazuo Inamori, who is better known as the founder of the large Japan-based multinational electronics firm Kyocera. (more…)
Western Illinois As Warning
Inside Higher Ed has an article following up on the recent news of the elimination of the philosophy major at Western Illinois University (WIU). As we previously reported, the committee charged with reviewing programs (APER) did not recommend the closure of the philosophy department. And while Illinois has a reporting requirement for programs with low enrollments at..
Duties to Graduate Students Pursuing Non-Academic Careers (guest post by Torsten Menge)
The following is a guest post by Torsten Menge, a recent philosophy PhD from Georgetown who currently works for Connected Academics, a national Mellon-funded project by the Modern Language Association (MLA) aimed at preparing humanities doctoral students for non-academic careers. (more…)
Morton White (1917-2016)
Morton White, Professor Emeritus in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, died on May 27th. Over the course of his career he taught philosophy at City College of New York, Columbia University, University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard University. (more…)
Other Two-Body Problems (guest post by Carol Hay & John Kaag)
The following is a guest post* by a couple of philosophers at the University of Massachusetts Lowell—Carol Hay, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of Gender Studies, and John Kaag, Professor of Philosophy—on being a couple of philosophers: not just in the same discipline, but in the same department. (more…)
2,000 Spaces for 10,000 Papers: Why Everything Gets Rejected & Referees Are Exhausted (guest post by Neil Sinhababu)
The following is a guest post* by Neil Sinhababu, Associate Professor of Philosophy at National University of Singapore. It concerns a publication crisis: how the number of new journal submissions outstrips the number of places to publish all of them, creating a backlog.
Synthese Editors Issue Letter on Special Issues
In January, an article by Jean-Yves Beziau, “The relativity and universality of logic,” which contained some remarkably strange passages, was published in a special issue of Synthese. After some publicity, the editors of Synthese, Gila Sher, Otávio Bueno, and Wiebe van der Hoek, announced that the article had not undergone the normal review process for a special iss..
Thomas Pogge, Yale University, and Sexual Harassment (Updated)
When Thomas Pogge travels around the world, he finds eager young fans waiting for him in every lecture hall. The 62-year-old German-born professor, a protégé of the philosopher John Rawls, is bespectacled and slight of stature. But he’s a giant in the field of global ethics, and one of only a small handful of philosophers who have managed to translate prominence wit..
There Is No One Thing Philosophers Should Be Doing
The latest in a series of articles exhorting philosophers to engage with “real world problems” appears at Inside Higher Ed this morning, focusing on philosophy at land grant universities in the United States. The authors, Christopher P. Long and Michael O’Rourke (both of Michigan State), write:
To the extent that philosophy lost its way by turning inward, perhaps..
Offend Responsibly
The thing I always like to stress is that although academics have the right to offend, they must do so responsibly, and they must to be able to defend the origin of the academic freedom of the right to offend and show that they exercise it in a way that’s as responsible as possible. Sometimes this means, if there is something on your syllabus that troubles a student..