public philosophy
Support for Cheryl Abbate (updated w/ statement from Marquette Pres.)
As reported a few days ago, Marquette University philosophy graduate student and instructor Cheryl Abbate has been the subject of defamatory and hostile politically-motivated blog posts by Marquette associate professor John McAdams. The story has predictably spread across the internet, and has now appeared on the Fox News website with a lying headline, typical slant..
Letter of Support for Abbate from Marquette Dept Chairs
The heads of several departments in Marquette University’s Klingler College of Arts and Sciences met about the Abbate case and have written a letter to their administration, below, which they invite other members of the Marquette University community to sign by posting their names in the comments. (Note: such “signings” will be the only comments allowed on this post..
College Pressures Philosopher to Withdraw Novel
Stephen Grant, until recently a lecturer in philosophy at Richmond upon Thames College, was asked by the school to stop the publication of his novel, A Moment More Sublime. While a lecturer there, he was a union representative and involved in the labor disputes at the school, and the novel is partly based on his experiences working there. He says that the story of t..
Teaching on Same-Sex Marriage
Most colleges offer lower-level philosophy courses on contemporary moral problems, one of the aims of which is to teach students how to think philosophically about assorted social and political issues. There are more of these kinds of issues than could be covered adequately in a semester, so the instructor must select which to include, and there may be some difficul..
More Details Emerge on Boxill’s Role in UNC Scandal
As was reported last month, a detailed investigation at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill revealed an academic fraud scandal in which philosopher Jan Boxill played a central role. Previous evidence focused on her role as an academic advisor who directed students towards fake or “paper” classes, helped students write papers, ignored academic dishonesty ..
Habermas on the Return of Exiled Jewish Philosophers
In an essay at Tablet Magazine, Jürgen Habermas describes the impact of Jewish philosophers and sociologists who returned to Germany after the Holocaust. An exceerpt:
On the present occasion I cannot make a contribution to exile research, but only sift through some recollections from the unreliable perspective of a contemporary witness. After their return to the ..
Are Terminal MA’s Part of the Solution?
My proposal, if I had a magic wand to make it happen, would be to not to make PhD admissions out of college. Turn a lot of PhD programs that aren’t serving their graduates well into MA programs, and have PhD programs accept students from the MA programs. Then the PhD programs would be evaluating applicants who’d spent a couple of years doing graduate-level work. The..
An Open Letter of Support (guest post)
The following guest post* is an open letter from John Greco (St. Louis University), Don Howard and Michael Rea (University of Notre Dame), Jonathan Kvanvig (Baylor University), and Mark Murphy (Georgetown University).
An Open Letter of Support
What follows is a statement of support for people in our profession who are suffering various trials either as victim..
The Fragmentation’s Disvalue
Over the summer, Nicholas Rescher (Pittsburgh), in his capacity as executive editor of American Philosophical Quarterly, published a brief editorial entitled “Growing Pains” (vol. 51, no.3) in which he notes the growth of the philosophy profession and laments its bad effects.
He writes:
The scholarly output of the profession has far outstripped its numerical gro..
Brilliant Combination of Teaching and Outreach (updated)
Mount Holyoke philosophy professor Thomas Wartenberg and College President Lynn Pasquerella co-teach a course called “Philosophy for Children.” An article at masslive.com describes it:
As part of the course, college students are teaching second graders at the Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School of Excellence in Springfield to question their own assumptions, lis..
Famous Papers First Rejected
“The Strength of Weak Ties” (1973) by sociologist Mark Granovetter is an extraordinarily influential paper, one of the most cited in sociology (with nearly 30,000 citations, according to Google Scholar). Yet it was initially rejected. You can read the rejection letter via a link from here. It is an interesting case of peer reviewers dismissing an idea because they w..
Martin Tamny (1941-2014)
Martin Tamny, Professor of Philosophy at CCNY and the CUNY Graduate Center, has died. Professor Tamny worked in the philosophy and history of science. Saul Fisher (Mercy College) sends along the following remembrance:
It is with great sadness that I report the passing of Martin Tamny on October 18, 2014, at the age of 73.
Martin was born in the Bronx, New York..
Open Access and Journal-less Publishing
Recently I was asked by the editors of a journal whose mission and scholarship I support and respect to review a book by a scholar I very much admire. In the past, I would have accepted the invitation without a second thought and proceeded to read the book and develop a review. Over the past few years, however, as my work has focused on questions of public scholarsh..
Three Philosophers Awarded New Canada Research Chairs
The Canada Research Program has announced the recipients of the new Canada Research Chairs. Three philosophers are among the new recipients. They are:
- Ingo Brigandt, University of Alberta: Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Biology
- Marc-Antoine Dilhac, Université de Montréal: Canada Research Chair in Public Ethics and Political Theory
- Ken Waters..
Two Ways to Help Victims (Guest Post by Jennifer Lackey)
Jennifer Lackey is professor of philosophy at Northwestern University. She works mostly in epistemology, with an emphasis on social epistemology. She is the author of Learning from Words: Testimony as a Source of Knowledge (OUP), has edited collections on the epistemology of testimony and disagreement, and has written very many articles on these and other topics. In..
Leiter to Step Down from PGR / The New Consensus
Brian Leiter (Chicago) announced that he will be stepping down as editor of the Philosophical Gourmet Report (PGR), a highly influential reputational ranking of philosophy Ph.D. programs he created in 1989 while he was a graduate student, and which has been published on the Internet since 1996. The 2014-15 edition of the PGR will be officially co-edited by Leiter an..
Non-Academic Hires — a Reminder
The academic philosophy job market is underway, but academia is not the only place philosophy PhDs might be seeking employment. Check out the Non-Academic Hires page here at Daily Nous to see what kind of work philosophers have landed outside of academia. If you are a philosopher who has recently found employment outside academia, please add your information to that..
The September Statement (Guest Post by Simon Cabulea May)
Simon Cabulea May is assistant professor of philosophy at Florida State University. He works on a variety of topics in political philosophy. He is also the creator of the group political philosophy blog, Public Reason. In the guest post*, below, May explains why he thinks philosophers should sign the “September Statement“, declaring in light of recent events their r..
Heap of Links
1. A defense of majoring in philosophy, by Joseph Tinguely (South Dakota).
2. Artist Tino Seghal’s latest installation places philosophers in the Roman agora in Athens to engage people in dialogue.
3. Don’t think for yourself, says Caleb Cohoe (Metropolitan State University of Denver).
4. Aristotle, the biologist. (via Johann A. Klaassen)
5. How to get your students..
Should the Philosophical Gourmet Report Continue? (Several Updates Added)
Brian Leiter (Chicago), who created and organizes a reputational survey of philosophy graduate programs known as the Philosophical Gourmet Report, is asking whether he should continue producing it. He opened a poll on the matter on his blog Tuesday evening, twice stopping and replacing the poll with new versions. The current poll is accessible through a link at the ..
What if a Metaphysician Had Written This?
Cass Sunstein (Harvard) delves into the philosophy of history, particularly counterfactuals and causation, with his review in The New Republic of Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History by Richard J. Evans. (via Philosophy Matters)
Historians cannot conduct randomized controlled trials, because history is run only once. Yet they nonetheless develop hypotheses, and..
Retaliation and the Ketland Case (Guest Post by Heidi Lockwood)
Heidi Lockwood is associate professor of philosophy at Southern Connecticut State University. She works on topics in logic, metaphysics, and epistemology, and has also done quite a lot of work, both written and behind the scenes, on issues related to sexual misconduct in the academy. She has guest posted* at Daily Nous before. In the following open letter she addres..
Six Month Status Report
Daily Nous began on the first Friday in March, and now it is the first Friday in September. It’s six months old, so still a baby, but nonetheless this seems like a good enough occasion to bore you with some blogging about the blog.
1. First things first.
THANK YOU! Daily Nous is still alive, and doing pretty well, as you’ll see, and of course that is owed to you: t..
Heap of Links
1. Has a time travel simulation resolved the grandfather paradox? Philosophers of science, let us know (via Ben Stein, Manolo Martinez).
2. A philosopher defends Zionism.
3. Meanwhile, the rabbinical ruling refusing to reverse Spinoza’s excommunication from Judaism has been made public.
4. PBS Newshour discusses philosophy and athletics with Mark Edmundson (Virginia..
Heap of Links
1. “Sometimes a deepening of a view may go so deep as to change its character without actually changing its letter,” says Joseph Raz (King’s College, London), in a wide-ranging interview at 3am Magazine.
2. Huw Price (Cambridge) is part of “The scientific A-Team saving the world from killer viruses, rogue AI and the paperclip apocalypse.”
3. A Time Travel Dialogue b..
Heap of Links
1. A symposium at Boston Review called “Against Empathy,” featuring Paul Bloom, Peter Singer, Nomy Arpaly, Barbara Fried, Jesse Prinz, and others.
2. “Imagine that women are proportionately represented in the journals we are discussing…. Could there be any reason for ensuring that more papers by women are published in these journals? Possibly, yes, for two reasons..
What Was I Thinking?
As I pressed the “publish” button on the “Philosophical Topics of Interest to Women?” post, the old Saturday Night Live commercial for “Chess for Girls!” popped into my head. It was a warning, but one that I allowed to go unheeded. In part this was owed to exhaustion, in part to distraction, in part to what might be a less-than-optimal amount of conscientiousness ab..
Dan Kaufman Sues University of Colorado
Dan Kaufman, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado, is suing his university and several of its employees for $2 million for damages relating to his “banishment” from campus for two months this past spring.
Kaufman has filed four notices of claim, a step required by Colorado law for anyone seeking to sue a public entity, and alleges that he h..