philosophy
TagNew Group Philosophy Blog
A new group philosophy blog is up and running. Called Philosophical Percolations, it has seventeen authors on its roster (some familiar from other blogs) and is open to adding more. It takes as its tagline, “all the philosophy that’s not fit to print,” which its authors explain in quite a bit of detail here. Check it out!
Using Initials to Hide Gender
There is some evidence that women scientists use their first initials, rather than their first names, at a greater frequency than men do in their publications. It would not be surprising if this were also true in philosophy and some other non-science disciplines. Reasons for women using initials might include worries about sexism in non-fully-anonymized peer review,..
The Mechanics of Class Participation
In one of the comments on the recent post about attendance, Chris requests a follow-up discussion on the mechanics of class participation. Some relevant questions:
- What kinds of class participation do you ask your students for?
- How do you encourage a wide range of students to participate?
- Does participation count as part of your students’ final grade? If so,..
Are Philosophers Hypocrites?
“On no issue did ethicists show unequivocally better behavior than the two comparison groups,” the researchers reported.
An article in The Atlantic— “The Hypocrisy of Professional Ethicists“— sums up research by Eric Schwitzgebel (UCR), Joshua Greene (Harvard), Sara Bleich (Johns Hopkins), Eric Schulz (Max Planck Inst.), Michael Koenigs (Wisconsin), and other..
Philosopher Wins Princess of Asturias Award
Spanish philosopher Emilio Lledó Iñigo has been awarded the 2015 Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities. Eight such awards are given annually, in different fields. The Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts went to Francis Ford Coppola and the award for social sciences was given to economist Esther Duflo. The awards include a replica of a Joan..
Attending to Attendance
Related to yesterday’s post about the differences between professors and teachers is a detailed analysis by Michael LaBossiere (Florida A&M) of his students’ attendance in his courses. He has long taken attendance and now makes use of Blackboard analytics for gathering information and “generating a picture of why students fail my classes.” He writes:
Not surpris..
On Trolley Problems (updated)
Robert Paul Wolff, at his blog The Philosopher’s Stone, objects to the use of trolley problems and other stylized thought experiments in which various complications are waved aside. “I am quite convinced that these sorts of thought experiments are nonsense,” he says. Wisely, he adds: “but it is not so easy to say why.”
I think that trolley problems and the like a..
How Philosophers Can Help Cosmologists
Cosmology’s hot streak has stalled. Cosmologists have looked deep into time, almost all the way back to the Big Bang itself, but they don’t know what came before it. They don’t know whether the Big Bang was the beginning, or merely one of many beginnings. Something entirely unimaginable might have preceded it. Cosmologists don’t know if the world we see around us is..
Questions for Academic Publishers (updated)
Oxford University Press philosophy editors Peter Momtchiloff, Peter Ohlin, and Lucy Randall have offered to answer Daily Nous readers’ questions about academic publishing. Here’s how it’ll work. You send in the questions to me at [email protected], or post them in the comment section below, and in a subsequent post during the last week of May, they will post..
An Exchange on Disgust
Many of you will remember Nina Strohminger‘s amusing review of Colin McGinn’s book, The Meaning of Disgust. The review, written with the kind of frankness McGinn’s own reviews are known for, appeared in the journal, Emotion Review. Several months after its publication, the journal received a letter from McGinn responding to the review. That letter, along with Strohm..
The Role of Professors in Students’ Lives
In “What’s the Point of a Professor?“, an opinion piece in The New York Times, Emory University English professor Mark Bauerlein laments the current role of professors. In the past, “students looked to professors for moral and worldly understanding.” Now, “finding meaning and making money have traded places.” In the past, “you couldn’t walk down the row of faculty o..
Morgan Freeman, Philosophy, and Science
Through the Wormhole is a television show on the Science Network hosted by Morgan Freeman. Its latest episode is about the direction of time and features Craig Callender* of UC San Diego in its first segment. So pretty much Morgan Freeman does his magical cosmic opening thing and then introduces and discusses time with Callender, who also goes paddle-boarding and ha..
Kant + Data = Beautiful Utility? (updated)
Minerva is “a web tool for supporting philosophical historiography research.” It’s the master’s thesis project of Valerio Pellegrini, and was designed by him in conjunction with “a team of philosophical historians from the University of Milan” and the Density Design Research Lab. It was initially designed for examining the work of Immanuel Kant, but the idea is to e..
Dennett Withdraws from Templeton-Sponsored Event
Daniel Dennett (Tufts) has withdrawn from the popular World Science Festival upon learning of its funding from the John Templeton Foundation. Dennett, whose opposition to Templeton has been discussed here before, is reported by The Washington Post as saying:
“I would be very happy to have the Templeton Foundation sponsor research on religion and science,” he said..
The Art of Thought Experiments
Si-Won Song, a student about to graduate from the University of Puget Sound, has created a series of digital artworks based on well-known philosophical thought experiments. Song, a philosophy major (with minors in studio art and Japanese) first got the idea from reading about Frank Jackson’s thought experiment, Mary’s Room, in Professor Justin Tiehen’s philosophy of..
Crash Course: Metaethics
Natalia Cecire, a lecturer in English and American literature at Sussex, has embarked upon an interesting project called “Crash Courses for the Desperate”:
Lately I’ve been thinking about what to do with students who suddenly need to get up to speed in a field, and don’t have time to take a course or immerse themselves in it for a year. I’m especially thinking of..
Your Strangest-Sounding Philosophical Beliefs
If philosophy can sometimes sound weird to other philosophers, it can sound really weird to non-philosophers. Imagine (you can do it) you were in a conversation with some non-philosophers and they asked, “what’s your strangest philosophical belief?”
What would your answer be?
(image: detail of “They Have Slept In The Forest Too Long” by Max Ernst)
Cartoon Introduction to Philosophy
The Cartoon Introduction to Philosophy is out! By philosopher Michael Patton (Montevallo) and illustrator Kevin Cannon, the book stars Heraclitus as the reader’s guide and companion through various philosophical topics, including logic, perception, minds, free will, god, and ethics. At over 150 pages, it has the heft and look of a big graphic novel, and it’s all ab..
Annalisa Coliva (Modena) to UC Irvine
Annalisa Coliva, currently lecturer at the University of Modena and associate director of the Cogito Research Centre in Philosophy, will be taking up a position as Full Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine, starting in Spring of 2016. Coliva works in philosophy of mind, epistemology, metaphysics, and the history of analytic philosophy.
How Philosophy Changed Your Students’ Minds
Jennifer Baker (College of Charleston) asked the students in her introductory philosophy course to report (anonymously) “ideas of theirs that changed after studying some philosophy.” I think this is a great idea for learning what kinds of topics and readings make an impact on the students’ thinking, which can be of use in both planning and pitching philosophy course..
The Open Logic Text
The Open Logic Project, instigated by Richard Zach (Calgary) and including Aldo Antonelli (UC Davis), Andrew Arana (UIUC), Jeremy Avigad (Carnegie Mellon), Gillian Russell (Wash U. St. Louis, soon to be UNC), Nicole Wyatt (Calgary), and Audrey Yap (Victoria), and a student assistant, has created the Open Logic Text, an open-source, collaborative logic text and all a..
Philosophy & Literary Writings Revisited
Last week’s post, “Philosophy’s Exclusion of Literary Writings,” asked whether philosophy could be done in the form of fiction or myth or poetry. Around the same time, I learned of a book whose description from the publisher included this question: “Given that poetry is about alternative forms of knowing, and philosophy the universal address of logos, then can the t..
The Point and Practices of Conferences
Christy Wampole (Princeton) lays out a series of complaints and concerns about conferences in the humanities, including:
We have sat patiently and politely through talks read line by line in a monotone voice by a speaker who doesn’t look up once, wondering why we couldn’t have read the paper ourselves in advance with a much greater level of absorption.
We have..
Course Evals from Prisoners and Princetonians
Sukaina Hirji and Daniel Wodak, two graduate students at Princeton, are currently teaching a class of fourteen prisoners at the Albert C. Wagner Youth Correctional Facility in New Jersey. You may recall that they were two of the philosophers interviewed here previously about their experiences teaching philosophy in prison.
Their course this term is called “Philos..
Philosophy’s Exclusion of Literary Writings
Chiara Bottici (New School) was one of the opening speakers at the Night of Philosophy held at the French Embassy in New York City on April 24th, 2015. She chose a controversial figure to focus on—Machiavelli, whose “very status as a philosopher is contested”—in order to get at the question of what does and what does not count as philosophy.
Towards the end o..
Trouble in Baltimore
On April 12th, 2015, Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man, allegedly ran away from a Baltimore police officer on a bicycle who had made eye contact with him. He was caught, arrested for possession of a switchblade, and dragged into a police van. At some point between his arrest and his delivery at a trauma center 40 minutes later, Gray sustained severe injuries th..
Suspect Reasons Behind Professor’s Firing
Thomas Jay Oord is tenured full professor of theology and philosophy at Northwest Nazarene University (as well as an ordained minister in the Church of the Nazarene), and he is being fired from his position for official reasons that apparently no one seems to believe. The official reasons have included: the university’s financial problems and low enrollment in the g..
Florida Gulf Coast U. May Lose Philosophy
Florida governor Rick Scott and the Florida board of governors, is calling for universities in the state to “examine their academic offerings, seeing if they can cut smaller, costly programs or those generating graduates with low job prospects and earning potential,” a committee at Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU) has answered the call, proposing for elimination..