papers
TagStudents Have Easy Access to Ghostwriters for Hire — What Should Teachers Do?
Recently, Eric Winsberg (South Florida), as an experiment, tweeted, “Who could I pay to write a five-page essay for me that I need to turn in for my philosophy class?” (more…)
The Best Reviewer/Editor Comments You’ve Received
Last week people shared their horror stories on “The Worst Reviewer/Editor Comments You’ve Received“. But refereeing papers and editing journals is crucial and often underappreciated work, and, as some noted, sometimes the comments can be extremely helpful or encouraging or otherwise appreciated. (more…)
How To Write A Philosophy Paper: Online Guides
Some philosophy professors, realizing that many of their students are unfamiliar with writing philosophy papers, provide them with “how-to” guides to the task. (more…)
An Impressively Detailed Philosophy Paper Grading Rubric
Micah T. Lewin, a recent PhD from Stanford who is currently an adjunct professor of philosophy at Perimeter College, Georgia State University, has created an impressively detailed and helpful rubric for grading philosophy papers. (more…)
How To Get More From Attending Academic Talks
Some philosophy talks are exciting, others are dull. It’s pretty easy to tune out of the dull ones. But once you tune out of a talk, it is difficult to follow the argument when you tune back in,and so you just end up sitting there wasting your time. As Ravi Vakil, a professor of math at Stanford puts it, “Talks are like horses: once you are thrown off, it is hard to..
A Philosopher’s Key To Grading Papers Quickly
Nick Byrd, a philosophy PhD student at Florida State University, has created a shorthand that he uses for commenting on his students’ papers. He describes it as having the virtues of the “grading shortcuts” method advocated by Rebecca Schuman and the more extensive approach advocated by Marcus Arvan. (more…)
Princeton Receives 16,000 Pages of Lewis Correspondence
Stephanie (“Steffi”) Lewis, the widow of David Lewis (1941-2001), has donated his papers to the Manuscripts Division of the Princeton University Library. There are a lot of them:
The David K. Lewis Papers include his extensive correspondence with other philosophers and scholars. There are approximately sixteen thousand pages of Lewis’s correspondence, both incomi..
That Paper… Again?
A philosopher who prefers to remain anonymous writes in with a good question:
How often can one present a paper in progress before one is simply presenting “old work”?
When I get invited to give a talk or present at a workshop, I often will use the same 1 or 2 papers 3-4 times within the space of a year or so. These are usually papers I’m working on and I wa..
“Sleeping Beauty” Papers in Philosophy (updated)
“Sleeping Beauty” papers “lie dormant for years before experiencing a sudden spike in citations as they are discovered and recognized as important.” A recent article in Nature discussed scientific papers that have slumbered for decades, as well as a way of assigning a “beauty coefficient” to papers.
The coefficient, B, is “a value based on the number of citations..