questions
TagAsking Questions at Talks and in Seminars
“It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it” (Maurice Switzer). Thoughts like that have inhibited many a young academic from asking questions in seminars or at talks. (more…)
The Intellectual Achievement of Creating Questions
A commonly recognized form of intellectual achievement is the correct answering of questions. This kind of achievement is not a matter of mere quantity—one doesn’t get much credit for answering easy questions or trivial ones—but also quality. What counts is providing answers that add to the store of human understanding, understood broadly. (more…)
Why Progress Is Slower In Philosophy Than In Science
“Since science took its modern form in the seventeenth century, it has been one long success story.” By contrast, we philosophers “don’t seem to have progressed much in the two and a half millennia since Plato wrote his dialogues.” That’s the conventional wisdom, as described by David Papineau (King’s College London) in The Times Literary Supplement. But if there’s ..
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..
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..
Giving a Philosophy Talk
Ole Koksvik (Bergen), along with the help of friends, has put together a very useful set of tips for giving a philosophy talk.  I appreciated the “rationale” section, in which he notes, among other things, that “giving a bad presentation is impolite.”  There is some good advice throughout, much of which is consistent with the general rule that guides how I put toget..
Contrarian on Questions
Continuing with the recent theme of methodology, Robin Hanson, who holds an appointment in the Economics Department at George Mason University, writes often about rationality and decision theory, and is chief author at the Overcoming Bias site, has advice for contrarians. Observing that knowingly disagreeing is irrational or dishonest, he says contrarians should not..