philosophy

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Philosophy as Anti-Terrorism Tool

A study from 2010 cites Philosophy for Children among “teaching approaches that help build resilience to extremism among young people.” The study, commissioned by the UK government,

presents the findings from a large-scale, in-depth research study into teaching methods—knowledge, skills, teaching practices and behaviours—that help to build resilience to extre..

Practical Questions About The Philosophy Curriculum

In a comment on a previous post, What’s “Core” and What’s “Peripheral” in Philosophy—and Why?, Brian Weatherson (Michigan) notes that there are “some practical questions that need answering from time to time.” They are:

Which subfields of philosophy should a philosophy major be required to take courses in?
Which subfields of philosophy should a PhD student be ..

Late Letters of Recommendation

A philosopher currently on the job market writes in with a query:

The philosophers who are writing my letters of recommendation are incredibly overworked. They send in recommendation letters sometimes a week after the deadline. Is this the norm? Due search committees overlook this aspect of the application?

My sense is that slightly late letters tend to not ..

The Ethics of Honoring

The recent wave of student protests in the United States have focused on a range of issues related to the status and treatment of racial minorities and other vulnerable parties on campus. One issue that has come up on several occasions are the ways in which universities have decided to honor various historical figures—for example, by naming buildings after them, o..

Today Is World Philosophy Day: What Are Your Plans? (updated)

Happy World Philosophy Day, everyone! The day was created in 2002 by the UN to celebrate philosophy. It is celebrated on the third Thursday of November.

Marking World Philosophy Day, the head of the United Nations Organization for Education, Science and Culture (UNESCO) has stressed that sustainability calls for new ways of thinking about ourselves and the planet..

Stomaching Controversy (Ought Experiment)

Welcome back to Ought Experiment! This week I heap reflexive and excessive scorn on a philosopher who’s worried that their work is taking them in controversial directions, and that contemporary philosophy might not be all that welcoming a place for such work. Oh, wait.

Dear Louie,

One of the papers I’m working on has a significantly controversial (maybe e..

A Response to Brian Leiter from the Margins (guest post by Christopher Lebron)

The following is a guest post * by Christopher Lebron, assistant professor of philosophy and African American studies at Yale University.

A Response to Brian Leiter from the Margins
by Christopher Lebron

Take a look around you. It’s a new day. Campuses around the country have put the world on notice that there is no last place of refuge for marginalization. Ap..

What’s “Core” and What’s “Peripheral” in Philosophy—and Why?

It’s pretty bizarre, when you think about it, that someone who spends their time wondering whether tables are real is considered to be working on a foundational area of philosophy, but someone who wonders whether races are real is doing something we consider a niche, ‘applied’ topic. Likewise, someone who tries to figure out how words like ‘might’ work is doing some..

Which MA Programs in Philosophy Fund Students?

As some of you know, Geoff Pynn (Northern Illinois) has over the years provided an important service to the philosophy profession: maintaining a list of master’s programs in philosophy and the kind of funding they offer their students. The list now includes 31 U.S. MA programs:

Brandeis
Cal State Los Angeles
Colorado State
Florida State
Georgia State
G..

Women’s Participation At APAs Has Doubled over 40 Years

Over at the Splintered Mind, Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) reports on research he has conducted into the participation of women on the main programs of the meetings of the American Philosophical Association (APA). His findings reveal an upward trend: women’s participation in the 2014-15 meetings, at 32%, was twice that of 40 years ago. He also broke down the sess..

The Internet: Good for Philosophy

On a recent trip I was introduced to a senior philosopher who soon turned the conversation away from the standard opening pleasantries with this: “If it were up to me, the internet—especially blogs and social media—would go out of existence. It is just a place philosophers go to do terrible philosophy and act thoughtlessly. It’s embarrassing.”

Naturally, I aske..

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 via special arrangement with Philosophical Percolations. They were first posted in PhilPercs’ “Saturday Linkorama” along with a collection ..

Philosophy Citation Practices Revisited

You may recall that earlier this year, in a guest post, Marcus Arvan decried philosophers’ reading and citation habits. Now, Moti Mizrahi has a post up at The Philosophers’ Cocoon with data showing that philosophy articles, on average, contain fewer than five cites per article are cited less than five times:

Additionally, Mizrahi says that other data suggest..

Philosophy Jobs Wiki Is Up

The Phylo Job Wiki is up and running. From the site:

A job wiki is a space for philosophy job seekers to post unofficial information about the status of various job openings in philosophy. Job seekers traditionally share information about when hiring departments schedule interviews, make offers, and so forth. Although job seekers provide this information as a ser..

A Call for the Humanities to Unite

There is a different unifying principle for most non-STEM disciplines—among them English, history, politics and civics, languages and literatures, education, the arts, philosophy, psychology and sociology—which I call the human disciplines. All of the subjects within human disciplines are fundamentally interested in people and with subjectivity. Our disciplines ..

Not Legally Actionable, But…

A tenure-track woman professor at a private U.S. university writes:

In light of a situation that recently came up in my department, I’ve been thinking quite a lot about the following question… I’m honestly at a loss for how to deal with this, and I’d love to hear some (sensible) thoughts of others on the issue.

The issue is this: Take it as a given that ther..

Disability Studies Quarterly Is Reviewing Stubblefield’s Articles

A philosophy professor who wishes to remain anonymous wrote to the editor of Disability Studies Quarterly in the wake Anna Stubblefield’s conviction for aggravated sexual assault of a severely disabled man requesting that the journal issue a retraction of an article purportedly co-authored by Stubblefield and her victim. From that letter:

Earlier this month, phi..

Four Philosophers of Biology Win $2.1m

Alan Love (Minnesota), C. Kenneth Waters (Calgary), Marcel Weber (Geneva), and William Wimsatt (Minnesota, Chicago) have won a $2.1 million grant from the Templeton Foundation for their project “From Biological Practice to Scientific Metaphysics”. The funding will support, among other things, summer institutes, lectures, post-docs, and graduate students. More infor..

What Should Academics Do About Journal Prices?

All six editors and all 31 editorial board members of Lingua, one of the top journals in linguistics, last week resigned to protest Elsevier’s policies on pricing and its refusal to convert the journal to an open-access publication that would be free online. As soon as January, when the departing editors’ noncompete contracts expire, they plan to start a new open-ac..

Sanders Graduate Student Prizes Awarded

The American Philosophical Association (APA) has announced the winners of the 2015 Sanders Graduate Student Prize, sponsored by the Marc Sanders Foundation. They are:

Joshua Brandt (University of Toronto), “Partiality’s Negative Analogue”
Kevin Dorst (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), “A Contextualist Solution to Miner Disagreements”
Matthew Shields (G..

A College without Philosophy? A Philosophy Department without Philosophers? (updated)

After program cut upon program cut, at what point does a liberal arts institution cease to be one?

That’s the question in an article at Inside Higher Ed that centers around faculty cuts at Wartburg College in Iowa, a Christian college.

This month, at least three tenure-track faculty members at Wartburg received notices that the college was not recommending the..

Name-Blind Hiring

The BBC reports that

Leading companies and universities are being asked to remove names from application forms in an effort to stop “unconscious bias” against potential recruits from black and ethnic minority backgrounds… Prime Minister David Cameron has announced that Ucas, the UK’s university admissions service, will carry out “name-blind” applications from 2..

Philosophy in 10 Years

Here are five predictions about the state of philosophy in ten years:

1. Philosophy’s popularity as a major will increase. This will be owed in part to the swing of the cultural pendulum, to economic growth making people more comfortable with a major lacking a clearly-defined career path, to efforts by the profession to emphasize the practical value of philosophy..

Where Philosophy Is Missing

Some colleges have no philosophers. Some colleges have philosophers, but not many, yielding a very low philosopher-to-student ratio, particularly when compared to elite institutions or flagship state schools. Such colleges—which include many community colleges, state branch campuses, and historically black colleges and universities—seem to turn out very few stud..

Does Philosophy Improve Critical Thinking?

Following on the heels of last week’s discussion of non-philosophers teaching critical thinking, the Chronicle of Higher Education drew attention to a meta-analysis of studies about whether colleges succeed in teaching critical thinking at all. As it turns out, they do:

Students’ critical-thinking skills do improve in college. The difference is comparable to a st..

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 this context means:

Available under a license which allows the “five Rs of openness“:

Retain – the right to make, own, and control copies of the content
Reuse – the right t..

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 movie was ahead of its time, at least when it came to marketing, apparently.

The movie also raised an important question which, alas, is still with us today, namely:
(more…)

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, is something like an environment “in which a person feels comfortable sharing ideas and opinions without fear of harsh judgment or repercussions.” This conception of intellectual..