January 2015

Monthly Archives:

Philosophers Talk Football

Hey, so, uh, the Superbowl….

That’s all I got, but feel free, folks.

Graduates with philosophy degrees have “higher earnings potential than many other arts and humanities-related fields,” said TheRichest. Payscale reports midcareer median salaries are $84,000 for your modern day Kant or Descartes. Why? Well, let’s be logical. Which is exactly what philosophy programs require of students … logic. Thinking is hard, it requires analysis..

Students Object to Job Candidate for Offensive Views

Graduate students in a philosophy department somewhere in the English-speaking world did some online sleuthing about a job candidate for a position in their department, and learned that the candidate seems to hold views they find offensive. In particular, they found reports (including alleged quotes) that the candidate had expressed in online fora the view that homo..

A Good Offense (updated)

When it comes to teaching philosophy, how offensive may we be, and in what ways? Recent discussions here, particularly regarding teaching same-sex marriage, have raised this issue, but those conversations have been dominated by discussion of the plausibility of arguments regarding that substantive matter. Though it has cropped up, the issue of the role that offensiv..

APA’s Inaugural Joyce Mitchell Cook Award Winner Announced

Kathryn Gines, assistant professor of philosophy at Pennsylvania State University, has been named the inaugural winner of the American Philosophical Association’s Joyce Mitchell Cook Award, presented by the Committee on the Status of Black Philosophers (CSBP). Professor Gines works on Continental philosophy (especially existentialism and phenomenology), African Amer..

Mapping Philosophical Arguments

The students sit in pairs at a computer terminal, and after reading Cullen’s synopsis of a particular argument, they try to map it. The room fills up with whispered suggestions, lines tested and rejected, double negatives made positive. Most of the boxes into which they enter text are red or green. The green ones contain evidence supporting the above premise; the re..

Nietzsche’s New Year’s Resolution

This:

I do not want to wage war with the ugly. I do not want to accuse, I do not want even to accuse the accusers. Looking aside, let that be my sole negation!

Thanks to Maria Popova at Brain Pickings for highlighting this passage from Nietzsche’s The Gay Science. See her post here for the rest of his New Year’s resolution.

(art: detail of Mirror/Infinity Roo..

Unblock Thyself

Jon Cogburn (LSU) has run a little experiment. For months he and others have been unable to comment at Daily Nous. Long thought to be the result of my tyrannical and heavy-handed moderation, this problem has now been traced by Cogburn to Askimet, a spam-filtering service used by many blogs, including DN. Apparently, in some cases, having one of your comments marked ..

User’s Guide to Philosophy Without Rankings

A User’s Guide to Philosophy Without Rankings is a new site “intended for the use of prospective graduate students in philosophy, faculty (including chairs or heads) in philosophy, and deans, provosts, and other administrators, all of whom need resources for the decisions they make about philosophy programs.” It is based on the idea that “currently, there are no ran..

New Motion in Ludlow Case; Faculty Respond (with updates from Kvanvig, Garthoff, and Lockwood)

A new motion was filed on January 6th by lawyers for the undergraduate student allegedly assaulted by Northwestern University professor of philosophy Peter Ludlow (previously). The student’s lawsuit against Northwestern for mishandling her complaints was dismissed this past November. This motion claims to establish that there is newly discovered evidence that should..

Amy Allen (Dartmouth) to Penn State

Amy Allen, currently Parents Distinguished Research Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy and Women’s and Gender Studies at Dartmouth College, will become head of the Department of Philosophy at Penn State, starting July, 2015. Professor Allen works in Continental philosophy, particularly critical social theory, poststructuralism, and feminist theo..

New Site for Discussions of Discrimination & Disadvantage

Discrimination and Disadvantage is a new blog developed by Thomas Nadelhoffer (College of Charleston) and Kevin Timpe (Northwest Nazarene U.) for discussions about the philosophy of discrimination and disadvantage, as well as of discrimination and disadvantage in the philosophy profession. As they put it in their mission statement,

In recent years, philosophers h..

Book Dedication Sale

Jason Brennan and Peter Jaworski (both of Georgetown), have been working on a book entitled Markets Without Limits. You may recall an earlier post which detailed their plans to sell space in the “acknowledgements” section of their book. Not to be outdone—by their earlier selves—the duo are now selling the dedication page of their book to the highest bidder. You ..

Philosopher Launches Global Health Impact Initiative

The Global Health Impact is an initiative created by Nicole Hassoun, associate professor of philosophy at SUNY Binghamton, that evaluates and compares the health impact of medicine. The site assigns “impact scores” to various drugs based on how much good they do (explained here) and presents the information sorted by disease, drug, country, and pharmaceutical compan..

Minorities in Philosophy: Data Visualized

Data from 860 philosophers who identified themselves on the UPDirectory (previously) as belonging to minority demographic groups has been analyzed and depicted in various graphs and diagrams by Andrew Higgins, a recent graduate of University of Illinois, specializing in metaphysics and digital humanities, and currently working at Heartland Community College.

The..

Same-Sex Marriage and Philosophy Revisited

“How Academic Philosophers Are Trying to End the Gay-Marriage Debate—and Getting it Wrong” is the title of a new article in the National Review. Written by University of Colorado Ph.D. student Spencer Case, the article picks up on a discussion had here at Daily Nous about the matter back in November.

Despite their field’s reputation for interminable controversy..

Laptops, Tablets, and Phones in the Classroom

I settled on my New Year’s resolution while giving a lecture to 85 masters students. It was one kid who unintentionally suggested the idea. He was sitting in the back row, silently pecking away at his laptop the entire class. At times, he smiled at his screen. But he rarely looked up at me. I had a choice. I could disrupt the class to single him out. Or I could do w..

Life as a Philosophy Student in North Korea

A philosophy student who defected from North Korea provides some information about life as a philosophy student there in a recent interview (part of a series of interviews with David A. Caprara, a journalist working with the Global Peace Foundation in Seoul, South Korea). The student now lives in Seoul.

The access to philosophy books in North Korea is quite limit..

Reasons You Rejected a Paper

The discussion of journal practices is continuing, but, at the suggestion of Tom Dougherty, I am posting this as a place to gather “frequent reasons for rejection” of articles. Here is his comment from the other thread:

If many of the papers getting desk-rejected by journals are rejected for common reasons, then I wonder if it might be in everyone’s interests for..

APA Wins $600,000 Grant for Undergraduate Diversity

The American Philosophical Association (APA) has won a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The grant will provide $600,000 over three years to support undergraduate diversity institutes in philosophy, including the expansion of the Philosophy in an Inclusive Key Summer Institute (PIKSI) program and the development of infrastructure to support it and other..

Philosophical Delight in the Classroom

One thing that makes us different from most of our undergraduate students is that we really enjoy philosophy and they do not. It may drive us to frustration and despair sometimes, but, generally, we find it interesting and take pleasure in it in a way that is foreign to our students. Yet, every once in a while its possible to get students to catch a glimpse, firstha..

Sexual Misconduct at Arizona State’s Honors College

In light of recent discussions of professor-student sexual relations (here, for example), readers might be interested in learning of about what has been happening at Barrett, the Honors College of Arizona State University.

In the past few years, Barrett has terminated the contracts of at least three professors who engaged in sexual relationships with students. Jo..

X-Phi Grad Programs Wiki

Another grad program wiki is up — this time for experimental philosophy. It was put together by Joshua Knobe and Christian Mott (both at Yale). Shawn Miller (UC Davis), who created PhilWiki and the template that has been used to make the various subject-specific wikis, writes:

Notable, perhaps, is that the total time it took Joshua and Christian to get the site..

Why Are So Many Philosophers of Religion Theists?

72.8% of the 3226 philosophers who took the PhilPapers survey in 2009 said that they accept or lean towards atheism. Among philosophers of religion, though, 72.3% accept or lean towards theism. What explains this difference? Adriano Mannino considers the question in a post at the group blog Crucial Considerations. Of these figures, he writes:

On the face of it, t..

A Closer Look at Philosophy Journal Practices (two updates)

Considering how important the publication of articles in peer-reviewed journals is to a successful career in philosophy, it is expected that curiosity and questions about the practices at philosophy journals would arise. Additionally, lately it seems as if there has been an increase in concerns about unfairness in access to publication opportunities, including insuf..

Philosophy: Now Even More Popular in Germany

Philosophy is so popular in Germany right now, reports The Chronicle of Higher Education (may be behind paywall). How popular is it? So popular that at least one philosophy book may have sold more copies in Germany than the latest album by David Hasselhoff, a fact the author of the Chronicle piece neglects to mention. Perhaps because it is not true. In any event, he..

Inclusive Philosophy Classroom Best Practices Site

A new website, Best Practices for the Inclusive Philosophy Classroom, has launched. It is an interdepartmental project, started by Minorities and Philosophy (MAP), which aims to be “an easily accessible launching pad for teachers who want to make their philosophy classrooms more inclusive.”

The site includes anthologies and other resources for diverse syllabi, ad..

Heap of Links

Daily Nous readership has grown quite a bit over the past few months and it occurs to me that some new visitors may not know about the Heap of Links. The Heap of Links is located just a little bit down the page in the right sidebar of the site (or, if viewing the site on a phone, below several of the main posts). It contains links, updated as they come in (often a f..