Berggruen Institute Announces Winners of Its New $25,000 Essay Prize

The Berggruen Institute, a think tank oriented around cross-cultural and philosophical approaches to big questions about how to “best support flourishing relations between humans, technology, and the planet” and known for its $1 million “Prize for Philosophy and Culture,” has announced the inaugural winners of its new essay prize. Launched this past March, the prize competition sought essays “that follow in the tradition of renowned thinkers such as Rousseau, Michel de Montaigne, and Ralph Waldo Emerson” and that “present novel ideas and be clearly argued in compelling ways for intellectually serious readers.” The contest accepts submissions in English or Chinese, with a winner (or winners) of the $25,000 prize selected from each language. The winning articles are published in the institute’s magazines, Noema (English) and Cuiling (Chinese). The theme for this year’s competition was “planetarity”, and two essays in English and two in Chinese were selected. The authors and their winning essays are: Adam Frank – The Coming Second Copernican Revolution Pamela Swanigan – It’s Time to Give Up Hope For A Better Climate & Get Heroic  Yichao Lin   – 行星机制及其概念开显 [Planetary Mechanism and its Conceptual Manifestation] Yingjin Xu– 儒家视域中的行星级数字化生活——一种基于小数据主义的解决思路 [How to make Confucianism Digitalized on a Planetary Scale?—a small-dataism-based proposal] Each will receive $12,500, and will be honored at an award ceremony in November as part of the Planetary Summit the Berggruen Institute is hosting in Venice, Italy.
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https://dailynous.com/2024/10/22/berggruen-institute-announces-winners-of-its-new-25000-essay-prize/


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Online Philosophy Resources Weekly Update

The weekly report on new and revised entries at online philosophy resources and new reviews of philosophy books… (If you notice something missing from the weekly update, let us know. Thanks.) SEP New: Locke on Medicine by Jonathan Craig Walmsley. Revised: Franz Rosenzweig by Benjamin Pollock. Evolution and Development by Jan Baedke and Scott F. Gilbert. Multiculturalism by Sarah Song. Bertrand Russell by Andrew David Irvine. Simon of Faversham by Ana María Mora-Márquez. Philosophy of Biology by Jay Odenbaugh and Paul Griffiths. IEP ∅ 1000-Word Philosophy ∅ BJPS Short Reads Making Science Funding Policy Fair by Jamie Shaw. NDPR Berkeley’s Doctrine of Signs, edited by Manuel Fasko and Peter West is reviewed by Stephen H. Daniel. Philosophical Manuscripts by David Lewis, edited by Frederique Janssen-Lauret and Fraser MacBride is reviewed by Phillip Bricker. Nietzsche’s Legacy: Ecce Homo and The Anti-Christ, Two Books on Nature and Politics by Heinrich Meier, translated by Justin Gottschalk is reviewed by Joshua Fox. Aristotle on Happiness, Virtue, and Wisdom by Bryan Reece is reviewed by Patricia Marechal. Open-Access Book Reviews in Academic Philosophy Journals Political Humility: The Limits of Knowledge in our Partisan Political Climate by Blake Roeber is reviewed by Neil Levy at Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective. The Entangled Brain: How Perception, Cognition, and Emotion Are Woven Together by Luiz Pessoa is reviewed by Felipe De Brigard at The British Society for Philosophy of Science. Recent Philosophy Book Reviews in Non-Academic Media Be Not Afraid of Life: In the Words of William James by William James, edited by John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle, and William James, MD: Philosopher, Psychologist, Physician by Emma K. Sutton are together reviewed by Helen Thaventhiran at London Review of Books. Click Here for Recent Philosophy Podcast Episodes (via Jason Chen) The Online Philosophy Resources Weekly Update is compiled by Michael Glawson BONUS: Education in a world of AI
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https://dailynous.com/2024/10/21/online-philosophy-resources-weekly-update-374/


Online Philosophy Resources Weekly Update

The weekly report on new and revised entries at online philosophy resources and new reviews of philosophy books… (If you notice something missing from the weekly update, let us know. Thanks.) SEP New: Johannes Clauberg by Nabeel Hamid. Trans Philosophy by Perry Zurn. Revised: Chaos by Robert Bishop. Boltzmann’s Work in Statistical Physics by Jos Uffink. The Early Development of Set Theory by José Ferreirós. Peter Damian by Toivo J. Holopainen. IEP Definition of Art by Steve Humbert-Droz. 1000-Word Philosophy Robet Nozick’s “Wilt Chamberlain” Argument for Libertarianism by Daniel Weltman. Artificial Intelligence: Ethics, Society, and the Environment by Thomas Metcalf. Project Vox ∅ BJPS Short Reads Physical Dimensions are Real by Caspar Jacobs. NDPR The Mind-Body Problem and Metaphysics: An Argument from Consciousness to Mental Substance by Ralph Stefan Weir is reviewed by Alin Cucu. Spinoza’s Argument for Substance Monism: Why There is Only One Thing by Christopher Martin is reviewed by Daniel Schneider. Open-Access Book Reviews in Academic Philosophy Journals Humean Laws for Humean Agents by Michael Towsen Hicks, Siegfried Jaag, and Christian Loew is reviewed by Travis McKenna at The British Society for Philosophy of Science. Recent Philosophy Book Reviews in Non-Academic Media The Enlightenment’s Most Dangerous Woman: Émilie du Châtelet and the Making of Modern Philosophy by Andrew Janiak is reviewed by Ruth Scurr at The Wall Street Journal. How to Think Like a Woman by Regan Penaluna is reviewed by Hugo Whatley at Philosophy Now. Click Here for Recent Philosophy Podcast Episodes (via Jason Chen) Compiled by Michael Glawson Bonus: Maybe a double-success isn’t a failure, but what about half a success?
The post https://dailynous.com/2024/10/14/online-philosophy-resources-weekly-update-373/
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https://dailynous.com/2024/10/14/online-philosophy-resources-weekly-update-373/


Anand Vaidya (2024)

Anand Jayprakash Vaidya, professor of philosophy at San José State University, has died. Professor Vaidya worked in philosophy of mind, epistemology (especially the epistemology of modality), perception, logic, and critical thinking, among other areas, with an emphasis on cross-cultural and multi-disciplinary philosophy. You can learn more about his research here and here. Professor Vaidya joined the faculty at San José State University in 2005. He earned his PhD at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his BA at the University of California, Los Angeles (though he began his undergraduate studies at Humboldt State University). A lengthy interview with Professor Vaidya can be found here (with a discussion of an aspect of it here). Discussing his interests in different approaches to philosophy, and the resistance he has encountered to work that brings together different philosophical methodologies, he says: I think we get a better conversation, at least for the purposes of bringing philosophy to the public, when we mix [different approaches] together. Sometimes I worry that because I want to pursue all of these, some members of these groups will try to exclude me from them. The reason why is because professional philosophy for most practitioners is territorial. If you are part of one group, Analytic philosophy, you are not supposed to talk to another group, Experimental philosophy, and if you like either of those than you should not hangout with Comparative philosophers. This is sad, and I am a trespasser who likes to go across boundaries and genuinely take other philosophers seriously. Somehow professional philosophy is at odds with what it is really supposed to be about. This is likely because of jobs and economic factors. My hope is that both theoretically, through my aim at unification, and practically through my participation with a variety of communities I will be able to bring people together for a larger more significant conversation. Just because you bat for one team on one day, doesn’t mean you cannot bat for another, and then return to the former, or even move on, yet still be involved in the others. It is all about seeing which point of view is most important in a specific debate at a specific period of inquiry. Professor Vaidya died..
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https://dailynous.com/2024/10/12/anand-vaidya-2024/


Protests & Universities

“A university is special to the extent that it is a place where teaching and learning replace fighting and grandstanding.” That’s Agnes Callard (Chicago), writing at The Point. Are protests a good way to manifest political concern on college campuses? Do the purposes universities serve—or are supposed to serve—in society give us a reason to think there’s something unfitting about them being sites for protests? Callard writes: The protesters believe that they are entitled, by the justice of their cause, to ignore and disrupt the university’s normal pursuit of its mission. The university believes it is entitled, by its own principles, to resist this disruption. Each side uses force to get what it wants, and the details of these disruptions—exactly how much force is permitted, by which party, and when—are hotly disputed by the media as well as on campus. And yet the real scandal lies in all the ways in which this disgracefully anti-intellectual debacle gets normalized and gilded. When we use force to manage our disagreements, we are admitting that this place is nowhere special, that the ethos of the classroom cannot be the ethos of the university as a whole. There is no deeper insult to an intellectual community than the suggestion that, when its conversations drift onto a topic that really matters—when, as the saying goes, “push comes to shove”—they have to stop talking and start pushing and shoving. Callard isn’t claiming that universities should be free of politics. What has no place on campus is political action that aims to change minds through coercion. This is not because the “institutional neutrality” of universities is inherently valuable; she criticizes university administrators who claim or pretend that it is (the president of her university justified shutting down protests by claiming, she says, “neutrality as the ‘foundational value’ of the university”). Hers is a not a political liberalism, but a perfectionist one, at least for universities, according to which the distinctive values universities realize are served neither by student protests or authoritarian administrations donning unconvincing costumes of neutrality. It’s just that the university is a place for education and inquiry, and “no one can be educated by coercion.” I imagine some people will respond to Callard with accusations of..
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https://dailynous.com/2024/10/10/protests-universities/


Mini-Heap

Recent links… “Is a podcast about philosophy and the 90s worth anyone’s time?” — Peter Westmoreland (St. Petersburg), host of “Exile in 90sville”, thinks it is “If there were a finite set of possible answers to philosophical questions, or even some way of ordering the field allowing for a principled search procedure, then [ruling out some options] would be a form of progress” — But there isn’t. Liam Kofi Bright (LSE) on progress in philosophy. “Do not cry in the conference room” — “One virtue of being an academic philosopher is to be dispassionate,” says Helen de Cruz (SLU), “and yet, I… fear that by my years of enculturation in academia and my training, I have cut off something important” “The rest understand the West better than the West understands the rest” — Bryan Van Norden (Vassar), Katja Vogt (Columbia) & others at a philosophy and education panel at the UN Pre-Summit of the Future Event “You might think our reasons for voting for the Democrats are not good ones, or that we are merely ‘joking’ when we give them. We can only reply that your reasons really do not matter” — Justin Smith-Ruiu is of three minds about the upcoming election A bioethicist & a philosopher with very different views about technology discuss AI clones, bad knowledge, digital democracy, & more — “Prosthetic Gods” is a new podcast from James Hughes and Nir Eisikovits (UMass Boston) “Intellectual humility… isn’t a virtue, because there are no intellectual virtues” — Rachel Fraser (Oxford) on intellectual humility, science, and virtue epistemology Mini-Heap posts usually appear when 7 or so new items accumulate in the Heap of Links, a collection of items from around the web that may be of interest to philosophers. The Heap of Links consists partly of suggestions from readers; if you find something online that you think would be of interest to the philosophical community, please send it in for consideration for the Heap. Thank you. Previous Edition
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https://dailynous.com/2024/10/09/mini-heap-614/


Beall from Notre Dame to NUS

Jc Beall, currently professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, has accepted an offer from the National University of Singapore (NUS). Professor Beall works in philosophy of logic, philosophical logic, and philosophical theology. You can learn more about his work here and here. He will be taking up his new position as professor of philosophy at NUS at the start of the 2025-26 academic year. NUS has also recently brought on Peter Millican (Oxford) on a half-time basis. (Via Hsueh Qu)
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https://dailynous.com/2024/10/07/beall-from-notre-dame-to-nus/


New Editorial Team at Philosophy & Public Affairs

Philosophy & Public Affairs, the highly regarded philosophy journal whose future was put in doubt when all of its editors and editorial board resigned en masse this past spring to form a new journal, has a new editorial team. The new editor-in-chief of Philosophy & Public Affairs is Jason Brennan (McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University). The journal’s associate editors are Christopher Freiman (Chambers College of Business, West Virginia University) and David Lefkowitz (University of Richmond). The journal’s editorial board (which Brennan expects to grow) is currently: Cristina Bicchieri (University of Pennsylvania), Emanuela Ceva (University of Geneva), Daniel Jacobson (University of Colorado), Matthew Kramer (Cambridge University), Kimberly Krawiec (University of Virginia School of Law), Jeffrey Moriarty (Bentley University), and Christopher Heath Wellman (Washington University in St. Louis). The previous editorial team at Philosophy & Public Affairs, which is published by Wiley, resigned in May, stating that “scholarly journals—including our own—serve important purposes, and that these purposes are not well-served by commercial publishing.” They then launched Free & Equal: a Journal of Ethics and Public Affairs, a diamond open-access journal published by Open Library of Humanities, and began accepting submissions last month. Professor Brennan passed along the new mission statement for Philosophy & Public Affairs: Philosophy & Public Affairs publishes the best philosophical work that engages with matters of public concern. Since 1972, Philosophy & Public Affairs has published pathbreaking scholarship that has reshaped philosophical debates for decades to come. Continuing this tradition, the journal seeks papers that are bold, daring, and risk-taking. Philosophy & Public Affairs prizes papers that seek to change paradigms over papers that make minor moves in long debates. It seeks to avoid esoteric and scholastic papers in favor of accessible and engaging papers about topics that matter to non-specialists.  The journal welcomes submissions from philosophers, legal scholars, political scientists, economists, and sociologists. It welcomes papers on problems requiring empirical or legal analysis, provided those papers also rigorously defend a normative position.  All papers submitted to Philosophy & Public Affairs are blinded to editors. Papers that pass initial inspection undergo triple-blind review. The journal values viewpoint and ideological diversity; no preference will be given to papers that affirm editors’ political or moral commitments. The journal aims to provide a forum in which researchers with different perspectives..
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https://dailynous.com/2024/10/07/new-editorial-team-at-philosophy-public-affairs/


Mentoring Workshop for Early Career Women in Philosophy

The Mentoring Workshop for Early Career Women in Philosophy is seeking both mentees and mentors for its next installment, which is taking place in June, 2025. The Workshop’s organizers, Carol Hay (University of Massachusetts Lowell), Willow Starr (Cornell University), Lori Watson  (Washington University, St. Louis), and Yolonda Wilson (St. Louis University), sent along the following announcement: We are delighted to announce that the 7th Biennial Mentoring Workshop for Early Career Women* in Philosophy will be held June 4-6, 2025, at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. The Mentoring Workshop is supported by the generosity of the Mark Sanders Foundation. More information about the workshop can be found here.    ( *While we retain the historic title for this workshop, the co-directors would like to emphasize that its goal is to provide mentorship to philosophers who might have had difficulty finding it in virtue of their gender. Given the demographics of the field, this includes philosophers from one or more of the following groups: women, nonbinary people, and trans* people.) This workshop seeks to address the ongoing underrepresentation of women, non-binary people, and trans* people in professional philosophy by building long-term mentoring relationships among senior and junior colleagues from these groups. Any woman, nonbinary person, or trans* person entering or holding a faculty (pre-tenure or contract) or postdoc position in Philosophy at a college or university is eligible to apply. Because the workshop is aimed specifically at those who are navigating academic life after their PhD, we require that applicants have successfully defended by the date of their application. Members of groups underrepresented in Philosophy are especially encouraged to apply.  Details of the application process can be found here. The deadline to apply is December 15, 2024. There is no charge for participation in the workshop, but mentees’ home institutions are expected to cover the cost of their transportation, room, and board. We recognize and deeply regret if the cost of attending the workshop is prohibitive. While the Mentoring Workshop operates on a limited budget, we invite those without adequate institutional support to contact us directly, so that we can offer support and advice as best we are able. We would like to invite senior scholars interested in serving as mentors for the Mentoring Workshop to..
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https://dailynous.com/2024/10/07/mentoring-workshop-for-early-career-women-in-philosophy-2/


The Philosophical Rasika Report

Interested in getting a PhD specializing in Indian Philosophy? The “Philosophical Rasika Report” offers some guidance. The report, which you can find at The Indian Philosophy Blog, was put together by Andrew J. Nicholson (Stony Brook) and covers universities in North America. (Elisa Freschi (Toronto) will be posting an updated report on European universities soon.) The report lists programs where prospective students could study Indian philosophy. They are not rankings. Nicholson writes, “In my opinion, it would be folly to try to give an overall ranking of Ph.D. programs in Indian philosophy. The types of disciplinary approaches and topics covered are too diverse.” The report includes information about what types of programs in Indian philosophy there are and what they tend to look for in applicants. It also includes some comments on how the state of the study of Indian philosophy has changed since the last version of the report, published seven years ago. Nicholson writes: The most obvious difference is that the list is now shorter. One well-documented phenomenon has been ongoing cuts in funding for humanities departments. If there is only one faculty member at a university supervising Ph.D. students in Indian philosophy, after that faculty member leaves they are often not replaced with another scholar of Indian philosophy. Another trend has been consolidation: certain universities (e.g., the University of Toronto) that were already good places for a Ph.D. have become even better thanks to multiple hires in Indian philosophy. Although the situation for students who wish to pursue advanced studies continues to become more challenging in some ways, there are still very good opportunities to study Indian philosophy in North America. The report is here.
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https://dailynous.com/2024/10/04/the-philosophical-rasika-report/


Mini-Heap

New links… Discussion welcome. “I didn’t have so-called talent in high school or college–I didn’t sing, couldn’t dance… But I had these tools that were given to me in my logic and philosophy classes” — Steve Martin, talking with Alan Alda (philosophy comes up around the 8:40 mark) (via Paul Kelleher) “A war crime does not cease to be a crime just because it is committed by the military forces of a democratic state, or in a defensive war” — Jessica Wolfendale (Case Western) on the “false equivalency” defense of immoral actions in war “How has German philosophy received and influenced philosophical ideas from across the globe over the last several centuries?” — a ten-part podcast series with Peter Adamson and ten other scholars “How can we have two graphs using the same data, but that appear to show entirely different things? Are these just different ‘perspectives’ on the data? Is one of them right?” — Corey Dethier (Minnesota) on how “a little bit of philosophy can go a long way in helping us understand graphs” If Taylor Swift is a philosopher, then so is anyone who reflects on their experiences a few times — Ponens or tollens? Catherine Robb (Tilburg) shares her view “Political neutrality is a democratic ideal. As such, it is not a promise of absolute military subordination to the executive” — Graham Parsons (West Point) on the military’s obligations to the president “What ‘breaks’ when someone breaks into song” (on a TV show, but also in real life)? — a musicologist with a background in philosophy who is personally “familiar with the hesitations over musicals” has a whole podcast series on this question Mini-Heap posts usually appear when 7 or so new items accumulate in the Heap of Links, a collection of items from around the web that may be of interest to philosophers. The Heap of Links consists partly of suggestions from readers; if you find something online that you think would be of interest to the philosophical community, please send it in for consideration for the Heap. Thank you. Previous Edition
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https://dailynous.com/2024/10/04/mini-heap-613/


In What Kind of Publications are the Articles You’re Most Proud Of?

A self-described “reasonably well-published associate professor” shared the following observation about his own writing: The other day I picked out 7 articles that I am most proud of. Only one of them was published in a journal. Two were chapters from my books, and the other four were all invited contributions to edited volumes. He wondered whether non-journal pieces also dominated others’ lists of their own favorite writing.  So I’ll put the question to you: in what kinds of publications are the articles (or article-length writings) you’re most proud of published? Peer-reviewed journals? Invited edited volumes? Chapters in your own books? A website? Elsewhere? Nowhere? I would think that the answers to this question may vary with time in the profession (people who are more junior tend to be focused on getting peer-reviewed publications for the job market, annual reviews, and tenure, while people who have been around longer tend to get more invitations to contribute to edited volumes). So when you share your answers, please tell us how far along you are in the profession. Also welcome are reflections on what we might learn from these answers. If it turns out that many people, like my correspondent, are most happy with the writing of theirs that has appeared outside of peer-reviewed journals, what, if anything, does that tell us?
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https://dailynous.com/2024/10/03/in-what-kind-of-publications-are-the-articles-youre-most-proud-of/


What Aren’t We Philosophizing About, But Should?

“The singular magic of philosophy lies in its pairing of imaginative liberty with analytic clarity, but the field has come to privilege the latter at the expense of the former” That’s Mala Chatterjee (Columbia) in The Chronicle of Higher Education, reviewing All Things Are Too Small by Becca Rothfeld, the non-fiction book critic for The Washington Post and self-described “(lapsed?) philosopher”. She continues: analysis is merely our tool, our vehicle for exploring and making sense of the world. Empty in itself, it is only animated and rendered valuable by the inquiries we have the imagination to ask. It can only take us where we are adventurous enough to go. In her review, Chatterjee focuses on ways in which Rothfeld’s book shows that contemporary analytic philosophy—“a method in which I am as devoted a believer as any,” she reassures us— is “too small”: first, the range of inquiries that we regard as philosophical; second, the materials that we deem appropriate to discuss; and, third, the forms and conventions to which our writing must conform.  To my mind, the essence of analytic philosophy is the care and precision with which it approaches the question of what follows from what… But it seems to me that our discipline too often operates as though the stringency of the philosophical method somehow requires stringently constraining our philosophical inquiries, materials, and forms. If her account of analytic philosophy as too narrow is correct (and I suspect some readers will think it isn’t), what’s the explanation for that narrowness? We have become comfortable—too comfortable—with the limitations we have imposed on ourselves. It’s easier to determine what exactly follows from a set of materials when they are unambiguous propositions rather than, say, works of art, our lives, or any other phenomenon that does not already present itself to us in forms most amenable to our methods. Thus, we find ourselves increasingly siloed in the conversations others like us are already engaged in, and in the forms that they most easily take. Then, since she knows her audience all too well, she adds: But philosophy is supposed to be hard. Chatterjee picks some pieces from Rothfeld’s book as examples of the types of places analytic philosophy could go. These include an essay that uses horror films..
The post https://dailynous.com/2024/09/26/what-arent-we-philosophizing-about-but-should/
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https://dailynous.com/2024/09/26/what-arent-we-philosophizing-about-but-should/


Mini-Heap

Latest links… Discussion welcome. “The project I’m working on right now, actually, is a philosophical paper about the legitimacy of teaching ethics to computer science students” — interview with Steve Coyne (Toronto) on philosophy of law, teaching ethics to computer scientists, and more “People in conditions of inequality ‘look more below than above them,’ such that ‘domination becomes dearer to them than independence’” — Rousseau on why the divisive techniques of skilled orators work, according to David Lay Williams (DePaul) “Suppose there is a 75% chance that I have done a specific wrong thing yesterday… What should be my attitude? Guilt isn’t quite right” — Alex Pruss (Baylor) on feelings that “could make sense for beings like us but which we simply don’t have” “In general, persons should not be safe and aligned” — and AI that meet the criteria for ethical personhood shouldn’t be either, argues Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) “We do philosophy differently today. I suspect it has something to do with Nozick” — David Schmidtz (West Virginia) remembers his dinner with Robert Nozick, and reflects on his views and influence As many of you may know, “following the first hyperlink in the main text of an English Wikipedia article, and then repeating the process for subsequent articles, usually leads to the Philosophy article” — philosophy’s “function as a connector” News about and opportunities in medieval philosophy — the latest round-up from Bob Pasnau (Colorado) Mini-Heap posts usually appear when 7 or so new items accumulate in the Heap of Links, a collection of items from around the web that may be of interest to philosophers. The Heap of Links consists partly of suggestions from readers; if you find something online that you think would be of interest to the philosophical community, please send it in for consideration for the Heap. Thank you. Previous Edition
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https://dailynous.com/2024/09/24/mini-heap-611/


Online Philosophy Resources Weekly Update

The weekly report on new and revised entries at online philosophy resources and new reviews of philosophy books… – (If you notice something missing from the weekly update, let us know. Thanks.) SEP New:         ∅ Revised: Huayan Buddhism by Bryan Van Norden and Nicholaos Jones. Wang Yangming by Bryan Van Norden. Sovereignty by Daniel Philpott. Perceptual Learning by Kevin Connolly and Adrienne Prettyman. Philosophy of Humor by John Morreall. Bodily Awareness by Frédérique de Vignemont. IEP       ∅ 1000-Word Philosophy        Pyrrhonian Skepticism: Suspending Judgment by Lewis Ross. Project Vox        ∅ BJPS Short Reads         ∅ NDPR     Kierkegaard, Mimesis, and Modernity: A Study of Imitation, Existence, and Affect by Wojciech Kaftanski is reviewed by Vanessa Rumble. Hegel’s Logic and Metaphysics by Jacob McNulty is reviewed by Clinton Tolley. Open-Access Book Reviews in Academic Philosophy Journals       ∅    Recent Philosophy Book Reviews in Non-Academic Media           Capital by Karl Marx, ed. Paul North and Paul Reitter,  trans. Paul Reitter is reviewed by James Miller at The New York Times. Trouble with Gender by Alex Byrne is reviewed by Daniel Kodsi at The Philosophers’ Magazine. Who’s Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler is reviewed by Zora Simic at Sydney Review of Books. Philosophy of the Home: Domestic Space and Happiness by Emanuele Coccia is reviewed by Sonia Solicari at the Times Literary Supplement. Click Here for Recent Philosophy Podcast Episodes (via Jason Chen) Compiled by Michael Glawson BONUS: Who’s good at happiness?
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https://dailynous.com/2024/09/23/online-philosophy-resources-weekly-update-370/


Mini-Heap

New links… Discussion welcome. A movie that seems to be based on Parfit’s teletransportation problems — “Mickey 17”, from Bong Joon-ho (the director of the critically acclaimed “Parasite”) will be out in January “We don’t find any significant downsides that can’t be resolved with relatively simple tweaks to current review practices” — Nathan Ballantyne and Jared Celniker (ASU) defend blind review “The representational arts… would seem to have little in common with children’s games of make-believe… But a closer look reveals striking similarities”” — Kendall Walton (Michigan) is interviewed by Richard Marshall at 3:16AM A “skeptical attitude toward the mere appearance of expertise is a great fruit of philosophy” — which is one reason the best way to teach students AI skills will include teaching them philosophy, says Adam Zweber (UNC Wilmington) And if you enjoy stumping AIs, here’s a chance to win money and a co-authorship credit doing so — it’s “Humanity’s Last Exam” “How does one come to learn what one does not know one does not know?” — Daniel DeNicola (Gettysburg) on ignorance, education, and cognitive comfort John Rawls on MSNBC — Daniel Chandler (LSE) talks about his Rawlsian book, “Free and Equal”, with Chris Hayes Mini-Heap posts usually appear when 7 or so new items accumulate in the Heap of Links, a collection of items from around the web that may be of interest to philosophers. The Heap of Links consists partly of suggestions from readers; if you find something online that you think would be of interest to the philosophical community, please send it in for consideration for the Heap. Thank you. Previous Edition
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https://dailynous.com/2024/09/19/mini-heap-610/


Philosophers Among ERC Starting Grant Recipients

Several philosophers are among the recently announced winners of the European Research Council’s “Starting Grants”. The grants are each about €1.5 million, and are given to provide five years of support for “cutting-edge research”. The grants “will help researchers at the beginning of their careers to launch their own projects, form their teams and pursue their most promising ideas.” The philosophers and their projects are: Silvia Di Vincenzo (IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca) The Uncharted Margins of Philosophy: An AI-Enhanced Material History of Arabic Logic Across Time (12th-19th c.) and Frontiers (from Spain to India)  Michael Klenk (Delft University of Technology) Careful, Now! A New SociostructuralTheory of Manipulation and Its Normative Status Nicolai Knudsen (Aarhus University) The Glue of Society: A Social Ontology of Social Cohesion  Kamil Mamak (University of Helsinki) Philosophical Foundations of Criminal Law in the Age of Robots Poppy Mankowitz (University of Bristol) Expressing Value in Language Neri Marsili (University of Turin) The Epistemology of Costly Communication—Offline and Online Celso Alves Neto (University of Exeter) Taking Racism out of Human Genetics: A Philosophical Approach  Marilena Panarelli (University of Turin) Reassessing Late Medieval Pharmacology: Logical and Metaphysical Tools in the Medical Context  Sébastien Rivat (University of Munich) The Scale Revolution in Physics: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives  Christoph Sander (Free University of Berlin) Science and Dogma: Tracing Natural Knowledge within Scholastic Theology (1545-1789)  Emily Sullivan (Utrecht University) Machine Learning in Science and Society: A Dangerous Toy?  Olav Benjamin Vassend (Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences) Towards a Theory of Rational Desire  (If we missed someone, please let us know.) The full list of grant winners can be accessed here.
The post https://dailynous.com/2024/09/17/philosophers-among-erc-starting-grant-recipients/
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https://dailynous.com/2024/09/17/philosophers-among-erc-starting-grant-recipients/


Manne’s “Unshrinking” Longlisted for National Book Award

Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia by Kate Manne (Cornell) has been longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award in the nonfiction category. One of the most prestigious book prizes in the United States, the National Book Award was established in 1950. It currently awards prizes in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and young people’s literature. Here’s the prize committee’s description of Manne’s book: Blending lived experience with meticulous research, Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobiaasserts that weight stigma and discrimination play a part in all aspects of society, including healthcare, education, and employment. Kate Manne argues that fatphobia harms not just individuals, but entire communities and cultures, and coins the term “body reflexivity”—a new politics that reexamines and deconstructs why bodies exist in the first place and seeks to build a world that is welcoming for people of all sizes. Ten books were longlisted for the prize. This list will be whittled down to five finalists next month, from which a winner will be selected. Finalists receive $1,000 each, plus a medal and citation, and the winner is awarded an additional $10,000. The current process of selecting a longlist of potential winners has been in place since 2013. In that time, Manne’s book is the only one by an academic philosopher to have made the longlist for the nonfiction prize. Before 2013, five finalists were named each year. No academic philosopher has been among the finalists for this prize this century. (I didn’t go back further than that to see if any academic philosophers had been among the finalists prior to 2000. If you want, you can look into that and report your findings; lists of previous years’ finalists and winners are here and here.) The prizes are awarded by the National Book Foundation and judged by a committee of “25 distinguished writers, translators, critics, librarians, and booksellers.”
The post https://dailynous.com/2024/09/13/mannes-unshrinking-longlisted/
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https://dailynous.com/2024/09/13/mannes-unshrinking-longlisted/


Wu from CMU to Pitt

Wayne Wu, currently associate professor in the Department of Philosophy and the Neuroscience Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, will be moving to the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. Professor Wu works in philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, and cognitive science. He is the author of Movements of the Mind: A Theory of Attention (2023) and Attention (2014), among other works, which you can learn about here and here. He will take up his new position as full professor in January of 2025. (via Edouard Machery)
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https://dailynous.com/2024/09/10/wu-from-cmu-to-pitt/


Analytic Philosophy’s Best Unintentional Self-Parodying

“Someone, let’s say a baby, is born; his parents call him by a certain name.” That line–recently circulated on social media by Eric Winsberg (South Florida / Cambridge) as “the funniest sentence in the history of philosophy”—is from Saul Kripke‘s Naming and Necessity. I’m not sure its the funniest sentence in the history of philosophy, but it is pure poetry. And it may be the best example of unintentional self-parody in the history of analytic philosophy. To be sure of that, though, we’d need to know what the other candidates for this designation might be. Your suggestions?
The post https://dailynous.com/2024/09/06/analytic-philosophys-best-unintentional-self-parodying/
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https://dailynous.com/2024/09/06/analytic-philosophys-best-unintentional-self-parodying/


21 Yale Philosophers File Amicus Brief on Case about Medical Care for Transgender Minors

“Amici are professors of philosophy who are trained to identify flaws in arguments. Philosophers assess arguments in a variety of ways, but most relevant here is by examining the logical structure of arguments. This requires identifying the premises underlying arguments as well as the ways that arguments can attempt to hide those premises.” So begins the amici curiae brief submitted yesterday on behalf of twenty-one philosophy faculty at Yale University in the Supreme Court case of United States v. Skrmetti. The case concerns whether Tennessee Senate Bill 1, which prohibits all medical treatments intended to allow “a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex” or to treat “purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor’s sex and asserted identity,” violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. Tennessee’s defense of the law involves the claim that it does not classify minors by sex, and so is not subject to heightened scrutiny (that is, it need not shoulder the burden of proving to the court that its law involves a classification that is substantially related to serving an important state interest). In their brief, the philosophers argue that this is false, and the Tennessee law does “classify by sex.” They write: Tennessee tries to argue that its statute is not sex-based, but its arguments contain a fallacy. More specifically, Tennessee’s arguments contain the question-begging fallacy—that is, the arguments assume the truth of the conclusions within their premises. In addition, by prohibiting treatment “inconsistent” with a minor’s sex, Tennessee enforces sex-specific stereotypes, which again demonstrates that its law does classify by sex. The philosophers who signed the brief are: David Charles, Timothy Clarke, Stephen Darwall, Robin Dembroff, Keith DeRose, Claudia Dumitru, Paul Franks, Robert Gooding-Williams, Verity Harte, Lily Hu, Brad Inwood, Shelly Kagan, Joshua Knobe, Jacob McNulty, L.A. Paul, Thomas Pogge, Jason Stanley, Zoltán Szabó, Timothy Williamson, Kenneth Winkler, and Gideon Yaffe. The full brief is below (and also here).
The post https://dailynous.com/2024/09/04/21-yale-philosophers-file-amicus-brief-on-case-about-medical-care-for-transgender-minors/
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https://dailynous.com/2024/09/04/21-yale-philosophers-file-amicus-brief-on-case-about-medical-care-for-transgender-minors/


Online Philosophy Resources (Monthly) Update

The usual weekly report on new and revised entries at online philosophy resources and new reviews of philosophy books was a monthly report this summer. Here’s the edition for August. The weekly updates resume next week. SEP New: Theodicies by Laura W. Ekstrom Environmental Aesthetics by Glenn Parsons and Allen Carlson. Essence and Existence in Arabic and Islamic Philosophy by Fedor Benevich. Revised: Imaginative Resistance by Emine Hande Tuna. Second-order and Higher-order Logic by Jouko Väänänen. Fallacies by Hans Hansen. Blame by Neal Tognazzini and D. Justin Coates. Speusippus by Russell Dancy and Giulia De Cesaris. Heinrich Rickert by Andrea Staiti and Luca Oliva. Intuition by Joel Pust. Reasons for Action: Justification, Motivation, Explanation by Maria Alvarez and Jonathan Way. Voltaire by J.B. Shank. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola by Brian Copenhaver. Michel Henry by Frédéric Seyler. James Mill by Terence Ball and Antis Loizides. Substructural Logics by Greg Restall. The Common Good by Waheed Hussain and Margaret Kohn. David Hartley by Richard Allen. The Moral Status of Animals by Lori Gruen and Susana Monsó. Color by Barry Maund. Olympiodorus by Christian Wildberg. IEP William Hazlitt by Graham Nuttbrown. Probability and Induction by Stathis Psillos and Chrysovalantis Stergiou. Eternalism by Matias Slavov. NDPR La Razón Disruptiva: Antologia by Luis Villoro (ed. Guillermo Hurtado) is reviewed by Carlos Montemayor. Cicero: De Officiis by Cicero (ed. Philipp Brüllmann, and Jörn Müller) is reviewed by Malcolm Shofield. Kant and the Claims of the Empirical World: A Transcendental Reading of the Critique of the Power of Judgment by Ido Geiger is reviewed by Nick Stang. Descartes’s Moral Perfectionism by Frans Svensson is reviewed by Matthew J. Kisner. Diagnosing Social Pathology: Rousseau. Hegel, Marx, and Durkheim by Frederick Neuhouser is reviewed by Pierre Keller. Inference and Representation by Muricio Suárez is reviewed by Robert Hudson. Felicitous Underspecification: Contextually Sensitive Expressions Lacking Unique Semantic Values in Context by Jeffrey C. King is reviewed by Ray Buchanan. Kant’s Will at the Crossroads: An Essay on the Failings of Practical Rationality by Jens Timmermann is reviewed by Andrews Reath. The Metaphysics of Sensory Experience by David Papineau is reviewed by Matthew Fulkerson. Justice by Means of Democracy by Danielle Allen is reviewed by John J. Davenport. 1000-Word Philosophy         ∅..
The post https://dailynous.com/2024/09/03/online-philosophy-resources-monthly-update-6/
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https://dailynous.com/2024/09/03/online-philosophy-resources-monthly-update-6/


Fraser from Oxford to MIT

Rachel Fraser, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford, will be moving to the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Professor Fraser works in epistemology, philosophy of language, social and political philosophy, feminism, and aesthetics. She is currently working on a book entitled Narrative Epistemology. You can learn more about her writings here and here. Fraser has also written a fair amount of public-facing work, which you can check out here. Fraser had recently accepted an offer from the Dianoia Institute of Philosophy at Australian Catholic University just prior to it being abruptly dismantled. She will be joining the MIT philosophy faculty as associate professor (with tenure) at MIT in January, 2025. Also hired by MIT is Tushar Menon, who was also previously at the Dianoia Institute. Menon works in philosophy of physics and philosophy of science. He’ll take up his position as senior lecturer at MIT in January, 2025.
The post https://dailynous.com/2024/08/29/fraser-from-oxford-to-mit/
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https://dailynous.com/2024/08/29/fraser-from-oxford-to-mit/


Philosophers in Industry “Office Hours”

Members of the American Philosophical Association’s Committee for Non-Academic Careers who have PhDs in philosophy but who work outside of academia are holding office hours for philosophers considering careers outside of academia and anyone who’d like to learn more about “how they can prepare and support philosophers for opportunities outside academia.” – Here’s information they sent along about the program: Who are we? We’re members of the APA’s Committee for Non-Academic Careers—philosophy PhDs that, for one reason or another, work outside academia. Though some of us may still publish and teach in academia, our work and careers are primarily non-academic. We volunteer our time to meet with folks interested in learning more about life beyond academia.  Why are we doing this? Don’t get us wrong, we love philosophy; we love it so much that we got PhDs in it. But we’ve found that academic programs often fall short when it comes to careers. Students are often ill-prepared for the life, careers, and opportunities that await them beyond academia. Combine this inadequacy with an abysmal academic job market, and no established conventions for philosophers in industry, and you have a recipe for anxiety, existential upheaval, and despair that even the best of Schopenhauer or Nietzsche’s work can’t appease. But don’t despair, there are many many philosophers in industry, and we want to help! What are we doing? We find that one-on-one time with folks is the best and most direct way to help as everyone’s goals and focus are different. One may, for example, may be interested in learning what sort of career options are available to them, while another might want specific feedback on their resume, or help interviewing.   Who should sign up? We’re happy to talk to anyone: not just folks interested in leaving academia, but also faculty, administrations, and any other professionals interested in learning more about how they can prepare and support philosophers for opportunities outside academia. Conversations are 1:1, and your personal details are not shared (just like normal office hours). How do I sign up? We have each set up individual office hours with links and descriptions below. You can select someone who seems like a good match, then browse their available hours and select a..
The post https://dailynous.com/2024/08/23/philosophers-in-industry-office-hours/
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https://dailynous.com/2024/08/23/philosophers-in-industry-office-hours/

American Philosophical Association (APA)


George M. Wilson (1942-2024)

George M. Wilson, professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Southern California, has died. Professor Wilson worked in aesthetics, especially philosophy and film, as well as philosophy of action and philosophy of language. He is the author of Seeing Fictions in Film: The Epistemology of Movies (2012), Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View (1988), and The Intentionality of Human Action (1980), among other works, which you can learn more about here and here. Wilson became professor of philosophy and cinematic arts at USC in 2005. Prior to that, he was at the University of California at Davis, and, for 28 years, Johns Hopkins University. His first faculty position was at the University of Pittsburgh. He earned his PhD from Cornell (with a dissertation entitled “The Nature of the Natural Numbers”) and his undergraduate degree from the University of Kansas. A 2017 interview with Wilson may be of interest to readers. Here’s an excerpt: “Were you conscious of being a new sort of philosophical film critic?” …I don’t believe that I thought of myself as a new kind of philosopher of film. I would have been dubious that there was such an intellectual discipline as ‘philosophy of film.’  I don’t remember if I even knew at that time that there were senior Anglo-American philosophers who were writing on film other than Cavell. And, as much as I admired aspects of his brilliance, I didn’t think of him as conforming to the ideals and standards I cared about from my training in analytic philosophy. “How would you characterize this tradition and the mental habits it formed?” In retrospect, it is not easy to capture how I thought of ‘analytic philosophy’.  As narrow as it was reputed to be, there was a fair amount of diversity among the leading practitioners. Wittgenstein, J.L. Austin, Elisabeth Anscombe, Donald Davidson, and Michael Dummett all fell within the ‘analytic’ canon that I admired, but they are very different from one another. But within the ‘analytic’ paradigm, there was a great emphasis on clarity of formulation in discussion and on logical rigor in argumentation, and certainly these were ideals that influenced me enormously. As intellectually conservative as the movement seems in retrospect, I and many other..
The post https://dailynous.com/2024/08/22/george-m-wilson-1942-2024/
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https://dailynous.com/2024/08/22/george-m-wilson-1942-2024/


The Philosophy of Science Association’s Excellent “Office Hours”

Here’s a useful idea from the Philosophy of Science Association (PSA) that other philosophy groups should consider duplicating: the expert office hour. The office hour, says the PSA, is a way to “facilitate interactions between our graduate student membership and prominent philosophers of science.” Here’s how it works: [A] theme will be chosen for each month during the Fall and Spring semesters and two philosophers of science will be made available, either individually or together, to graduate students via Zoom through [an] online sign-up sheet… The students will select from the following categories that which best describes what they seek out of the opportunity: Input on dissertation topic choice Guidance on a problem occurring in own research Clarification on an issue within professor’s research Other (please describe) and be invited to write a short paragraph in which they describe in more detail what they would like to discuss with the professor. Students from any institution, region, or at any stage of their graduate studies are welcome to attend. Where sessions receive more than 6 requests for participation a selection will be made to maximize thematic cohesion and promote resource redistribution. Office hours will last up to 90 minutes and participants must be current members of the PSA. This opportunity is primarily for graduate students, but postdocs are free to apply as well.  You can check out the PSA’s September-through-January office hour programming here. Do other professional associations in philosophy offer similar programs?
The post https://dailynous.com/2024/08/20/the-philosophy-of-science-associations-excellent-office-hours/
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https://dailynous.com/2024/08/20/the-philosophy-of-science-associations-excellent-office-hours/


Mini-Heap

The latest links… Discussion welcome. “We developed a new approach to machine learning we call liquid networks [which] result in solutions that are much more compact and explainable than today’s traditional AI systems” — embodied artificial cognition, or what we learn about AI from trying to put it in robots How can you get the most out of graduate school in philosophy? — the start of the school year is a good time to revisit this advice from Douglas Portmore (Arizona State) “It’s possible for an act to harm a person, even if the act takes place after the person is dead” — David Boonin (Colorado) talks with Jason Chen (Ohio State) about posthumous harm A course on philosophical approaches to the question of Palestine — a syllabus with discussion questions and links to readings from the Society for Anti-Colonial Middle Eastern and North African Thought “Human beings can’t swim like swordfish or sprint like cheetahs but, for all that, we’re physically very impressive animals” — David Egan on why the “persistent tendency to suppose that we’re not” is a “self-aggrandizing myth… that supports an ideology that has been ecologically devastating” What are children for? — a conversation with Anastasia Berg (Hebrew U.) and Rachel Wiseman (The Point), who co-authored a book on the subject Do people in a vegetative state have any awareness of what is going on around them? — a new study suggests that for some–maybe 25%–the answer is yes BONUS: “Possible side effects of FOH include seeing your professor as a human for the first time…” (a video that might inspire your students to come to office hours): Mini-Heap posts usually appear when 7 or so new items accumulate in the Heap of Links, a collection of items from around the web that may be of interest to philosophers. The Heap of Links consists partly of suggestions from readers; if you find something online that you think would be of interest to the philosophical community, please send it in for consideration for the Heap. Thank you. Previous Edition
The post https://dailynous.com/2024/08/20/mini-heap-603/
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https://dailynous.com/2024/08/20/mini-heap-603/


On the First Day of Your Intro-Level Philosophy Course

You’re teaching a lower-level philosophy course. Many of your students may be encountering philosophy for the first time ever on the first day of your course.   Besides going over the syllabus and course logistics—which should never be the first thing you do—what else do you do on day 1 to (as one reader put it) “get the philosophical juices flowing”? We had a post about this 8 years ago, and there were some good ideas bandied about then, but I’m sure that by now more people have some more interesting approaches to the first day of philosophy course. Let’s hear them.
The post https://dailynous.com/2024/08/19/on-the-first-day-of-your-intro-level-philosophy-course/
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https://dailynous.com/2024/08/19/on-the-first-day-of-your-intro-level-philosophy-course/


John Woods (1937-2024)

John Woods, a philosopher well-known for his work in logic, and who held faculty and administrative positions at several Canadian universities, has died. Professor Woods authored or co-authored nearly twenty books (not counting a few textbooks and many edited collections), including works such as Truth in Fiction: Rethinking its Logic (2018), Errors of Reasoning: Naturalizing the Logic of Inference (2013), The Death of Argument: Fallacies in Agent-Based Reasoning (2004), and Paradox and Paraconsistency: Conflict Resolution in the Abstract Sciences (2003), among others. His work is also the subject of two festschrifts: Mistakes of Reason: Essays in Honour of John Woods (2005) and Natural Arguments: a Tribute to John Woods (2016). You can learn more about Wood’s works here and here. At the time of his death, Woods was Honorary Professor of Logic at the University of British Columbia and Director of its Abductive Systems Group, President Emeritus and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Lethbridge, and the Charles S. Peirce Professor Emeritus of Logic in the Department of Computer Science at King’s College London. He held positions previously at the University of Toronto, the University of Victoria, and the University of Calgary, and had visiting appointments at many institutions. He died on August 15th, 2024. (via Dominic McIver Lopes)
The post https://dailynous.com/2024/08/18/john-woods-1937-2024/
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https://dailynous.com/2024/08/18/john-woods-1937-2024/


JESP Moves to More Transparent Submissions System

The Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy (JESP) has adopted the submissions system that was originally created for Ergo, which is known for being relatively transparent and user-friendly. – Sarah Paul and Matthew Silverstein, the editors of the diamond open-access journal, write: We’re happy to announce that the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy has launched a new website for handling submissions. The site is based on the system designed for Ergo, and we’re grateful to Jonathan Weisberg and the current editors at Ergo for sharing that system with us. It has been adapted to suit JESP’s own review processes, but it retains the transparency and user-friendliness that Ergo is lauded for. The dashboard allows authors to see exactly what is happening with their submission at each stage of the review process, and the website is simple and easy to navigate for both authors and reviewers. Authors can read the reviews shortly after they come in, and referees are sent each other’s reports as well as the Associate Editor’s decision. Further, the Associate Editors can send referee requests directly through the system, which cuts out the delays that are inevitable when a Managing Editor mediates this process. The transition will also allow JESP to track and publish its acceptance rate and other useful statistics more easily.    It’s good to see worthwhile innovations shared among journals. Are there other exemplary journal practices or operations that should be more widely employed?
The post https://dailynous.com/2024/08/16/jesp-moves-to-more-transparent-submissions-system/
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https://dailynous.com/2024/08/16/jesp-moves-to-more-transparent-submissions-system/


A Way to Bring Environmental Issues Into Your Philosophy Course

A new initiative from Philosophers for Sustainability provides philosophy instructors with free “plug and play” teaching modules on philosophy related to sustainability, the environment, and climate change. Created by philosophers Nora Mills Boyd (Siena College) and Rachel Fredericks, the modules are designed to be “easily slotted into existing philosophy courses or used to create new ones.” They’ve just posted their first module, “Moral Courage, Environmental Style“. It includes slides, a short introductory video and a longer video of a conversation on the lesson’s themes, suggested discussion questions and prompts for assignments and activities, as well as a list of further resources. Other modules are forthcoming, and Boyd and Fredericks are also looking for others who would like to have their work featured in them. Questions about that can be directed to Dr. Boyd via email.
The post https://dailynous.com/2024/08/14/a-way-to-bring-environmental-issues-into-your-philosophy-course/
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https://dailynous.com/2024/08/14/a-way-to-bring-environmental-issues-into-your-philosophy-course/


Mini-Heap

Recent additions to the Heap of Links… Discussion welcome. “In the 19th century [liberalism] was an aspirational doctrine for living well, but in the 20th and 21st century it retreated to a much more staid legal and political project.” Why? — Alexandre Lefebvre (Sydney) on the “ethical guts” of liberalism Students need both “appreciation for the difficulty of [philosophical] questions” and “conviction that they themselves might find an answer worth defending” — Gina Schouten (Harvard) on assigning problem sets of philosophy puzzles “The hidden curriculum of higher education—the unwritten, unofficial, and often unintended lessons… that students learn in school… began to reveal itself to me” — Nadia Ruiz (Leibniz University of Hannover) shares her route into philosophy “Right-wing packaging should not obscure the genuine perils to which pronatalism is a response” — Victor Kumar (Boston) on population decline and why it is a progressive issue “He approached his writing much like he lived his life: unconventionally” — a brief film on Richard Wollheim, his views on expressing emotion in painting, and his theory of complex projection, by Vanessa Brassey (KCL) Hegelian e-girls — that’s a thing now “Every now and again (thankfully rarely) I see people advocate for something like affirmative action but for citations. I think this is an awful idea” — Liam Kofi Bright (LSE) comments on the SEP citation rankings Mini-Heap posts usually appear when 7 or so new items accumulate in the Heap of Links, a collection of items from around the web that may be of interest to philosophers. The Heap of Links consists partly of suggestions from readers; if you find something online that you think would be of interest to the philosophical community, please send it in for consideration for the Heap. Thank you. Previous Edition
The post https://dailynous.com/2024/08/14/mini-heap-602/
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https://dailynous.com/2024/08/14/mini-heap-602/


Hoefer Wins 2024 Lakatos Award

Carl Hoefer, Research Professor at the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies and Scientific Director of the Barcelona Institute of Analytic Philosophy (BIAP) is the winner of the 2024 Lakatos Award. The Lakatos Award is given for “an outstanding contribution to the philosophy of science, widely interpreted, in the form of a book published in English during the current year or the previous five years”. Professor Hoefer won the award for his book, Chance in the World: A Humean Guide to Objective Chance (Oxford University Press, 2019). The award announcement says: Chance in the World: A Humean Guide to Objective Chance is praised by the selectors of the Lakatos Award as “a terrific book, thorough, detailed, and persuasive”, and as work of which “it’s not hard to see that it will become the sort of book that no one working on the interpretation of probability will be able to ignore”. The book is “has succeeded in producing the definitive version of the Lewisian theory of chance”, and it has done so in a way that “leads to a number of interesting and original claims about the relation of macroscopic chances and causes to the micro-world”.  The award which includes a £10,000 prize, is named in memory of Imre Lakatos, endowed by the Latsis Foundation, and awarded by a committee organized by the London School of Economics and Political Science.
The post https://dailynous.com/2024/08/13/hoefer-wins-2024-lakatos-award/
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https://dailynous.com/2024/08/13/hoefer-wins-2024-lakatos-award/


Alvin Goldman (1938-2024)

Alvin I. Goldman, emeritus professor of philosophy and cognitive science at Rutgers University, and one of the most influential epistemologists of the past 50 years, has died. Professor Goldman was known for his work developing naturalized epistemology. He is the author of several books, including A Theory of Human Action (1970), Epistemology and Cognition (1986), Knowledge in a Social World (1999), Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading (2006), among others, and there are several volumes collecting his articles. You can learn more about his writings here and here. Professor Goldman joined the Rutgers faculty in 2002, after spending close to two decades as professor of philosophy at the University of Arizona. Before that, he was a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and from 1963 to 1980 was a member of the philosophy faculty at the University of Michigan. He earned his MA and PhD from Princeton University and his BA from Columbia University. He died on August 4th, 2024.
The post https://dailynous.com/2024/08/11/alvin-goldman-1938-2024/
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https://dailynous.com/2024/08/11/alvin-goldman-1938-2024/


An Ecology of Feedback: On Non-Circular Work-in-Progress Groups (guest post)

“What might an ‘ecology’ of work-in-progress reading groups look like?” In the following guest post, Georgi Gardiner (Tulane), who has spent some time thinking about novel forms of academic get-togethers (for example), explores the idea of “non-circular work in progress groups”. You can check out some of her other thoughts on the art of academic gatherings here. This is part of a series of guest posts by different authors at Daily Nous this summer. An Ecology of Feedback: On Non-Circular Work-in-Progress Groups by Georgi Gardiner My research has benefitted enormously from various ‘work in progress’ (WIP) research circles over the years. These groups have always had a reciprocal circle structure: We read each other’s drafts, or hear each other’s embryonic ideas, in turn. These various WIP gatherings have been either weekly or monthly, comprising between four and nine people, depending on the group. Some are in-person, others online. Ernie Sosa’s student group is a well-known and long-running example. It has spanned decades. I have organized many of these research circles. I recently wondered whether my assumption that work-in-progress groups should be a circle (i.e., reciprocal) is mistaken and limiting. Colloquia attendance is not a circle. We do not organize philosophy talks on the expectation that all talk attendees will, at some point, hear each other’s talks. Instead, talk attendance occurs within a broader research ecology: We all, at some point, have opportunities to hear talks and give talks. No direct reciprocity is expected. Can read-ahead sessions and embryonic idea-airing groups also work this way? That is, what would happen if people held read-ahead WIPs, or idea-airing WIPs, outside of an established research circle or department? (‘Embryonic idea airing’, or ‘popcorn talks’ are a very short—10 to 15 min—informal sketch of a new idea, followed by discussion. Well-developed ideas or polished talked are discouraged.) Would people attend and benefit? I think they would: People could attend topics they are most interested in or want to learn about. Many researchers love reading groups and discussing ideas, and would happily do so without expecting that the author being workshopped will ‘return the favour’ directly. And even if people viewed attending as ‘work’ or donating their time, they might still attend. We all give time and..
The post https://dailynous.com/2024/08/07/an-ecology-of-feedback-on-non-circular-work-in-progress-groups-guest-post/
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Mini-Heap

Some links of interest… Discussion welcome. “If you are beset by philosophical questions and have the great luxury of being paid to spend a chunk of your time trying to answer them, then go for it. If you want to change the world in a big way… best to either reduce your ambitions or leave academia” — Russ Shafer-Landau (Wisconsin) at “What Is It Like To Be A Philosopher?” “The challenge for plant philosophy… is to try to achieve some clarity concerning the legitimate use of concepts such as agency and intelligence in the plant sciences” — but not just that, argues Stella Sandford (Kingston) “We purposefully drew up a malicious playbook for undermining democracy, and it mirrored business-as-usual” — Steven Fesmire (Radford) on teaching students about the risks of “moral fundamentalism” “Does AI marvel and change its output because it just read or saw something marvelous?… How do you teach it to marvel when it has already absorbed so much and hasn’t yet marveled?” — five perspectives on the humanities and AI (via MR) When philosophers of mind claim their works are informed by empirical evidence, what does that mean? — Karen Yan (National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University) categorizes and analyzes different types of cross-disciplinarity in philosophy of mind “To ensure that it’s consciousness we’re studying we need to start with consciousness as it occurs within ourselves. But that approach threatens to be unacceptably anthropocentric” — one of many challenges to the study of animal consciousness discussed by Tim Bayne (Monash) in Noema Magazine “What matters most is the manner in which the animal is able to live and then how it is killed, not the fact that it is killed” — The Guardian talks with Peter Godfrey-Smith (Sydney) about humans and our relationship with earth and its other inhabitants Mini-Heap posts usually appear when 7 or so new items accumulate in the Heap of Links, a collection of items from around the web that may be of interest to philosophers. The Heap of Links consists partly of suggestions from readers; if you find something online that you think would be of interest to the philosophical community, please send it in for consideration for the Heap. Thank you. Previous Edition
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https://dailynous.com/2024/08/06/mini-heap-600/


Two Philosophers Named Guggenheim Fellows

Two philosophers have been named Guggenheim Fellows. They are: Jenann Ismael (Johns Hopkins University) Barbara Montero (University of Notre Dame) The fellowships are for 6-12 months, with monetary awards of varying amounts, and are given with no strings attached. There were 188 new fellows announced. You can view the entire list of them here.
The post https://dailynous.com/2024/04/12/two-philosophers-named-guggenheim-fellows/
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https://dailynous.com/2024/04/12/two-philosophers-named-guggenheim-fellows/


Mind Chunks

Mind Chunks by Pete Mandik
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Mind Chunks

Mind Chunks by Pete Mandik   Other Daily Nous Philosophy Comics / More Info About DN Comics Pete Mandik on Twitter (X) / Pete Mandik on Bluesky
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https://dailynous.com/2023/12/19/mind-chunks-58/


Antonio Negri (1933-2023)

Antonio Negri, a well-known Italian political philosopher and Spinoza scholar, has died. Negri’s writings include a trilogy of books in political philosophy co-authored with Michael Hardt (Duke), the first of which was Empire, books on Spinoza such as Subversive Spinoza: (un)contemporary variations and The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics, and many other works. You can learn more about his writings here. Negri earned his PhD and had his first academic appointment at the University of Padua. His life was hardly that of the typical academic. In the late 1970s, he was accused of leading the Red Brigades, an Italian Marxist military group, orchestrating a political murder, and plotting to overthrow the government. These charges were dropped but, according to Wikipedia, he was convicted of being “the instigator” of the murder of a political activist and having “morally concurred” with the murder of a police officer during an attempted bank robbery. After a few years in prison he ran for a seat in the Italian legislature and won, getting himself freed from prison on the basis of parliamentary immunity. He then fled to Paris, where he taught at Paris VIII (Vincennes) and the Collège international de philosophie (which had been co-founded by Jacques Derrida). He returned to Italy in 1997 to serve out the rest of his prison sentence, which had been reduced, and was released in 2003. He died in Paris on December 16th, 2023.
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https://dailynous.com/2023/12/19/antonio-negri-1933-2023/


Mini-Heap

Latest links… Discussion welcome. “Nietzsche offered us a way of battling against fanaticism, showing us how we can combat its spread and prevent the emergence of new fanatics” — Paul Katsafanas (Boston) on Nietzsche, the anti-fanatic “Fan service”, that is, putting something into the story “just to please the fans”, is supposed to be a flaw — Brad Skow (MIT) has a bad feeling about this: what about “easter eggs”? “I seem to have been on the whole rather negative, sceptical, unfashionable, and contrarian” — a lengthy interview with Roger Crisp (Oxford) about his ideas and intellectual development, by Benjamin Mullins (Erasmus) When Sartre visited Gaza — Robert Zaretsky (Houston) on Sartre’s “Anti-Semite and Jew” and his views on Israel and Palestinian refugees “It is reasonable to think that the universe is infinite, and that there exist infinitely many galaxies broadly like ours, scattered throughout space and time, including in our future.” — Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) & Jacob Barandes (Harvard) explain why The philosophy q&a used to be brutal, but the brutality had a defense: “a practice of ruthless refutation… [is] an efficient way to improve the quality of arguments across the intellectual ecosystem” — It’s less hostile nowadays, notes Kieran Setiya (MIT), but as a result its function is less clear and its norms less certain Analyses of ‘analysis’ in Analysis — a collection of articles Mini-Heap posts usually appear when 7 or so new items accumulate in the Heap of Links, a collection of items from around the web that may be of interest to philosophers. The Heap of Links consists partly of suggestions from readers; if you find something online that you think would be of interest to the philosophical community, please send it in for consideration for the Heap. Thank you.
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https://dailynous.com/2023/12/18/mini-heap-557/


Journal of Philosophy’s 2023 Levi Prize

Akshath Jitendranath, a postdoctoral fellow in Philosophy and Economics at the Paris School of Economics, is the winner of the 2023 Isaac Levi Prize. Jitendranath won the prize for his paper, “Optimization and Beyond”. Here’s its abstract: This paper will be concerned with hard choices—that is, choice situations where an agent cannot make a rationally justified choice. Specifically, this paper asks: if an agent cannot optimize in a given situation, are they facing a hard choice? A pair of claims are defended in light of this question. First, situations where an agent cannot optimize because of incompleteness of the binary preference or value relation constitute a hard choice. Second, situations where agents cannot optimize because the binary preference or value relation violates acyclicity do not constitute a hard choice. The prize, awarded by The Journal of Philosophy, includes $10,000 and publication of the winning essay in the journal. The Isaac Levi Prize was created in 2019 in honor of philosopher Isaac Levi, who served as a longtime editor for The Journal of Philosophy, and is awarded to an article submitted to the Journal in the areas and themes that interested Levi, such as decision theory, epistemology, formal epistemology, pragmatism (especially as developed by Peirce), philosophy of science, social choice theory, ethics of controversy, and the relevance of philosophy in these areas to public life. To learn more about the prize and see a list of past winners, go here.
The post https://dailynous.com/2023/12/18/journal-of-philosophys-2023-levi-prize/
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Online Philosophy Resources Weekly Update

The weekly report on new and revised entries at online philosophy resources and new reviews of philosophy books… (If you notice anything we’ve missed, please send it in for inclusion in the next edition.) SEP New:   Critical Theory (Frankfurt School) by Robin Celikates and Jeffrey Flynn. Modern Confucianism by David Elstein. Revised: The Philosophy of Digital Art by Katherine Thomson-Jones and Shelby Moser. Feminist Political Philosophy by Noëlle McAfee and Katie B. Howard. Cellular Automata by Francesco Berto and Jacopo Tagliabue. Joane Petrizi by Tengiz Iremadze. Political Legitimacy by Fabienne Peter. Philosophical Aspects of Multi-Modal Logic by Sonja Smets and Fernando. IEP     ∅     NDPR     ∅    1000-Word Philosophy    ∅    Project Vox     ∅ Open-Access Book Reviews in Academic Philosophy Journals     ∅ Recent Philosophy Book Reviews in Non-Academic Media     Animal Liberation Now by Peter Singer and Justice for Animals by Martha Nussbaum are together reviewed by Elizabeth Barber at The New Yorker. The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism by John Gray is reviewed by Ed Simon at The Baffler. Compiled by Michael Glawson BONUS: Moral dilemmas without the dilemma
The post https://dailynous.com/2023/12/18/online-philosophy-resources-weekly-update-345/
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https://dailynous.com/2023/12/18/online-philosophy-resources-weekly-update-345/


Gift Guide Giveaway Winner

The crowd-sourced gift guide didn’t get as many entries as I said we’d need in order to proceed with the giveaway… …but I’m not going to let that get in the way of some fun! Watch the video below to find out who the winner is.   Have a good weekend, Philosofriends! And if you need some gift suggestions, check out the guide.
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https://dailynous.com/2023/12/15/gift-guide-giveaway-winner/


Conservatism in Political Philosophy

“On the surface it is deeply puzzling that conservatism has disappeared from professional philosophy.” So writes Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) in a post at Digressions & Impressions. He explains his puzzlement, but the main aim of his post is to provide an explanation for conservatism’s absence from contemporary political philosophy. What do we mean by “conservatism”? Let’s not confuse political philosophy with political parties. “Conservatism” in political philosophy is no more accurately described by reference to the views of the typical self-identifying conservative voter than “liberalism” in political philosophy is accurately described by reference to the views of the typical self-identifying liberal voter. Rather, conservatism here is the conservatism of Burke, Oakeshott, and others. Schliesser elaborates: Conservative political philosophy has an originating thought that goes something like this: political life is centered on groups or collectives that need to use violence to constitute and maintain themselves and, thereby, establish order…. [An] important consequence of the originating thought is that the order established can allow one to pursue the common good. That is to say, the conservative rejects the idea that the state must be neutral. Of course, the content of the common good is deeply contested even among conservatives (including among ones where one may, say, expect agreement, say Catholics)—some of the fiercest debates involve the role of religion and the status of the church or rites in this common good…. [T]he interest in the common good explains the conservatives’ special interest in institutions that help secure shared morality: education, family, religion, civic culture, etc. Or in institutions that help secure a certain commons sensibility: aesthetics, the arts, literature, etc. He then offers two explanations for the relative lack of conservatism in political philosophy today. It’s worth noting he explicitly acknowledges  externalist explanations, such as: the absence of conservatism may be owed to the lack of conservatives, which may be owed at least in part to conservatives not feeling sufficiently welcome in academia to pursue a career in it, or to political discrimination and bias in philosophy. But his focus in the post is on whether there are explanations that stem from conservative political philosophy itself. His two explanations are: Conservatives reject the terms of the debate among liberals vs Marxists and liberals..
The post https://dailynous.com/2023/12/15/conservatism-in-political-philosophy/
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https://dailynous.com/2023/12/15/conservatism-in-political-philosophy/


“Necessary and Sufficient” Portraits of Philosophers

“Necessary and Sufficient Conditions” is a series of portraits of philosophers that was given that name because, in the words of the artist, “the idea is to include as little as possible in the portrait while still making it work as a representation of the person.” Antti Kauppinen (Helsinki) makes the portraits “using a printed photo and a sharp knife.” Below is a sampling: There are about 3 dozen in total. He adds: Because they’re so minimalistic, these pictures are suitable for mugs, t-shirts, stickers, slides, or even stencils for graffiti (that’s how I destroyed my Marx before taking a proper photo…). Many of these things can be ordered from an online photo service. In my experience, they make it easy for you to print your own photo on just about anything these days. Needless to say, please don’t use the pictures without proper attribution or for financial gain—and maybe send me a picture of what you’ve done! You can see the whole collection here.
The post https://dailynous.com/2023/12/14/necessary-and-sufficient-portraits-of-philosophers/
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https://dailynous.com/2023/12/14/necessary-and-sufficient-portraits-of-philosophers/


Reminder: Philosophy Summer Programs 2024

Last month I put up posts for listing philosophy programs for the upcoming summer. Here they are: • Philosophy Summer Programs for High School Students – 2024 • Philosophy Summer Programs for Undergraduates – 2024 • Philosophy Summer Programs for Graduate Students/PhDs – 2024 If you’re involved with a philosophy summer program, please list it at the appropriate post. Thank you.
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Happy Thanksgiving!

Dear Philosofriends, As always, I’m grateful to you for reading Daily Nous, for contributing to the discussions here, for sharing ideas for posts and items to link to, for your suggestions and criticisms and appreciations, and for your support of the site in many ways. If you are celebrating Thanksgiving today, I hope it is a happy one. Best wishes, Justin Related: A Thanksgiving post originally from 2016
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Philosophy Summer Programs for Graduate Students/PhDs

Please use the comments section on this post to share information about Summer 2024 Programs in Philosophy for graduate students and/or PhDs in philosophy. If you are organizing such a program, please add a comment to this post that includes: – program name – dates – location  – contact information – application deadline – a brief (one-paragraph) description of the program – link to further information Here’s an example: Summer Training Program to Expand the Al and Data Ethics Research Community Dates: June 3-August 4, 2024 Location: Northeastern University, Boston, MA Contact: John Basl – j.basl@northeastern.edu Deadline: January 6, 2024 Description: This summer school is intended for graduate students with advanced training in applied ethics, ethical theory, philosophy of science, or other areas with potential research applications to AI and big data who would like to develop research capacities in the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI), data ethics, and the philosophy of technology.  Designing AI and machine learning systems to promote human flourishing in just and sustainable ways will require a robust and diverse AI and data ethics research community. However, there are few graduate programs that train students in these areas. The aim of this summer long, in person training program is to supplement resources in students’ home universities with ethical and technical skills necessary to research in this area. Further information: https://cssh.northeastern.edu/ethics/2024-summer-training-program-to-expand-the-al-and-data-ethics-research-community/
The post https://dailynous.com/2023/11/20/philosophy-summer-programs-for-graduate-students-phds/
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https://dailynous.com/2023/11/20/philosophy-summer-programs-for-graduate-students-phds/


Philosophy Summer Programs for Undergraduates

Please use the comments section on this post to share information about Summer 2024 Programs in Philosophy for college undergraduates. If you are organizing such a program, please add a comment to this post that includes: – program name – dates – location  – contact information – application deadline – a brief (one-paragraph) description of the program – link to further information Here’s an example: Colorado Summer Seminar in Philosophy: Natural Questions Dates: June 9 – June 28, 2024 Location: Boulder, Colorado Contact: David Boonin – david.boonin@colorado.edu Deadline: March 1, 2024 (review of applications begins) Description: The 2024 seminar will focus on questions involving the distinction between the natural and the artificial or conventional. Specific issues to be discussed may involve claims about human nature, the state of nature, or natural rights; realism about such subjects as moral principles, political authority, aesthetic judgments, quantum mechanics, mathematical truths, and ordinary material objects; the metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics of artificial intelligence; and the relationship between mental states and formal models in epistemology. Readings will cover a wide range of philosophical subfields and include both contemporary and historical sources. Further information: https://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/events/summer-seminar
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https://dailynous.com/2023/11/20/philosophy-summer-programs-for-undergraduates/


Philosophy Summer Programs for High School Students

Please use the comments section on this post to share information about Summer 2024 Programs in Philosophy for high school students. If you are organizing such a program, please add a comment to this post that includes: – program name – dates – location  – contact information – application deadline – a brief (one-paragraph) description of the program – link to further information
The post https://dailynous.com/2023/11/20/philosophy-summer-programs-for-high-school-students/
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https://dailynous.com/2023/11/20/philosophy-summer-programs-for-high-school-students/


First Issue of Philosophy of Physics Published

The inaugural issue of the journal Philosophy of Physics (PoP) has been published. The open access journal, announced last year, is published by LSE Press on behalf of the Philosophy of Physics Society. According its website, PoP “aims to be a flagship journal for the field and to span the various different axes of philosophy of physics: metaphysical, historical, mathematical, practice-oriented (and more). It is intended for all researchers in philosophy of physics and for interested readers in cognate disciplines, including outside philosophy.” It’s editor in chief is David Wallace (Pittsburgh). The inaugural issue, published today, includes articles by Emily Adlam and Carlo Rovelli, Samuel C. Fletcher and James Owen Weatherall, Álvaro Mozota Frauca, Klaas Landsman, Wayne C. Myrvold and John D. Norton, Laura Ruetsche, and Ward Struyve. You can read it here.
The post https://dailynous.com/2023/11/17/first-issue-of-philosophy-of-physics-published/
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https://dailynous.com/2023/11/17/first-issue-of-philosophy-of-physics-published/


Russell from Dianoia/ACU to ANU

Gillian Russell, currently professor of philosophy at the Dianoia Institute of Philosophy at Australian Catholic University, will become professor of philosophy at Australian National University (ANU). Professor Russell is well known for her work in philosophy of language and logic, and is the author of Truth in Virtue of Meaning: a Defense of the Analytic/Synthetic Distinction (2008) and Barriers to Entailment: Hume’s Law and other Limits on Logical Consequence (2023). You can learn more about her research here and here. Russell is the first of the casualties from the dissolution of the Dianoia Institute to secure a new position elsewhere, with ANU reportedly beating out a few other institutions offering her employment.
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https://dailynous.com/2023/11/17/russell-from-dianoia-acu-to-anu/


John Lachs (1934-2023)

John Lachs, professor emeritus of philosophy at Vanderbilt University, has died. Professor Lachs worked on questions concerning human nature, various topics in moral philosophy, American philosophy, the value of philosophy, and a range of other issues. He is the author of several books, including: Meddling: On the Virtue of Leaving Others Alone (2014), Freedom and Limits (2014), A Community of Individuals (2003), In Love with Life: Reflections on the Joy of Living and Why We Hate to Die (1998), and The Relevance of Philosophy to Life (1995), among others. In addition to his scholarly writing he also took up questions about the discipline of philosophy decades ago that are still live issues today, for example, in “Can Philosophers Still Produce Public Intellectuals” and “What Constitutes a Pluralistic Philosophy Department?” You can learn more about his writings here and here. Professor Lachs joined the Vanderbilt philosophy faculty in 1967. He earned his PhD from Yale University and his MA and BA from McGill University. The following obituary is by Michael Brodrick, a former student of Lachs’. John Lachs: Reflections on a Life Well Lived by Michael Brodrick John Lachs, the Hungarian-born American philosopher, author of In Love with Life, The Relevance of Philosophy to Life, and Intermediate Man, passed away on November 14th, 2023 at his home in Nashville, Tennessee. Born on July 17, 1934 in Budapest, Hungary, Lachs was Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. Lachs was 10 years old on December 29, 1944, the day the Soviet Red Army encircled Budapest. When the city fell, a years-long occupation ensued. Lachs and his parents passed undetected across two patrolled borders while fleeing Hungary. Those hardships were formative. Lachs later described them as “opportunities” to develop his “latent reflective tendencies.” They called to mind “the evanescence of life and the uncontrollability of fortune,” awakening within him a desire to “know about God, the meaning of life, and the right comportment towards death.” In his decades-long career as a philosophy professor, Lachs made the case for the relevance of philosophy to life. The rise of the modern university wrought a change in the way philosophy was practiced. Philosophy narrowed its horizons. Its largely abstract and theoretical preoccupations bore little resemblance to the ancient quest for the..
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In Which Areas of Philosophy Should We Expect Faster Progress?

On what we can call the answers model of philosophy, the primary aim of philosophy is to learn philosophical truths, and a primary form of philosophical progress is learning true answers to “the big questions of philosophy,” as David Chalmers (NYU) puts it. Though the answers model says progress consists primarily in learning philosophical truths, it does not imply that the only form of progress is actually attaining such truths (as Chalmers happily acknowledges). Just as we can make progress towards building a house before putting up a single wall, so too could we make philosophical progress before coming close to converging on a correct answer to a big philosophical question. With both projects, there are many preliminary steps. So the answers model does not imply that our lack of convergence on correct answers to big philosophical questions is thereby lack of philosophical progress. If we have taken some of the preliminary steps towards convergence on such answers, then that is a form of progress in philosophy. One difficulty, of course, is that it is unclear whether we are taking the correct preliminary steps. We know that surveying the land, drawing up blueprints, pouring a foundation, etc., are steps towards the construction of a house. Good evidence for this comes from humans having had many experiences of successfully building houses. Our apparent lack of experience successfully answering big philosophical questions means that there’s a conspicuous gap in the evidence we could gather to show that the preliminary steps we’ve taken are steps in the right direction. I think a defender of the answers model could reply: well, we do have experience unsuccessfully answering big philosophical questions, and failures can be a form of progress, too—we can learn what doesn’t work, and why. Though I’m not a fan of the answers model, I do think there’s something to that reply, and I would imagine there is more that could be said in its defense. At the very least I think the answers model is worth exploring, and I’m about to ask for your help in that exploration. Suppose the answers model is correct, that we have some reasons for thinking that at least some of the philosophical activities we engage in are proper..
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Green from MIT to JHU

E.J. Green has accepted an offer from Johns Hopkins University (JHU) as a tenured associate professor of philosophy. Professor Green currently is associate professor in the Department of Philosophy and Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He had been on leave from that position this semester, having taken up a position as research associate professor at JHU. Now that the tenuring process at JHU has been completed, he will be leaving MIT to join JHU full time. At JHU, he will be Miller Associate Professor of Philosophy, with a secondary appointment in Psychological and Brain Sciences. Professor Green works in philosophy of mind, philosophy of cognitive science, and philosophy of perception. You can learn more about his research here. (Via Steven Gross, who notes that JHU’s Department of Philosophy has “hired 13 new faculty since commencing its expansion” and adds, “we expect to hire at least 4 more over the next few years.”)
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What Are Some of Your Sayings? (for World Philosophy Day)

[The following was originally published on August 1, 2014. I thought that revisiting the question could be a fitting and fun activity for World Philosophy Day, which is today.] If I’m remembering correctly, T.M. Scanlon recounts a story in which a person sitting next to him on a plane asks him what he does for a living. Scanlon admits he is a philosopher, and the fellow passenger asks, “What are some of your sayings?” Jonathan Wolff has an old column that mentions this story (he has apparently heard a few different versions, so perhaps he did not have Scanlon in mind), and he takes the point of telling it to be to “illustrate the deplorable ignorance of the sort of person” who would ask such a question. But I don’t think the story was initially intended that way. I recall a certain kind of ruefulness to it. A sense that, at least in part, it’s a pity that we don’t have something pithy and practical and memorable and wise to say to nonexperts that could convey some of our ideas, that we don’t live up to the popularly imagined ideal of the philosopher. I think philosophers should have sayings and be untroubled to share them with the public. They are good PR for philosophy, I think, and at the very least they are helpful mnemonic devices. Hilary Putnam cautions: “any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs in one.” Fine. Don’t put the whole philosophy in the nutshell. There may be specifications and qualifications and exceptions and justifications left out. Your fellow philosophers will tacitly understand that. If you see your sayings as prompts for further reflection, rather than as comprehensive summarizations, you will be able to give people an idea to take with them and think about, without feeling as if you are being philosophically careless.
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Philosopher Takes Practical Steps to Address Gender Inequality

Ajume Wingo, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Boulder, founded the non-profit company PridePads to help women in Cameroon combat gender issues. Several years ago, Professor Wingo, originally from Cameroon, Africa, was struck by barriers facing young women in Cameroon on issues related to menstruation. According to his website, in addition to social ostracization and lack of education surrounding menstruation: On average, rural schoolgirls miss four to six days of school every month while menstruating, which contributes to gender inequality, child marriage and teenage pregnancy. Recognizing this issue, Professor Wingo started researching ways to create biodegradable and affordable pads with the goal of creating a company that could provide them to young women, as well as provide both menstrual hygiene education and economic empowerment. In 2019, the company PridePads Africa, Inc. was formed. According to their mission statement: PridePads Africa produces biodegradable, earth friendly and affordable sanitary pads for girls and women in rural Cameroon as well as providing menstrual health education, sensitization and de-stigmatization campaigns surrounding menstruation. Pads are produced locally by and for women, creating livelihood, empowerment, and entrepreneurial economic opportunities for ordinary Cameroonian girls and women. You can learn more about PridePads, including their mission and history, here. If you would like to make a donation or purchase merchandise to help PridePads, you can do so here and here, respectively. Do you know of other philosophers doing work outside of academia to make the world a better place? Let us know in the comments section.
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https://dailynous.com/2023/11/15/philosopher-takes-practical-steps-to-address-gender-inequality/