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2026-03-12 03:50:29 UTC

Susan Haack (1945-2026)
Susan Haack, professor of philosophy and law at the University of Miami, has died. Professor Haack was well-known for her work in philosophy of logic, epistemology, pragmatism, and philosophy of law. She is the author of Deviant Logic, Fuzzy Logic (1974), Philosophy of Logics (1978), Evidence and Inquiry: Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology (1993, revised 2009), Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate (2000), Putting Philosophy to Work: Inquiry and Its Place in Culture (2013), Defending Science—Within Reason (2011), Evidence Matters: Science, Proof, and Truth in the Law (2014), among many other works. She joined the philosophy faculty at the University of Miami in 1990, was appointed as a professor of law there in 2000, and was named a distinguished professor in the humanities in 2006. Prior to arriving at Miami, she was a professor at the University of Warwick. She earned her PhD from the University of Cambridge, an MA from Oxford and Cambridge, and a BPhil and BA from Oxford. Over the years she held visiting appointments at many institutions around the world—in Brazil, Colombia, Poland, Spain, the UK, Mexico, Italy, Denmark, Australia, Canada, and the US. Among her various honors, she delivered over 30 named or endowed lectures over the course of her career. Professor Haack died on March 10th, 2026. A brief memorial notice is posted at the University of Miami website. Below are two videos of Susan Haack. The first features her in conversation with Gilbert Ryle in 1973: The second is the lecture she gave at the ceremony at which she was awarded the University College Dublin Ulysses Medal in 2016:
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2026-03-11 09:30:12 UTC

Calzavarini Wins Popper Prize
The editors of the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (BJPS) have announced the winner of the 2025 Popper Prize. The Popper Prize is awarded annually for the best article appearing in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science in the prize year. The 2025 award goes to Fabrizio Calzavarini (University of Turin) for his article, “The Conceptual Format Debate and the Challenge from (Global) Supramodality“. The Popper Prize includes a £500. It is awarded by the editors-in-chief of the BJPS, in consultation with the journal’s associate editors and members of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science Committee. The prize committee writes: In ‘The Conceptual Format Debate and the Challenge from (Global) Supramodality’, Fabrizio Calzavarini rejects one of cognitive neuroscience’s most entrenched commitments and argues that such rejection reshapes high-profile debates in philosophy of cognitive science and empirically oriented philosophy of mind. For well over a century, a fundamental distinction has lain at heart of neuroscientists’ understanding of functionally relevant architecture of the brain: the distinction between modally specific cortex, on the one hand, and amodal or non-modal cortex, on the other. In his prize-winning paper, Calzavarini reviews a robust range of neuroscientific data suggesting that extensive portions of what are traditionally considered modality-specific cortices are in fact ‘supramodal’; they process information independently of perceptual modality. On the most radical (though not necessarily implausible) interpretation of these data, so-called sensory cortices should be treated as task-specific contributors, not individuated by their role in processing distinctive channels of sensory input. This fascinating and potentially ground-breaking contribution to our understanding of neural architecture has striking implications regarding cognitive ontology. For instance, proponents of embodied perspectives on cognition often emphasize what they take to be the distinctively sensory grounding of human concepts and the effects of modality-specific grounding on cognitive processing. Yet, if Calzavarini’s view is correct, the entire debate over embodied concepts would seem to rest on a misconception of the kind of material available for conceptual grounding. For its impressive contribution to debates of central importance in the philosophy of cognitive science, the BJPS Co-Editors-in-Chief and the BSPS Committee judge ‘The Conceptual Format Debate and the Challenge from (Global) Supramodality’ to be worthy of the 2025 BJPS Popper..
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2026-03-10 12:20:45 UTC

How (and Why) to Organize a Conference in the Global South (guest post)
Conferences provide valuable opportunities to academics and can influence disciplinary agendas. But scholars have unequal access to conferences, often owing to where such conferences are held and the availability of funding. As Kritika Maheshwari (Delft University of Technology), Thierry Ngosso (University of St. Gallen), and Brian Berkey (University of Pennsylvania) explain in the this guest post, this is not bad just for those scholars, but “for philosophy as a discipline.” They have each been involved in organizing conferences around the world, and in what follows they discuss why it is worthwhile to do so, and share some advice based on their experiences. How (and Why) to Organize a Conference in the Global South by Kritika Maheshwari, Thierry Ngosso, and Brian Berkey Conferences are an important part of professional life in academic philosophy. They provide opportunities to get helpful feedback on our work, to learn about what others are working on, and to develop professionally valuable relationships. One of the most significant features of conferences is that they allow us to engage in intellectually rewarding ways with a wide range of colleagues, many of whom we might not otherwise have significant professional interactions with. This engagement contributes to the quality of our research and teaching by exposing us to perspectives and approaches that we might not otherwise have encountered, and also simply makes professional life in academia more enjoyable and rewarding. Conferences also serve important institutional functions. They shape disciplinary agendas, determine which questions and approaches gain visibility, and influence whose work is taken up, cited, and taught. Importantly, the opportunities to participate in conferences, and therefore to access their benefits, are distributed very unequally. Some of us are fortunate enough to be able to attend multiple conferences each year in a variety of locations, while others have few if any institutional resources available for conference participation. Philosophers based in well-resourced institutions—predominantly in North America, Europe, and Australia—tend to attend conferences held in those same regions, while those based in institutions across the Global South face significant barriers to participation. The result is limited cross-regional engagement within the discipline. In addition, this separation makes it the case that conferences organized and hosted by institutions in the Global North—often with the interests, constraints,..
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2026-03-09 13:27:40 UTC

New: Free MA Program in Philosophy
The University of Leipzig is launching a new, tuition-free English-language Master of Arts program in philosophy. Professor Kristina Musholt writes that it is a two-year program “with a diverse range of courses that create the conditions for acquiring in-depth skills in academic work, placing particular emphasis on guiding and promoting independent philosophical research.” The program, which is accepting applications now, will start in the winter term of 2026-27, which runs October through March. You can learn more about the program at the University of Leipzig Institute for Philosophy website, with instructions about applying here. Advice for international students is here.
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2026-03-04 10:30:23 UTC

Tracking Mentorship
The “Mentorship Index Calculator” is now live. What is it? The Mentorship Index (M-index) measures a scientist’s contribution to mentoring junior scientists. The M-index counts the number of publications for which the scientist served as last author (typically indicating the senior/mentoring role) where the first author (typically the mentee who led the work) was relatively new to science (proxied by the number of publications associated with their name at that time). For example, the M10-index is the number of last-author publications where the first author had fewer than 10 publications at the time. Great idea. Here’s what it looks like: The index and calculator were created by Jean Fan, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University. It uses the Open Alex database as its reference source. You can try out the calculator here. Given how it works, the Mentorship Index will be more accurate a measure of one’s mentorship in fields in which co-authoring is more common—the sciences, as opposed to philosophy. But there are some philosophers included among the “scientists” the M-index Calculator can report on. That said, one should be cautious about the results. I typed in the names of several philosophers who had co-authored a fair amount to get their M-Indexes. Some did not show up at all. Some share names with other scientists, and so they end up getting credit for mentoring via articles they actually did not write. In some cases, articles appear to be double-counted. And in one case, after typing in a philosopher’s name and hitting enter, the calculator repeatedly changed the name to someone else’s and gave me the results for this other persons. So there are some bugs; with luck they will get fixed. In the meanwhile, alternate suggestions for tracking mentorship in philosophy would be welcome.
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2026-02-12 20:26:28 UTC

Can AI Write a Useful Philosophical Literature Review? (guest post)
A pair of philosophers have developed a new research tool that uses AI to provide comprehensive and reliable philosophical literature reviews, and they’d like you to give it a try. Just last week I checked out a new AI tool discussed in Nature that is supposed to be able to “synthesize scientific literature”. As good as it may be at that (I’m not in a position to judge), I can tell you that it didn’t seem to have access to much philosophy, and so was not of any use for philosophical inquiries. And general LLMs like ChatGPT may pull from random or odd or even imaginary sources, making them difficult to trust. Still, for some, the idea of an AI philosophy research assistant has significant appeal, and now, thanks to Johannes Himmelreich (Syracuse) and Marco Meyer (Hamburg), you can see for yourself what one could do and what you think about it. They call their tool PhilLit, and in the following guest post, they explain why they made it, what it does, and how you can try it. Can AI Write a Useful Philosophical Literature Review? by Johannes Himmelreich and Marco Meyer A year ago, the best AI model could complete tasks that take a human expert 56 minutes. Today, this same metric, the task-completion time horizon, is around 6.5 hours.[1] These numbers were derived from tasks used in software development. How much better did AI get in the past 12 months at tasks that we use in philosophy? Unfortunately, nobody knows. As philosophers, we might want to know whether and how AI can be used for philosophy. Of course, asking “how AI can be used for philosophy” in the abstract is about as fruitful as asking “how the internet can be used for philosophy”—it depends on the philosophical task and the corner of the internet where you look for help. Recently, this blog hosted a guide on whether AI can help develop research ideas through conversations. Conversations are a general-purpose tool for cognitive work. But research also involves certain more specific tasks. AI can help with at least one specific task that we as researchers undertake regularly: orienting ourselves in unfamiliar literature. But asking ChatGPT to do so won’t do. Even the research agents..
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2026-02-10 15:06:52 UTC

Mini-Heap
New links… “The current state of education positively requires external pressure on the universities, demonstrating to them a model of inquiry that they have themselves patently failed to uphold” — Justin Smith-Ruiu introduces The Hinternet Foundation and its programs “How we interact with AI systems will shape what they become” — a profile of Amanda Askell, the philosopher teaching Anthropic’s Claude AI to be moral “Noam and I have felt a profound weight regarding the unresolved questions surrounding our past interactions with Epstein. We do not wish to leave this chapter shrouded in ambiguity” — a message from Valéria Chomsky The podcast of the Center for Philosophy of Science at Pittsburgh is back with its second season — the first episode features Edouard Machery in conversation with David Wallace about philosophy of physics Who has published at least once in each of philosophy’s “top 5” generalist journals? — a list of authors, their articles, and their departments, courtesy of Nick Laskowski “The question [is] whether liberalism can support an ample humanism… whether it can be beautiful and sweet and sustaining… [L]iberals ignore these aesthetic matters at their own peril” — Becca Rothfeld on the aesthetics of politics “Today’s AI systems make the dialectical practice cherished by philosophers readily available” — reflections on Plato, AI, and the value of writing from Elay Shech Mini-Heap posts usually appear when several 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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2026-01-30 18:09:38 UTC

Hume’s Tomb Vandalized with “Satanic” Symbols
David Hume’s tomb was one of a few sites at a cemetery in Edinburgh that have been vandalized with “disturbing occult-style paraphernalia,” according to The Guardian. The Guardian reports: A tour guide made the discovery at the Old Calton burial ground. It included a drawing of a naked woman pointing a bloodied knife at a baby with a noose around its neck, and coded writing on red electrical tape attached to the David Hume mausoleum and two nearby memorial stones. The guide emailed photographs of the vandalism to Edinburgh council and described the symbols as “satanic”. A group on Telegram purporting to be responsible for the vandalism of graves at unnamed cemeteries posted photographs of the same damage in a now-deleted channel. More details here. Readers may recall this earlier bit of Kant-related vandalism.
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2026-01-17 16:59:55 UTC

University of Austin’s Experiment: a Report
“I’ve never felt my speech was so chilled as it was in the classroom at UATX.” That’s one student quoted in an article at Politico by Evan Mandery that describes how things have gone at the University of Austin (UATX). UATX was announced in November 2021 as a “fiercely independent” institution of higher education dedicated to free expression and “the fearless pursuit of truth.” Claiming to be unbound by the political pieties of the day, it bragged about offering courses that covered “the most provocative questions that often lead to censorship or self-censorship in many universities.” Its inaugural class of students began in the fall of 2024. As the end of the school year approached, in April of 2025, a member of the university’s board of trustees (and one of its major donors) summoned all of the faculty and staff for a meeting and reportedly told them that they must all subscribe to “the four principles of anti-communism, anti-socialism, identity politics, and anti-Islamism.” Whether he had the institutional authority to issue such a command is disputed. That episode is just one in this fascinating history of the university. I recommend you read the whole thing. (For fun, you may also want to check out my initial post about the University of Austin from back in November, 2021.)
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2026-01-07 02:34:54 UTC

Texas A&M Bans Plato
Drop the race and gender material from your course and the Plato readings, or teach a different course. You have a day to decide. That’s a paraphrase of what Martin Peterson, professor of philosophy at Texas A&M University, was told by university officials today about his upcoming “Contemporary Moral Problems” course, due to start next week. Here’s the actual email: “Rule 08.01” refers to these recent policy changes at the university. “Kristi” is Department of Philosophy chair Kristi Sweet, who, I think it’s safe to assume, was merely passing along the verdict of “the college leadership team“, headed up by interim dean Simon North. (The above email and other documents in this post were provided by Professor Peterson.) I’m going to pause here just to review: an institution that purports to be a university has told a philosophy professor he is forbidden from teaching Plato. The Plato readings were from the Symposium, particularly passages on Aristophanes’ myth of split humans and Diotima’s ladder of love. The other readings are from Ethics: Theory and Contemporary Issues (10th edition) by Andrew Fiala and Barbara MacKinnon. Professor Peterson had been contacted by his chair on December 19th about the review of syllabi for Contemporary Moral Problems courses. Here’s that email: Professor Peterson replied to this, submitting his syllabus for what he referred to, correctly, as “mandatory censorship review”. Among other things, he said, “Please note that my course does not “advocate” any ideology; I teach students how to structure and evaluate arguments commonly raised in discussions of contemporary moral issues.” (See “The Charade of Banning ‘Advocacy’“.) He also reminded his chair and college officials that “the U.S. Constitution protects my course content,” as do the norms of academic freedom. Here is his full reply: Here is Professor Peterson’s syllabus (also here): It was clear that Texas A&M’s new policies were going to lead to conflicts with the First Amendment and academic freedom. That the first such conflict involves telling a professor to remove from his syllabus the writings of the person who created the west’s first institution of higher education is too perfect an irony, though. This reality is unbelievable. (Thanks to several readers who alerted me to the story.)
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2026-01-05 15:47:58 UTC

Philosophy to the Rescue of Science
The pessimistic meta-induction—the argument that since past scientific theories have been shown to be false, we should expect that today’s will turn out false, too—makes the New York Times. . Elay Shech, professor of philosophy at Auburn University, takes up the topic in the context of current political disputes about science and our government’s seemingly increasing disregard of expertise: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, made a version of this argument in August when defending his decision to halt hundreds of millions of dollars in mRNA vaccine development despite the objections of vaccine scientists. He said that “science is always evolving” and the experts could not always be trusted. Shech accepts that “many widely accepted [scientific] theories have been discarded” but that the question, “why should we trust the ones we have now?” is misleading. Why? It implies that the only possible attitudes toward science are naïve faith and wholesale pessimism. It assumes that science is a single global entity that rises or falls all at once, when in reality, science is an array of local domains of inquiry, each with its own standards of evidence and degrees of reliability. In place of skepticism, Shech recommends “disciplined trust.” The first step in the direction of disciplined trust is recognizing that “there is no single scientific method used in all of science.” Shech writes: Newton’s deduction from observed phenomena is very different from Darwin’s inference to the best explanation, which in turn differs radically from Einstein’s thought experiments with light beams, trains and elevators. What people call “the scientific method” is really many distinct ways of investigating the world—different strategies for representing, experimenting and classifying. Since different areas of science employ different methods and rely on different kinds of evidence, to make a case for skepticism “you need to look at the evidence and methods in a specific area of inquiry.” And that case will not be “a sweeping claim about all of science” but rather about that particular area of inquiry with, for example, what might turn out to be “well-understood methodological problems.” Shech’s piece is “Science Keeps Changing, So Why Should We Trust It?” (NYT gift link). Discussion welcome (readers are advised to keep in..
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2026-01-05 11:30:50 UTC

Lord Wins 2025 Sanders Epistemology Prize
The winner of the 2025 Marc Sanders Prize in Epistemology is Errol Lord (University of Pennsylvania). Professor Lord was awarded the prize for “Aestheticizing Epistemology”. Here’s the abstract of the paper: Aesthetic value is central to epistemic normativity. That is a startling sentence to the vanishingly small number of people who can fully understand it. In this paper, I defend it. The basic theoretical details are relatively simple. The domain of epistemic normativity is at least partly determined by the nature of the rational competitions it governs. And the nature of these competitions is determined by the nature of their competitors. This paper is about two of these competitions. First, the doxastic competition, crucially featuring involving belief and disbelief. Second, the noetic competition, whose aim is understanding. In both competitions, one of the competitors is suspension of judgment. Sometimes the epistemic permits, forbids, or requires suspension of judgment. In the doxastic competition, sometimes we are required to suspend judgment rather than believe or disbelieve; in the noetic competition, sometimes we are required to suspend rather than adopt a conception (the noetic analogue of belief). Thus, to fully understand epistemic normativity, we need to understand the nature of suspension of judgment. At least one form of suspension of judgment is inquisitive. To use Jane Friedman’s phrase, when you suspend judgment about whether p in an inquisitive way, you put p on your agenda; you are disposed to answer the questions <whether p?>. Now we can get to beauty. Following Plato, I will argue that a certain (purified) sort of passionate love–eros–is this sort of inquiring state of mind. Beauty is the proper object of eros; thus, beauty is central to the epistemology of suspension of judgment. The competition is sponsored by the Marc Sanders Foundation and administered by Tamar Szabó Gendler (Yale). The prize is $5000 and publication of the paper in Oxford Studies in Epistemology. Of the paper, the judges wrote: Veritists try to understand epistemic norms by appeal to the value of true belief, or the value of true belief relevant to our practical goals. Such projects have come under various sorts of compelling attack in recent years (including from Dandelet, Berker, Schafer, and many others). In response to the perceived failures of such projects, many epistemologists have tried to follow the lead of venerable philosophers such..
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2025-12-24 13:24:41 UTC

Georgetown Philosophy Suspends PhD Admissions for Fall 2026
The Department of Philosophy at Georgetown University will not be accepting any PhD students for the 2026-2027 academic year. The decision is owed to “budget constraints” and was directed by the College of Arts & Sciences at Georgetown. It is expected that admissions will resume for fall of 2027. The Hoya reports: The department announced the decision in a Dec. 22 email to applicants, one week after the Dec. 15 application deadline. The announcement came after university officials announced Dec. 12 that Georgetown has reduced doctoral enrollment amid ongoing budget cuts and a decline in graduate tuition revenue… Interim University President Robert M. Groves announced Dec. 9 that the university recorded a 23% decline in the number of students starting graduate applications and a 20% drop in international graduate student enrollment. Groves has cited federal cuts to higher education funding, changing immigration policies and ending graduate loan programs as reasons for the declines. In an email to applicants breaking the news, John Greco, the department’s director of graduate admissions, wrote: I sincerely apologize for the late timing of this decision, which I understand is extremely frustrating for many reasons, not least because of the time and effort that goes into building a graduate admissions application. For different reasons, this is all deeply frustrating for the Admissions Committee and the Philosophy Department as well. That said, I do believe that Georgetown’s administration is acting with good will to negotiate difficult circumstances. Georgetown is not the first philosophy graduate program to announce it was cutting back on admissions for the next year. Harvard is temporarily reducing the size of its incoming class. Rutgers is not accepting any applicants. Others are listed on this spreadsheet.
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2025-12-15 13:05:06 UTC

Online Philosophy Resources Weekly Update
New and revised entries at online philosophy resources, new reviews of philosophy books, new podcast episodes, and more—including, now, a section on recently published open access philosophy books (if you tell us about them). (If we missed anything, please let us know.) SEP New: 20th Century Theories of Scientific Explanation by James Woodward and Lauren Ross. Revised: Korean Buddhism by Lucy Hyekyung Jee. Mathematical Style by Paolo Mancosu. IEP Being in Structural-Systematic Philosophy by Alan White. 1000-Word Philosophy ∅ BJPS Short Reads ∅ Recently Published Open Access Philosophy Books ∅ Book Reviews Early German Positivism by Frederick C. Beiser is reviewed by Mark Textor at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Conceptualising Concepts in Greek Philosophy by Gábor Betegh and Voula Tsouna (eds.) is reviewed by Christoph Helmig at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Psychoanalysis and Ethics: The Necessity of Perspective by David M. Black is reviewed by Maria Balaska at Philosophical Psychology. Who’s Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler is reviewed by Lorna Finlayson at Boston Review. The Complete Notebooks by Albert Camus translated by Ryan Bloom is reviewed by Joanna Kavenna at Literary Review. A Theory of Subjective Wellbeing by Mark Fabian is reviewed by Jessica Sutherland at Philosophical Psychology. The Developmental Psychology of Personal Identity: A Philosophical Perspective by Massimo Marraffa and Cristina Meini (eds.) is reviewed by Mahmud Nasrul Habibi, Monicha Ana Billa, Ida Umaria Hentihu, Arvan Setiawan & Kristina Serenem at Philosophical Psychology. Open Minded: Searching for Truth about the Unconscious Mind by Ben R. Newell & David R. Shanks is reviewed by Aliya Rumana at Philosophical Psychology. It’s Only Human: The Evolution of Distinctively Human Cognition by Armin W. Schulz is reviewed by Olivier Morin at The British Society for Philosophy of Science. The Oxford Handbook of Moral Psychology by Manuel Vargas and John Doris (eds.) is reviewed by Anneli Jefferson at Philosophical Psychology. Arthur Schopenhauer: The Life and Thought of Philosophy’s Greatest Pessimist by David Bather Woods is reviewed by Terry Eagleton at London Review of Books. Philosophy Podcasts – Recent Episodes (via Jason Chen) Compiled by Michael Glawson BONUS: Further moves in the simulation argument game
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2025-12-11 13:10:39 UTC

New Journal: Experimental Philosophy
A new peer-reviewed open-access journal, Experimental Philosophy, has been launched. . According to a description on its website, Experimental Philosophy is an open-access journal founded to enable authors to publish work in experimental philosophy without having to compromise on either the empirical or the philosophical side. The journal welcomes submissions relevant to the field of experimental philosophy, broadly interpreted to include experimental-philosophy studies, empirically informed philosophy, and discussions of methods and empirically informed and experimental philosophy, meta-studies, and critical responses to empirical work. Submissions are expected to make a significant contribution to philosophical discourse. The journal’s co-editors-in-chief are Alex Wiegmann (Ruhr-University Bochum), Ivar Hannikainen (University of Granada), and Pascale Willemsen (University of Zurich). You can see a full list of section editors and editorial board members here. The journal is “completely fee-free” and will “not collect any publication or processing charges under any circumstances, including from researchers unaffiliated with universities or research institutions.” Experimental Philosophy began accepting submissions this week. Related: The Development of Experimental Philosophy
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2025-11-26 23:40:08 UTC

The Charade of Banning “Advocacy”
“Leaders at these institutions want to ban only certain topics from discussion. To do so, they have issued vague directives that no one knows how to interpret.” That’s philosopher Jacob Beck (York), writing about higher education in Texas. His first job as a professor was at Texas Tech. Earlier this fall that university, Beck notes, “told faculty members they must recognize only male and female sexes in their instruction.” Angelo State, another Texas university, “forbade instructors to so much as discuss transgender identities in class.” And as we reported earlier this month, the Texas A&M Board of Regents on November 13th decreed that “No system academic course will advocate race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity, unless the course and the relevant course materials are approved in advance by the member CEO” (see the discussion here). In an op-ed in the Dallas Morning News, Professor Beck writes: Supporters of these actions say they are justified because professors are straying from their syllabi. But that’s a dodge. If an instructor in Calculus 101 teaches Hamlet, the reaction would not be to ban Shakespeare instruction throughout the university. The dean would simply hold the instructor to account. The Nov. 13 decree only bans advocacy, which might seem harmless. Surely professors should be educators, not advocates! But if the point were to prohibit advocacy, why focus exclusively on gender and race? Why not forbid advocacy of all kinds? The answer is clear. Leaders at these institutions want to ban only certain topics from discussion. To do so, they have issued vague directives that no one knows how to interpret. As Beck notes, “the regents haven’t defined advocacy.” These interventions by trustees, regents, and administrators are anathema to higher education, Beck writes: Free inquiry is not incidental to a university, whose very purpose is to seek knowledge and understanding. You cannot understand a topic that you cannot investigate. Some proponents of the new bans might argue that these issues are already settled. We know that there are two genders. We know that racism is wrong. What’s the point of further discussion? I know that Naziism is a deplorable ideology. Even so, no university should ban its mention. To understand Naziism, you must..
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2025-11-26 19:12:29 UTC

Kind & Nickel Awarded Prize for Philosophy in Psychiatry and Psychotherapy
The German Society for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Psychosomatics and Neurology, the largest continental European national association for psychiatry, has announced the winners of its Prize for Philosophy and Ethics in Psychiatry and Psychotherapy. The prize is in recognition of “outstanding contributions that help to systematically discuss current fundamental questions in psychiatry and psychotherapy as well as in philosophy, especially in the fields of medical ethics, anthropology and philosophy of science, and the humanities and social sciences.” The prize is 6,000 euros (approximately $7,000). This year, the prize was awarded to two recipients: Adrian Kind (Charité – University Medicine Berlin) and Lea Nickel (Institute for Ethics and History of Medicine, University Medical Center Göttingen of the Georg-August University). Dr. Kind was recognized for his article, “The Faithful Response to the Comforting Delusion Objection“, published in Neuroethics. The prize committee writes: Dr. Adrian Kind’s outstanding work represents a significant advance in knowledge for both philosophy and psychiatry, thus fully meeting the criteria for awarding the prize. Thematically, it addresses the critique of an aspect of psychotherapeutic treatments using psychedelic substances (such as psycholysis), where therapeutic success is sought through the induction of states of transcendence, such as mystical experiences of oneness. These therapies are predominantly viewed critically by the public, while research into them – after a prolonged hiatus – has recently increased again. The aspect that is often considered problematic, particularly from a philosophical perspective, is the irrationality of the beliefs that are accepted as a means to an end. The “comforting delusion” of drug-induced unio mystica may be “comforting,” but it remains a (transient) delusion. In this respect, it may not harm the patients’ health, but it does harm their intellectual integrity and, potentially, their dignity as rational subjects. This work develops a profound, albeit limited in scope, meta-critique of this critique. It adopts the distinction between belief and faith from analytical philosophy of religion and argues that the induced states belong to the category of faith and are therefore incommensurable with the cognitive rationality criteria applicable to beliefs. Ms. Nickel was recognized for her article, “Speech Is Silver, Listening Is Gold: Phenomenological Psychopathology in Dialogue with Epistemic Injustice.” The prize committee writes: In her work, Lea Nickel argues that psychiatric..
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2025-11-11 13:31:52 UTC

Mini-Heap
Recent additions to the Heap of Links… It’s surprisingly “puzzling and difficult… to explain why right hands and left hands are identical but different” — Kant tried, but an adequate explanation, according to this article, was not discovered until 1956 (via the Browser) “All the people talking about polarization are just fascism enablers… it’s like saying… the problem with the Civil War was polarization” — an interview with Jason Stanley on More to the Story (via Richard Galvin) “Humans do seem dead set on conveniencing themselves into meaninglessness” — a song followed by a speech by Tim Minchin at the Sydney Opera House on individualism, the arts, difference, and empathy “Our understanding of consciousness will improve with our interaction with increasingly sophisticated A.I.” — Barbara Gail Montero on how “our concepts are shaped by what we discover” “The course [is] focused on… philosophical issues drawn to the fore by particular games. We [play] these games during extended class periods, then devote the next several meetings to philosophical ideas surrounding those experiences” — Catharine Saint-Croix on teaching philosophy through games An attempt to “combat the crisis of attention” — Michael Vazquez, Sarah Stroud, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the virtues of attention “God I’m even boring when I’m a Nazi” — philosophers described by excerpts from the British sitcom “Peep Show” (that was Heidegger) (via Mike O’Brien) Mini-Heap posts usually appear when several 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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2025-11-11 12:00:59 UTC

What’s in a Name? “Philosophy” in Non-European Traditions (guest post)
If certain cultures didn’t have the word “philosophy,” or a word that can directly be translated with “philosophy,” is it illegitimate, maybe culturally imperialist, to impose it on them? In the following guest post, Peter Adamson (LMU, KCL) takes up that question. Readers may know Professor Adamson not just from his academic work but as the host of the long-running podcast, “History of Philosophy without any Gaps” (from which a series of books came about). (A version of this post first appeared on the History of Philosophy without any Gaps website.) What’s in a Name? “Philosophy” in Non-European Traditions by Peter Adamson I’ve had a couple of conversations recently in which people challenged the use of “philosophy” in contexts outside of the European tradition, like pre-modern India and China.* Basically their worry is that if these traditions didn’t have the word “philosophy,” or a word that can directly be translated with “philosophy,” then it is illegitimate, and maybe culturally imperialist, to impose it on them. Rather, they say, we should talk more loosely about “intellectual traditions” or “thought,” or something like that (at least I guess this would be the alternative). As is no doubt apparent to those who listen to History of Philosophy without any Gaps, I don’t agree with this. Since I have encountered the point quite a few times over the past years, I thought it might make sense to explain why. 1. You don’t need to have a word for something to do it: trees grow without having a word for growing, and people all over the world experience schadenfreude without knowing German, or having a word of their own that means the same thing. So more needs to be said to show that the worry is a genuine problem; we clearly can’t just have a blanket rule against using words to describe activities that wouldn’t be used by those who engage in the activities. 2. Even within the history of European philosophy, we use non-immanent terms of analysis all the time. For example we might speak of intensional vs extensional distinctions, or dualism and physicalism, when talking about ancient philosophy. True, one needs to do this with some care, but it isn’t obviously problematic and indeed..
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2025-11-09 19:10:20 UTC

Which AI’s Might be Conscious, and Why it Matters (guest post)
Large language models like ChatGPT are not conscious, but there are “a range of more serious contenders for AI consciousness that exist today.” Furthermore, “AI development will not wait for philosophers and cognitive scientists to agree on what constitutes machine consciousness, if they ever agree at all. There are pressing ethical issues we must face now.” So writes Susan Schneider in the following guest post. Dr. Schneider is professor of philosophy at Florida Atlantic University, director of its Center for the Future of AI, Mind and Society, and co-director of its Machine Perception and Cognitive Robotics Lab. She is the author of Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind, among other works. (An earlier version of the following was originally published as a report by the Center for the Future of AI, Mind and Society, Florida Atlantic University, and posted on Medium.) Which AI’s Might be Conscious, and Why it Matters by Susan Schneider In a recent New York Times opinion piece, philosopher Barbara Montero urges: “A.I. is on its way to doing something even more remarkable: becoming conscious.” Her view is illustrative of a larger public tendency to suspect that the impressive linguistic abilities of LLMs suggest that they are conscious—that it feels like something from the inside to be them. After all, these systems have expressed feelings, including claims of consciousness. Ignoring these claims may strike one as speciesist, yet once we look under the hood, there’s no reason to think these systems are conscious. Further, we should not allow ourselves to be distracted away from a range of more serious contenders for AI consciousness that exist today. The linguistic capabilities of LLM chatbots, including their occasional claims that they are conscious, can be explained without positing genuine consciousness. As I’ve argued elsewhere [1], there is a far more mundane account of what is going on. Today’s LLMs have been trained on a vast trove of human data, including data on consciousness and beliefs about feelings, selves, and minds. When they report consciousness or emotion, it is not that they are engaging in deceptive behaviors, trying to convince us they deserve rights. It is simply because they have been trained on so many of our reports of consciousness and..
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2025-11-07 14:49:44 UTC

How (and Why) to Organize a Zero-Budget Conference (guest post)
“Obtain free publicity for your conference by writing a post for Daily Nous in which you get to mention it.” That’s not really part of the post, but I have to give Craig Agule (Rutgers University-Camden) and Brian Berkey (University of Pennsylvania) credit for thinking to do this, as it does fit with what they’re talking about: how they’ve managed for a few years now to hold a “zero-budget” in-person conference. (You can see the call for submissions for the next conference they’re putting on here.) How (and Why) to Organize a Zero-Budget Conference by Craig Agule and Brian Berkey For the last three years, we’ve organized the Philadelphia Normative Philosophy Conference (PNPC), a zero-budget conference held in October at the University of Pennsylvania. In our view, the conference has been a great success, and so we thought it might be useful to describe how we’ve organized a fairly large conference without any funding. We suspect that many people might like to organize a conference but also think that funding is a necessary condition of being able to do so. The success of PNPC, we think, shows that this view is mistaken. We also think that many of the features of a zero-budget conference are preferable to more traditional ways of organizing conferences, and so we’d like to encourage other conference organizers to consider adopting them, whether they have access to funding or not. First, here’s a brief description of PNPC: The conference features 30 talks over two days, with three concurrent talks over five sessions each day. Talks are on topics across normative philosophy, including normative ethics, metaethics, moral psychology, political philosophy, applied ethics, feminist philosophy, philosophy of race, philosophy of law, epistemic normativity, and aesthetics. Each talk has a commentator and a chair, and we’ve aimed (almost entirely successfully) to have 90 distinct individuals on the program each year. Speakers and commentators are drawn from a call for abstracts that we put out in the latter part of the year preceding the conference, with abstracts due in April. (The call for next fall’s PNPC is here!) Chairs are drawn from those whose abstracts aren’t selected, from past attendees, and from philosophers across the Philly area and broader East..
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2025-10-29 17:36:14 UTC

“Fixing” the Definitions of Philosophical Terms
Sometimes, philosophical terms mean one thing, but sound like they really ought to mean something else. That was the premise of the Uxbridge Dictionary of Philosophy, a compilation of “misdefinitions” of philosophical ideas started by Anthony Gottlieb and compiled by the late D.H. Mellor. Dubbed the “illegitimate offspring” of the Uxbridge English Dictionary and the Philosophical Lexicon, the dictionary used to be hosted on Mellor’s website. Recently, Gottlieb shared with me some of the entries he contributed to it, lamenting that the whole collection appeared to no longer be online. While it’s not on an active site anymore, I did find the archived page, last updated September 10, 2019. So, below are the entries in the Uxbridge Dictionary of Philosophy. Suggested additions/revisions are welcome in the comments. A fortiori: There are at least 40 papers on this already A posteriori: He is talking out of his arse A priori: Someone already said that Abstraction: Stretching stomach muscles Accidental property: Windfall Aesthetic: Pain-inducing Argumentum ad baculum: Back-stabbing B-theory of time: Time is honey Bad company objection: ‘That’s what they say’ Canonical form: Clergyman’s track record Chinese Room: Restaurant with effective but uncomprehending waiters Chinese Room Argument: Dispute in a Chinese Room (q.v.) Contingent proposition: Unnecessary remark Converse: Prisoners’ poetry Copula: Small policewoman Demiurge: Weak inclination Determinist: Ambitious colleague Disposition: Here (see also ‘dat-position’) Dualist: Disputatious Endurantist: Patient listener Entailment: What Manx cats envy Error theory: Your theory Ex post facto: The proof is in the mail Existential import: Cheap foreign philosophy Extensional operator: Masseur Extensionally adequate: Stinks but otherwise OK External relation: Foreign family member Fallacy: Male-dominated Fictionalist: Liar Formal ontology: Black tie metaphysics Framework: Conceptual zimmer frame Genidentity: Jennifer’s essence Goedel’s Theorem: ‘Every system of truths contains at least one misrepresented by popularisers’ Heterological: Preferring the other truth-value Idealist: String of suggestions Internal relation: Embryo Intuition: Under instruction Material conditional: A device for drawing material conclusions from immaterial premises Mentalese: Dualist painkiller Metaphysics: Just encountered a branch of science Monist: Philosophical whinger Naturalist: Bare particular One over many: Head of Department Ontic vagueness: Indeterminate credit Ontological commitment: Longevity Ostrich nominalist: Exotic meat menu Overdetermined: Tries too hard Paradox: Military airports Physicalist: Muscular naturalist (q.v.) Presentist: Generous gift-giver Property dualism: ‘What’s yours is mine’ Propositional calculus: The..
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2025-10-29 12:56:36 UTC

Philosophers Among Recent Discovery Grant Winners
The Australian Research Council has announced the winners of its latest round of Discovery Grants, and several philosophers are among them. . The principal investigators, co-investigators, and their projects are listed below: Samuel Baron (University of Melbourne) with Elizabeth Sonenberg, Piers Howe, Kate Lynch, James Norton, Finnur Dellsén, Sander Beckers, Emily Sullivan, and Rach Cosker-Rowland An Interventionist Approach to Explainable Artificial Intelligence This project aims to develop a new approach to explaining and understanding decisions generated by artificial intelligence (AI). Popular approaches rely on counterfactuals, which focus on how an outcome would change, given different inputs. Such explanations are criticised in philosophy for failing to provide causal understanding. Interventionism is a theory of explanation from philosophy designed to yield such understanding. This project aims to develop new strategies for explaining AI decisions using interventionism. Expected outcomes include improved understanding of AI and better AI decision-making. Anticipated benefits include new knowledge and support for government to use AI effectively while protecting the interests of individuals. (AU$573,060) – – – Pierrick Bourrat (Macquarie University) with David Raubenheimer, Paul Griffiths, Charles Pence, and Cynthia Beall Health, Biological Fitness and Environmental Diversity Health is often impaired when evolved biological mechanisms interact with modern environments. But the idea that an ‘ancestral’ lifestyle will maximise health has been rightly derided as ‘paleofantasy’. Our team includes leaders of two fields that have taken a more productive approach to the impacts of diverse environments on biological fitness and on health: nutritional ecology and the evolutionary anthropology of altitude adaptation. Making explicit the ways in which these fields define reference environments and assess biological fitness will facilitate research on other health impacts of environmental diversity. This interdisciplinary collaboration will demonstrate the value of philosophy in science as opposed to philosophy of science. (AU$600,146) – – – Yuri Cath (La Trobe University) with Richard Skarbez, Mary Walker, Margot Strohminger, and Tim Bayne Virtual Reality and Knowing What It Is Like This project aims to investigate the idea that virtual reality (VR) is an ‘empathy machine’ that can simulate the experiences of other people and thereby give us knowledge of what it is like to have those experiences. The project expects to advance our understanding of this issue by bringing together..
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2025-10-21 11:00:05 UTC

American Association of Philosophy Teachers Upcoming 50th Anniversary (guest post)
The American Association of Philosophy Teachers (AAPT) will be 50 years old next year. Renée Smith, Professor of Philosophy at Coastal Carolina University, was recently elected president of the AAPT. In the following guest post, she talks about her experiences with the AAPT, what the organization does, and how to join it. The AAPT’s Upcoming 50th Anniversary by Renée Smith In 2026, the American Association of Philosophy Teachers will celebrate 50 years of advancing the art of teaching philosophy. This year, I was honored to become the 24th president of the American Association of Philosophy Teachers on what marks my own 20th anniversary of being involved with the AAPT. It is no exaggeration to say that the AAPT has been tremendously influential in my career as a philosophy professor. In 2006, just a few years into my first job, I attended my first AAPT conference at Washington and Jefferson College. I presented research I had done and techniques I had used to teach philosophy as a distance course. While I don’t remember much about my presentation, what I do remember is the uniquely inclusive conference “vibe.” I found a community of philosophy teachers who were engaged, welcoming, and excited to talk about teaching. Every session on the program offered thoughtful and practical pedagogical strategies as well as engaging and interactive discussions relevant to my career as a philosophy teacher. Even at communal meals and social events, people were excited to talk about teaching, share their experiences, and make professional connections with other philosophy teachers no matter how long, where, or in what capacity they taught philosophy. The AAPT conferences, and the many other AAPT activities I have since experienced, unlike any other professional activities, have been foundational to the professional life I have developed over the last 20 years as a philosophy professor. Because of the AAPT, I have attended, presented, and planned conferences sessions, published papers, co-edited a volume of AAPT Studies in Pedagogy, refereed conference and journal submissions, supported colleagues’ bids for promotion, mentored faculty, organized virtual conferences, facilitated virtual teaching discussions, and performed professional service on committees and on the board of the AAPT. In the coming year, as we prepare to celebrate the 50th anniversary of..
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2025-10-21 09:00:38 UTC

New: Political Theory Funding Database for Postdocs & other Early Career Researchers
A researcher in political theory has developed a new resource for early-career scholars working in political theory, political philosophy, and related fields. It’s a database of regularly-offered grants and fellowships that are aimed at junior researchers, particularly recent PhDs. The site was developed by Marcus Carlsen Häggrot, a political theorist working on the philosophy of electoral participation. He writes: “So many early-career political theory scholars do not realise they can apply for individual research funding, or they are not aware of the opportunities and programmes that are available across different countries. Closing this information gap is the aim of this website.” In addition to its list of grant programs, the site also has some basic grant application tips. Dr. Häggrot welcomes information about programs not yet listed, corrections and updates, and suggestions for how to improve the site. Check it out here.
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2025-10-20 16:12:13 UTC

Opposing Orthodoxy about Heterodoxy
“Whenever I see people engaged in philosophical debate or argument, I want to see people trying to win. I like my philosophy adversarial, aggressive, combative, and even hostile. I think there are some good reasons for this approach… but I also think it’s more fun that way. And I’m not the only one. Friedrich Nietzsche once said one of the reasons Socrates was so popular among the high-born youth of Athens was that he introduced them to a new kind of competitive wrestling.” That’s Michael Veber (East Carolina University) in a recent article in Theory and Society about why he won’t be joining Heterodox Academy anytime soon. Why not? For one thing, he doesn’t like “loyalty oaths”: Heterodox Academy (hereinafter, HxA) is an academic advocacy group devoted to promoting open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement in research and education… If you aspire to team up with notable heroes of the campus free speech movement and declare that you too are HxA, you must go online, click a box, and thereby affirm the following statement. “I support open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement”. In other words, you need to take a loyalty oath. But he also thinks this particular loyalty oath has a problem: The problem is that “constructive disagreement”, as HxA understands and advocates for it, is inconsistent with open inquiry and undermines viewpoint diversity. That makes the HxA loyalty oath logically self-contradictory and the act of requiring people to take it self-defeating. What does HxA mean by “constructive disagreement”? Veber shares the following, from the organization’s website: The objective of most intellectual exchanges should not be to “win,” but rather to have all parties come away from an encounter with a deeper understanding of our social, aesthetic, and natural worlds. Try to imagine ways of integrating strong parts of an interlocutor’s positions into one’s own. Don’t just criticize, consider viable positive alternatives. Try to work out new possibilities, or practical steps that could be taken to address the problems under consideration. The corollary to this guidance is to avoid sarcasm, contempt, hostility, and snark. Generally target ideas rather than people. Do not attribute negative motives to people you disagree with as an attempt at dismissing or discrediting their views. Avoid hyperbole..
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2025-10-16 01:48:44 UTC

The Plummeting Philosophy Major in the US (guest post)
Just a few years ago, the philosophy major seemed on the rise. Now, the data reveal a different picture. As Eric Schwitzgebel shares in the following guest post, the number of undergraduate degrees awarded in philosophy (and their share of the total undergraduate degrees awarded) has declined over the past few years. Furthermore, he notes that “relatively elite schools award disproportionately many philosophy degrees—and this tendency has increased as the percentage of students earning philosophy degrees has declined.” (A version of this post first appeared at The Splintered Mind.) The Plummeting Philosophy Major in the US by Eric Schwitzgebel Three years ago, I posted some optimistic reflections about how the philosophy major seemed to be recovering from its recent decline in the U.S. I take it back. The National Center for Education Statistics has released its numbers from the 2023-2024 academic year, and it’s bad. First off: The humanities in general have been hemorrhaging majors since about 2008. English in particular has been hammered. In the 2000-2001 academic year, 4.5% bachelor’s degrees recipients were English majors. Now it’s 1.7%. [1] Since philosophy started out low, its decline is not as visually evident in the above graph. Here are the raw numbers: Year: Philosophy BAs awarded (as a % of all Bachelor’s degrees) 2001: 5836 (.49%) 2002: 6529 (.52%) 2003: 7023 (.54%) 2004: 7707 (.57%) 2005: 8283 (.60%) 2006: 8532 (.60%) 2007: 8541 (.59%) 2008: 8778 (.59%) 2009: 8996 (.59%) 2010: 9268 (.59%) 2011: 9292 (.57%) 2012: 9362 (.56%) 2013: 9427 (.54%) 2014: 8820 (.49%) 2015: 8184 (.44%) 2016: 7489 (.40%) 2017: 7572 (.39%) 2018: 7667 (.39%) 2019: 8074 (.40%) 2020: 8209 (.40%) 2021: 8328 (.40%) 2022: 7958 (.39%) 2023: 7550 (.38%) 2024: 7091 (.36%) As you can see, there were grounds for hope around 2019-2021. However, since 2021 the number of bachelor’s degree completions in philosophy has fallen from 8328 to 7091—a 15% decline in just three years. The percentage of college students receiving philosophy degrees is at an all-time low. Bachelor’s degree completions in general have declined somewhat. They peaked at 2,068,932 in the 2020-2021 academic year and have declined slightly in every subsequent year, down to 1,959,325 for the 2023-2024 academic year—a 5% decline overall. Possible explanations of this general trend..
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2025-10-02 10:45:19 UTC

Mini-Heap
Recent additions to the Heap of Links… “What is the relationship between disability and well-being?” — in taking up this question, philosophers must consult—and critically analyze—the empirical literature, says Avram Hiller Tractatus lego-philosophicus — Philip Bold offers fellow philosophy instructors a useful metaphor for explaining early Wittgenstein “We know how to produce incisive critique, we know how to identify exclusions, how to name the ways power reproduces itself. Can we now build?” — Hollis Robbins on “the master’s” house and tools, aphorisms, AI, and threats to the academy “Two years ago, her employer started requiring chaplains to accrue more of what it called ‘productivity points.’ A visit to the dying: as little as one point. Participating in a funeral: one and three-quarters points” — the ethics of workplace surveillance and productivity monitoring for professionals “The game sees you as wander through the Alps as Friedrich Nietzsche, haunted by the wind-scattered pages of your final manuscript” — “Nietzsche’s Shadow” video game was recently released “It is a site for surveillance, control, name-calling. Functioning like a modern-day scarlet letter, the list can lead to ostracization, condemnation, and even the practice of self-silencing… for those who are placed on it” — George Yancy on being on Charlie Kirk’s “Professor Watchlist” “People in the fight game are fond of saying that boxing doesn’t build character; it reveals it. It can do both” — Gordon Marino on boxing and virtue Mini-Heap posts usually appear when several 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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2025-09-23 03:21:45 UTC

Jonathan Lear (1948-2025)
Jonathan Lear, Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago, has died. Professor Lear was well-known for bringing moral and social philosophy and psychoanalysis to bear on various aspects of the human condition. He is the author of Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life (2022), Wisdom Won From Illness: Essays in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis (2017), The Idea of a Philosophical Anthropology: The Spinoza Lectures (2017), A Case for Irony: The Tanner Lectures on Human Values (2011), Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (2006), Therapeutic Action: An Earnest Plea for Irony (2003), Happiness, Death and the Remainder of Life (2000), Open Minded: Working Out The Logic of the Soul (1998), Love and its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis (1990), Aristotle: The Desire to Understand (1988), and Aristotle and Logical Theory (1980), among other works, which you can learn more about here. Professor Lear joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1996. Prior to that, he taught at Yale University and the University of Cambridge. He earned his PhD in philosophy from The Rockefeller University, an MA and a BA in philosophy from Cambridge, and a BA in history from Yale. In an essay at The Point (that was developed into his Imagining the End), Professor Lear, discussing a joke about the end of the human species, turns to mourning and the Aristotelian idea of kalon, or the beautiful or noble: I would like to close by suggesting that mourning is itself kalon. It is not only good, but wondrous and marvelous that there should be mourning. As we have seen, mourning is a distinctively human way of responding to loss. It is a special manner of expressing grief: an insistence that what happened was no mere change. The loss is testament to our previous attachments—love and hate, care and entanglements—and constitutes us as beings with a history, a history that continues to matter. In response to loss we get busy making meaning, recreating what we have lost and reanimating forms of life that might otherwise disappear. This seems to me a wondrous response to love and loss, a wondrous response to caring and finitude in general. Jonathan..
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2025-09-03 10:00:29 UTC

How the Public Sees Philosophy: Insights from a National Survey in the Czech Republic (guest post)
What do ordinary people think philosophy is for? That’s one of the questions a pair of philosophers, Vít Gvoždiak and Martin Zach (Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences) aimed to answer. Last year, they conducted a national survey of the Czech public to learn how they perceive philosophy, what roles they assign to philosophers, and what they think count as philosophical texts. In the following guest post, they share some of their findings and see what kinds of broader lessons can be learned from them. (Their full report, in Czech, is available here.) How the Public Sees Philosophy: Insights from a National Survey in the Czech Republic by Vít Gvoždiak & Martin Zach When you hear the word philosophy, what comes to mind? For some, it might be Aristotle and Kant; for others, heated debates over beer, or a podcast episode about mindfulness. Philosophy has always sat in an odd position: at once an academic specialty, a personal quest for meaning, and a cultural shorthand for “deep thinking.” But here’s a simple question that surprisingly little research has addressed: what do ordinary people think philosophy is for? In 2024, we teamed up with the polling agency Focus to ask this question directly to the Czech public. Using a nationally representative survey of more than 1,000 respondents, we explored how Czechs perceive philosophy, what roles they assign to philosophers, and even how they recognize a “philosophical” text. The results are interesting, not only for what they reveal about Czech society, but also for what they suggest about philosophy’s image worldwide. The survey in context The survey took place online in October 2024, with over a thousand participants covering a representative sample of Czech adults aged 18 and over. Quotas ensured balance across gender, age, education, region, and size of settlement. We were interested in people’s attitudes toward philosophy, perceptions of philosophers’ roles in society and education, barriers to engaging with philosophy and how people judge whether a text is “philosophical.” While the results reflect the Czech context they echo broader questions that are relevant globally: Is philosophy seen as useful? As elitist? As a science, or as self-help? A general attitude: positive but vague One of the clearest findings is that Czechs do not reject philosophy. On the contrary, most..
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https://dailynous.com/2025/09/03/how-the-public-sees-philosophy-insights-from-a-national-survey-in-the-czech-republic-guest-post/

2025-09-01 12:50:25 UTC

Online Philosophy Resources Monthly Update
Here’s the last of the monthly updates on new and revised entries at online philosophy resources, new reviews of philosophy books, and new podcast episodes. Next week we return to a weekly schedule. (If we’ve missed anything, please let us know.) SEP New: Edmund Husserl by Dan Zahavi. Algorithmic Fairness by Deborah Hellman. Gauge Theories in Physics by John Dougherty. Preference Logic by Fenrong Liu and Leon van der Torre. Revised: Feminist Moral Psychology by Anita Superson. Non-Deductive Methods in Mathematics by Alan Baker. Ikhwān al-Safā’ by Carmela Baffioni. Thomas Paine by Mark Philp. Markets by Lisa Herzog. Sorites Paradox by Diana Raffman and Dominic Hyde. Feminist Ethics by Kathryn Norlock and Jordan Pascoe. Contractarianism by Ann Cudd and Seena Eftekhari. Prisoner’s Dilemma by Steven Kuhn. Autonomy in Moral and Political Philosophy by John Christman. Abstract Objects by José L. Falguera, Concha Martínez-Vidal, and Gideon Rosen. Decision Theory by Katie Steele and H. Orri Stefánsson. Ibn Rushd [Averroes] by Fouad Ben Ahmed and Robert Pasnau. Computation in Physical Systems by Gualtiero Piccinini. Counterfactuals by Willow Starr and Alex Kocurek. Ralph Cudworth by Sarah Hutton. Causation in Arabic and Islamic Thought by Kara Richardson. Trinity by Dale Tuggy. Justice as a Virtue by Mark LeBar. Giles of Rome by Roberto Lambertini. Idiolects by Alex Barber and Eduardo Garcia Ramirez. Confirmation by Vincenzo Crupi. Lady Anne Conway by Sarah Hutton. Robert Boyle by Peter Anstey and Jan-Erik Jones. The History of Utilitarianism by Julia Driver. Constructive Empiricism by Chad Mohler and Bradley Monton. Science and Pseudo-Science by Sven Ove Hansson. IEP Primary and Secondary Qualities: Wright’s Account by Ali Hossein Khani. Intuitionism in Mathematics by Bruno Bentzen. 1000-Word Philosophy Definitions of Art: What is Art? by Brock Rough. Philosophical Counseling: Using Philosophy to Address Life’s Challenges by Nathan Nobis. Dehumanization: What is it to Dehumanize People? by Dan Peterson. BJPS Short Reads ∅ Book Reviews Health Problems: Philosophical Puzzles about the Nature of Health by Elizabeth Barnes is reviewed by Alison Reiheld at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life by Agnes Callard is reviewed by Mary Townsend at The Bulwark. Transcendence for Beginners by Clare Carlisle is reviewed by Sarah Bakewell at The Guardian. Biological Essentialism..
The post https://dailynous.com/2025/09/01/online-philosophy-resources-monthly-update-9/
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https://dailynous.com/2025/09/01/online-philosophy-resources-monthly-update-9/

2025-08-29 22:17:37 UTC

Mini-Heap
Recent links… “They don’t necessarily think their movements will make all the difference—at least not in the short term. But they believe they can make a difference to their movement” — Michael Brownstein & Alex Madva on the civic value of losing loudly A fictional movie about sexual harassment, set in the Yale Philosophy Department, will be out in the US in October — starring Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri, Andrew Garfield, and Chloë Sevigny, the film is getting mixed reviews Transformative shared experiences — L.A. Paul and Brian Earp talk about “transformative experiences shared by couples or groups, where it isn’t just individuals who change, but relationships themselves” “Lincoln… both fought passionately against slavery and held that racial inequality was unavoidable and acceptable” — Sacha Golob on the complexities of morally assessing “flawed heroes” What is it like to have a brain-computer interface? — “the Neuralink device has been entirely transformative,” says the first patient to have one implanted Don’t be a “drive-by critic” — Nathan Nobis explains what that is, and what we should do instead Is there a sharp cutoff between the conscious and the non-conscious? — Pete Mandik offers a thought experiment about consciousness and vagueness Mini-Heap posts usually appear when several 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/2025/08/29/mini-heap-674/
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https://dailynous.com/2025/08/29/mini-heap-674/

2025-08-26 11:00:48 UTC

You Don’t Need an AI Policy — You Need Two (guest post)
What will tell your students about whether and how they may use AI for work you assign? It depends on the students, right? That’s the main idea behind today’s guest post by Victor Kumar (Boston University). Professor Kumar is co-author (w/Richmond Campbell) of A Better Ape (OUP, 2022). In addition to his academic work, he writes about philosophy, teaching, and society at his blog, Open Questions. “To capitalize on the benefits of AI and avoid the risks, teachers must craft two AI policies: one for classes where most of the students will exploit any available shortcuts, and another for classes where most of the students won’t,” Kumar writes. He’s teaching an intro-level course and an upper-level course this term, and in what follows he shares elements of the different approaches to student AI use he is taking in them. You Don’t Need an AI Policy. You Need Two. One policy to preserve the take-home essay, another to explore the frontiers of education by Victor Kumar Many university professors (like me) are worried that AI will short-circuit learning. By outsourcing written assignments to LLMs like ChatGPT or Claude, students avoid thinking for themselves. If we don’t curb this practice, they’ll learn nothing in our courses, and the value of a university education will collapse. Yet others (also me) argue that AI—when used properly—accelerates learning. Like other information technologies that once seemed threatening but ultimately proved invaluable, LLMs scaffold cognition and allow users to ascend to new intellectual heights. We just need to figure out how to unlock this potential in our classrooms. So who’s right? Both are. (I’m right twice over.) The same technology that threatens cognitive atrophy also promises to nurture intellectual growth. You might search for a single AI policy that minimizes the odds of degrading student learning and maximizes the odds of enhancing it. Yet it’s impossible to devise take-home assignments that students won’t game with AI. Ask students to have an LLM generate an essay and then critique it themselves? Some will just outsource the critique as well. To capitalize on the benefits of AI and avoid the risks, teachers must craft two AI policies: one for classes where most of the students will exploit any available shortcuts,..
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https://dailynous.com/2025/08/26/you-dont-need-an-ai-policy-you-need-two-guest-post/

2025-08-25 10:45:09 UTC

“Pity the Poor Reader”
“Pity the poor reader” is one of philosopher Penelope Maddy‘s writing maxims. Maddy is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Irvine, and is interviewed about her writing by Nathan Ballantyne (Arizona State) at his site, The Workbench. What does she mean by it? She says: In philosophy especially, I figure the reader is nearly always gasping for breath, in danger of being swept out to sea, so the writer should do everything in their power to help. Keep things as simple and explicit, as direct and straightforward as you can. Don’t hedge or obfuscate. Don’t use jargon unless you define it. (Philosophical words—realism, analyticity, empiricism, etc.—are used in so many different ways that it’s not safe to call on one without saying explicitly what you mean by it.) Give concrete examples. Down to earth examples are always best, I think… I sometimes said to my students, I don’t care what happens on Mars (Twin Earth, etc.), tell me what happens here! Later in the interview she shares a variant of this advice, picked up during her time in grad school at Princeton, which she has passed on to others: At the time, [Thomas Nagel] lived in New York City and commuted down to Princeton by train. Rumor had it that he read his students’ short papers during the train ride, with all the noise and distractions that would involve. So the grad student scuttlebutt was that we needed to write our papers clearly and directly enough to come through to someone in that challenging environment. I used to share that advice with my students: Write for Nagel on the Train. The interview contains further interesting details about Maddy’s writing, along with more bits of writing advice. You can read the whole interview here. Discussion welcome, as are writing suggestions.
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https://dailynous.com/2025/08/25/pity-the-poor-reader/

2025-08-25 08:30:36 UTC

Mini-Heap
Recent links… While much has been written about how current generations should wield the power they have to affect future generations, almost nothing has been written on whether that power is legitimate — but there’s a question there. Is it a good one? Emil Andersson thinks so To what extent is visual perception influenced by one’s culture? — a look at some recent findings “Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world” — the 21 rules of 17th Century Samurai Miyamoto Musashi (interesting on their own but also for lessons on Stoic and Buddhist philosophy) “Philosophy majors scored higher than students in all other majors on standardized tests of verbal and logical reasoning, as well as on self-reports of good habits of mind, even after accounting for freshman-year differences” — Vazquez & Prinzing’s op-ed on their research (covered previously at DN) is being republished in several popular news venues “It was new math… A machine just contributed original research-level mathematics” — ChatGPT-5-Pro “reasoned for 17 minutes, and produced a correct proof,” making novel progress on an open problem in math (via MR) “In living things, unlike in machines, unreliable parts make a reliable whole” and “the unreliability of biological building blocks is not a bug, it’s a feature” — a way of thinking about the difference between organisms and machines “Expertise induces epistemic opacity to outsiders.” Was Aristotle aware of this problem? And what did he think the solution is? — Eric Schliesser on epistemic trespassing, synthetic philosophy, and On the Parts of Animals Mini-Heap posts usually appear when several 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/2025/08/25/mini-heap-673/

2025-08-21 12:12:58 UTC

Ryan Lake (1976-2025)
Ryan Lake, assistant professor of philosophy at Perimeter College at Georgia State University, has died. Ryan’s philosophical interests were mainly on questions related to freedom and determinism. In addition to his academic work and teaching, Ryan dedicated a significant amount of time and effort popularizing philosophy. His main channel for this was his philosophical comic strip, Chaospet, which I was fortunate to be able to publish for several years at Daily Nous. You can view those comics here. He also had a series of philosophy videos on TikTok. Ryan defended a version of compatibilism, yet a recurring theme of his comics was the absurdity of human agency, responsibility, and valuing in a mechanical and indifferent universe. (Chaospet by Ryan Lake, January 15, 2019) For Ryan, the absurdity of our condition also included the human capacity, or perhaps need, to grasp for the silver lining in what seem like metaphysically or epistemically undesirable conditions. (Chaospet by Ryan Lake, September 12, 2017) And of course he did not exempt his own way of grappling with the human condition from his ironic lens. (Chaospet by Ryan Lake, September 20, 2022) Ryan died of cancer. He was 48 years old.
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https://dailynous.com/2025/08/21/ryan-lake-1976-2025/

2025-08-17 22:38:27 UTC

Philosopher’s Annual for 2024
The articles that made it into the latest edition of Philosophers Annual have been announced. The list aims to “select the ten best articles published in philosophy each year—an attempt as simple to state as it is admittedly impossible to fulfill.” This volume—the 44th—covers the literature from 2024. The selections are: Rosalind Chaplin (UNC Chapel Hill), “Kant on the Conceptual Possibility of Actually Infinite Tota Synthetica,” from Kantian Review Most interpreters hold that Kant rejects actually infinite tota synthetica as conceptually impossible. This view is attributed to Kant to relieve him of the charge that the first antinomy’s thesis argument presupposes transcendental idealism. I argue that important textual evidence speaks against this view, and Kant in fact affirms the conceptual possibility of actually infinite tota synthetica. While this means the first antinomy may not be decisive as an indirect argument for idealism, it gives us a better account of how our ideas of the unconditioned generate the antinomies, and it allows us to see important and often overlooked elements in Kant’s account of the infinite. Nicholas DiBella (Carnegie Mellon), “Cantor, Choice, and Paradox,” from The Philosophical Review This article proposes a revision of Cantor’s account of set size that understands comparisons of set size fundamentally in terms of surjections rather than injections. This revised account is equivalent to Cantor’s account if the axiom of choice is true, but its consequences differ from those of Cantor’s if the axiom of choice is false. This article argues that the revised account is an intuitive generalization of Cantor’s account, blocks paradoxes—most notably, that a set can be partitioned into a set that is bigger than it—that can arise from Cantor’s account if the axiom of choice is false, illuminates the debate over whether the axiom of choice is true, is a mathematically fruitful alternative to Cantor’s account, and sheds philosophical light on one of the oldest unsolved problems in set theory. Caspar Jacobs (Leiden), “Comparativist Theories or Conspiracy Theories?” from The Journal of Philosophy Although physical theories routinely posit absolute quantities, such as absolute position or intrinsic mass, it seems that only comparative quantities such as distance and mass ratio are observable. But even if there are in fact only distances and mass ratios, the success of absolutist..
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https://dailynous.com/2025/08/17/philosophers-annual-for-2024/

2025-08-11 08:30:17 UTC

Texas Hires Gustafsson and Ward
Philosophers Johan Gustafsson and Thomas Ward have been hired by the University of Texas at Austin. Johan Gustafsson was most recently senior research fellow at the University of York. He joins the UT Austin Department of Philosophy this fall as full professor. His research covers a range of topics in moral and political philosophy, and he is the author of Money-Pump Arguments (2022), among many other works. You can learn more about his writings at here and here. Thomas Ward was previously associate professor of philosophy at Baylor University. This fall, he will be associate professor in the School of Civic Leadership at UT Austin with a courtesy appointment as associate professor in the Department of Philosophy. Ward works on the history of philosophy, especially medieval philosophy, and has authored several books in the area. You can learn more about his work here and here. Additionally, UT Austin’s Department of Philosophy hired Jens Jäger, who will start as assistant professor this fall.
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https://dailynous.com/2025/08/11/texas-hires-gustafsson-and-ward/

2025-07-30 08:00:17 UTC

Opportunity to Volunteer to Teach Online Courses for Ukrainian Universities
A pair of philosophers have created a program that facilitates volunteers for team-teaching online courses at Ukrainian universities. The European Initiative for Online Tandem Courses for Ukrainian Universities launched in September of last year. It arranges for teams of two European university lecturers from two different countries to offer philosophy seminars via a virtual platform (such as Zoom) at Ukrainian universities. It is done on a voluntary basis and at no cost to the universities. The aims of the program include communicating to Ukrainian students and scholars: that Ukraine is not alone in this terrible war of aggression and that we as European partners stand in solidarity with Ukraine, that Ukraine is already part of a peaceful and cooperative Europe today, that Russian aggression cannot prevent Ukraine and its European partners from living the “European way of life”, with the tandem teaching method of two lecturers from different European countries, that we work together within the European Union across national and language borders, and opportunities for gaining academic contacts throughout Europe. The initiative was created by Ulrich Arnswald (University of Innsbruck, Austria) and Joaquín Jareño Alarcon (University of Murcia, Spain), who have been teaching a two-hour seminar once a week for the Oles Honchar Dnipro National University in Dnipro, close to the front line. Professor Arnswald says, “Every seminar is extremely intensive, the students are highly motivated (and there are good reasons for this) and, despite the strong focus on the philosophical content, you gradually learn more about the war, personal feelings and concerns.” About the program as a whole, the organizers write: When we developed this initiative, we remembered the Samizdat underground seminars of the Cold War. At that time, various philosophers such as Charles Taylor, Roger Scruton, Jacques Derrida, and R.M. Hare participated in a kind of “underground university” in Czechoslovakia, one of the most repressive states behind the Iron Curtain. This group came together on short notice, the seminars took place in private flats in the Czechoslovakia over a few days, and then the colleagues left the country again to avoid being picked up by the secret service. It was an adventurous undertaking, described in a book by Barbara Day entitled The Velvet Philosophers (1999). What this generation did for..
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https://dailynous.com/2025/07/30/opportunity-to-volunteer-to-teach-online-courses-for-ukrainian-universities/

2025-07-25 12:58:51 UTC

Mini-Heap
Recent additions to the Heap of Links… “As societies become more complex in the sense of the growth of hyper-specialization, then the odds should go up of philosophy (understood as a distinct discipline) arising” — is this a testable hypothesis? Eric Schliesser on the social origins of philosophy Researchers “have performed a quasi-resurrection of the late experimental American composer Alvin Lucier, creating a sort of brain that continuously composes music on the fly with its errant electrical signals” — gimmicky now, but what will future versions be like? (And what questions about aesthetics, ethics, and agency does this raise?) “It isn’t difficult to be winged when one has Plato’s faith; but to see the world as a lump of matter, to dwell in it as if one dwelt in a graveyard, and still, even here, not to allow our wings to wither away—this is the true art” — the beauty of the “inhuman” materialist “religion” of Lucretius, made vivid by Henryk Elzenberg (in a 1927 essay just recently translated into English) “What’s your philosophy?” — comedian Ray O’Leary, who has an MA in philosophy, brings it up in his act sometimes “For an analytic philosopher, life itself is extracurricular” — Justin Smith-Ruiu on, among other things, analytic philosophy’s “pretension to having successfully transcended worldly pressures” “What do we even mean when we ask whether bots, bees or babies are conscious?” — Tim Bayne on what we can learn from jazz and dolphins about the meaning of “consciousness” People’s trust in experts is decreasing. Why? — Steven Hales offers a perfect-if-true answer: because the people don’t know even know what expertise is Mini-Heap posts usually appear when several 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/2025/07/25/mini-heap-669/

2025-07-24 07:00:40 UTC

Columbia University Caves
Door #1: Lose at least $400 million in federal grants. Door #2: Lose at least $221 million and your institutional autonomy. Not an enviable choice for any university. Columbia University just chose Door #2 (as at least one professor warned it would, a few months back), and with that choice comes the risks of appeasement, not to mention a fair amount of uncertainty. The agreement Columbia has made with the Trump administration gives the government considerable oversight over the university, and furthermore, “Nothing in this Agreement prevents the United States (even during the period of the Agreement) from conducting subsequent compliance reviews, investigations, or litigation” (sec. 17). The agreement requires the university to, among other things: “conduct a thorough review of the portfolio of programs in regional areas across the University, starting with the Middle East” “appoint new faculty members with joint positions in both the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies and the departments or fields of economics, political science, or SIPA [School of International and Public Affairs]” “add an additional administrator… who will serve as a liaison to students concerning antisemitism issues, advise the University’s agreement Administrator and other University leaders and make recommendations to University leaders about ways to improve and to support Jewish students” “not maintain programs that promote unlawful efforts to achieve race-based outcomes, quotas, diversity targets, or similar efforts” “not use personal statements, diversity narratives, or any applicant reference to racial identity” in admissions “provide the Resolution Monitor and the United States with admissions data… showing both rejected and admitted students broken down by race, color, grade point average, and performance on standardized tests” “provide that all hiring and promotion practices for faculty and administrative roles are grounded solely in individual qualifications and academic and professional merit, and shall not use of race, color, sex, or national origin as a factor-implicit or explicit-in hiring decisions across all schools, departments, and programs” not “use personal statements, diversity narratives, or any applicant reference to racial identity” in hiring “undertake a comprehensive review of its international admissions processes and policies and will ensure that international student-applicants are asked questions designed to elicit their reasons for wishing to study in the United States.” “take steps to decrease financial..
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https://dailynous.com/2025/07/24/columbia-university-caves/

2025-07-01 11:30:56 UTC

Philosophy Departments as Sites of Collective Intellectual Activities: a Decline? (guest post & poll)
Has there been “a marked decline in faculty participation in seminars, colloquia, reading groups, and other intellectual gatherings that once formed the core of academic life”? Annalisa Costella (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) and Kritika Maheshwari (Delft University of Technology) think so. In the following guest post, they share views about the importance of various in-person events and activities typical of philosophy departments, as well as their observations about the extent of faculty of participation in them. They have also constructed a brief poll on the topic, which you can find at the end of the post. This is the fifth entry in the 2025 Summer Guest Post Series. (It will stay pinned to the top of the home page for a few days.) Philosophy Departments as Sites of Collective Intellectual Activities: a Decline? by Annalisa Costella and Kritika Maheshwari This post was born out of a series of conversations between the two of us, as well as with other colleagues, senior and junior, tenured and non-tenured, from a variety of institutions. One of the reasons why we entered this profession is the unique promise it offers: the chance to pursue the “life of the mind”. Academic philosophy seems attractive not only because it offers the prospects of a career spent doing research on what one finds puzzling, fascinating, or daunting, but also because it provides a platform to think deeply about pressing challenges surrounding our societies. Doing research, we take it, is not just about sitting at one’s desk and rewriting the same sentences over and over in the hope of getting one’s papers published. It also, and perhaps crucially, involves engaging in intellectual exchange: discussing ideas with one’s peers, taking part in seminars and workshops, providing feedback on drafts, broadening one’s horizons by trying to get the nitty-gritty details of a talk given by someone who works in a different area of philosophical expertise, and so on. This active engagement with one’s research community seems to us an important component of intellectual life, and more appealing than the image of the solitary philosopher alone at their desk, perpetually toiling away in isolation. While we are aware that some of our peers would rather spend their work life typing away by..
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https://dailynous.com/2025/07/01/philosophy-departments-as-sites-of-collective-intellectual-activities-a-decline/

2025-06-24 11:51:16 UTC

Sullivan Wins $10 Million Grant for “Love Ethic” Project at Notre Dame
Meghan Sullivan, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, has won a $10 million grant for the project, “Love and Social Transformation: Empowering Scholars and Social Innovators to Develop the Love Ethic.” According to a press release from Notre Dame: The Love and Social Transformation project will bring scholars, writers, nonprofit leaders and others together to advance a framework that captures the power, richness and applicability of the love ethic—a core component of many faith traditions throughout the world. Love-based ethical insights have powered some of the most important social movements of the past century, such as Mahatma Gandhi’s Satyagraha movement in India and Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights leadership in the United States. But in the 21st century, the more common approaches to ethical decision-making — especially in policy realms — focus instead on cost-benefit analysis. “These frameworks neglect the dimensions of life that fit into the rich tradition of virtue ethics — moral touchpoints such as love, dignity and awe,” said Meghan Sullivan, the Wilsey Family College Professor of Philosophy, director of the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good and the Notre Dame Ethics Initiative, and principal investigator for the grant. “In contrast, the love ethic has three components: It holds that a widespread, non-merit-based trait like dignity is what grounds moral significance for each one of us; it is built around principles that situate interpersonal love at the foundations of our ethical reasoning; and it suggests love-oriented policies on diverse social issues as well as a love-oriented way of life.” The grant is from the John Templeton Foundation. Notre Dame will collaborate with up to 10 other institutions as research partners on this work, and researchers “will apply the love ethic to a wide range of use cases, including issues of displacement and migration, disability, global philanthropy, political polarization and artificial intelligence.” The funding will support residential fellowships for faculty and graduate students developing the theoretical foundations for the love ethic, fellowships and grants to nonprofit leaders and organizations putting this ethic into practice on pressing social issues, intensive workshops and two global conferences designed to expand the reach of the love ethic, an integrated series of public engagement and storytelling programs that will inspire the..
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https://dailynous.com/2025/06/24/sullivan-wins-10-million-grant-for-love-ethic-project-at-notre-dame/

2025-06-19 13:21:37 UTC

Mini-Heap
Recent links… “The usage of LLMs could actually harm learning, especially for younger users” — a new study on brain activity and the use of LLMs like ChatGPT “At the microscopic scale, where particles act like billiard balls, time is reversible… But at the mesoscopic and macroscopic levels, there is no going back in time” — the mathematics of gas and “a rigorous mathematical resolution of an old paradox” “I have Hume to thank for all the bacon I’ve eaten” — Michael Frazer takes a break from lecturing students about the Scottish Enlightenment to perform five minutes of stand-up about it “Correlation does imply causation” — Naftali Weinberger has launched a series of brief videos introducing ideas about causal inference “My hope is that there are folks who either have been swayed by anti-trans sentiment or have remained confused by the whole affair who are willing to take this journey with me” — Talia Mae Bettcher begins a series of posts “to address the anti-trans arguments and positions in a systematic way” “The media’s complete erasure of the large group of American Jews… critical of Israel’s actions in Gaza, has allowed the Trump regime to conduct its dismantling of the US higher education system under the pretext of fighting antisemitism” — Jason Stanley on how the media is helping Trump attack universities “Analytic philosophy does not guide its individual practitioners to the truth… Rather, if there is any rightness or truth that is produced by this otherwise odd practice of… squatting in bits of logical space, it is at the level of the collective practice” — Eric Schliesser begins a series of posts on Christoph Schuringa’s Social History of Analytic Philosophy Smart phones are great examples of extended cognition, right? — No, argue Rachael L. Brown & Robert C. Brooks: “by design, modern smartphones frequently thwart the ability of their users to achieve the goals and desires cannot be considered part of users’ cognitive systems” Mini-Heap posts usually appear when several 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..
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https://dailynous.com/2025/06/19/mini-heap-664/

2025-06-17 13:04:18 UTC

New: “Being Trans in Philosophy”
A new zine, Being Trans in Philosophy, launched today, featuring testimonials from many trans philosophers and philosophers with a trans family members. Edited by Ding and Willow Star, the free zine is available here. From a press release from the editors: A new zine released today collects 22 first-personal accounts of what it is actually like to be trans or have trans kids as a philosopher. Being Trans in Philosophy details the material and on-the-ground consequences of our discipline’s role in providing intellectual cover for a global transmisogynistic and transphobic moral panic—one that has been increasingly institutionalized into laws and policies. “I work in the USA on a visa and live in constant dread that ICE is going to show up on my doorstep, tell me the gender marker on my passport is false, and cite that as grounds for my detention or deportation,” a trans woman philosopher wrote in the zine. “I can’t imagine how much more fear I’d be living in if I were out about being trans, like many of my friends are. It is such a betrayal that some of my philosopher colleagues have played such an outsized role in making this oppression of trans people possible.” Philosophical conversations about trans people do not happen in a vacuum. They happen in a political context where trans people are relentlessly attacked and a material context where trans lives are particularly vulnerable. These contexts make it impossible to “just ask questions” about trans people. And trans people and our loved ones are not okay—in, with, and because of our discipline. “Talia Mae Bettcher talks about the WTF of existence—where up becomes down and down becomes up. I can’t begin to say how much this captures my experience as a parent of a trans kid right now,” said Erin Beeghly, another contributor to the zine. “Now bullies run the show—in dominant online spaces in our discipline, in our state legislature, in the U.S. government. State law bars kids like him from playing sports. It is illegal for him to use the bathroom associated with his gender identity at school. Just last month, my kid lost access to gender-affirming healthcare at our local hospital.” “I had days where I was spat..
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https://dailynous.com/2025/06/17/new-being-trans-in-philosophy/

2025-06-02 09:00:15 UTC

Online Philosophy Resources Weekly Update
The weekly report on new and revised entries at online philosophy resources, new reviews of philosophy books, and new podcast episodes… This update covers the past two weeks. As we’ve done for the past few years, we’re switching to a monthly update for the summer; the next update will be in the first week of July. SEP New: ∅ Revised: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel by Paul Redding. Distributive Justice and Empirical Moral Psychology by Christian B. Miller. Francisco Sanches by Rolando Pérez. Intensional Transitive Verbs by Graeme Forbes. Adam Smith’s Moral and Political Philosophy by Samuel Fleischacker. Turing Machines by Liesbeth De Mol. Dependence Logic by Pietro Galliani. Theological Voluntarism by Mark Murphy. Clarence Irving Lewis by Bruce Hunter. The Traditional Square of Opposition by Terence Parsons and Graziana Ciola. IEP Intuitionism in Mathematics by Bruno Bentzen. 1000-Word Philosophy Rudolf Otto on “Numinous” Religious Experience by Matthew Sanderson. BJPS Short Reads ∅ Book Reviews* An Instrumentalist Theory of Political Legitimacy by Matthias Brinkmann is reviewed by Fabian Wendt at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. A Realistic Blacktopia: Why We Must Unite to Fight by Derrick Darby is reviewed by Vanessa Wills at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Democracy and Beauty: The Political Aesthetics of W. E. B. Du Bois by Robert Gooding-Williams is reviewed by Becca Rothfeld at The Washington Post. A Philosophy of Shame: A Revolutionary Emotion by Frédéric Gros is reviewed at Kirkus Reviews. Ethics and the Environment: An Introduction (2nd ed.) by Dale Jamieson is reviewed by Nicolas Delon at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Kant on Freedom and Rational Agency by Markus Kohl is reviewed by Frederick Rauscher at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Thinking of Necessity: A Kantian Account of Modal Thought and Modal Metaphysics by Jessica Leech is reviewed by Uygar Abaci at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Karl Marx in America by Andrew Hardman is reviewed by Devin Thomas O’Shea at Los Angeles Review of Books, by Michael Kazin at The New Republic, and at Kirkus Reviews. Essays on Relativism: 2001-2021 by Crispin Wright is reviewed by Derek Ball at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Philosophy Podcasts – Recent Episodes (via Jason Chen) Compiled by Michael Glawson * The Book Reviews section contains links to reviews of books by philosophers in non-academic..
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2025-05-27 18:40:30 UTC

New Philosophy Outreach Program: Philosophy Smash
A philosopher at the University of Birmingham, Henry Taylor, has a new philosophy outreach program. Philosophy Smash with Henry! aims to introduce children to philosophical questions. In the following guest post, Professor Taylor explains the various aspects of the project, and invites other philosophers to take part. Philosophy Smash with Henry! by Henry Taylor (art by Jen Elliot) The Idea While there are many brilliant resources available for learning about philosophy, there are relatively few aimed at a younger age group and designed for classrooms. I decided to record some short (6-9 minute) interviews with experts on philosophical topics, with schools in mind. The result is Philosophy Smash with Henry! Each video is a conversation between me and an expert in the field, themed around a philosophical question, like ‘How should we treat animals?’ and ‘Are rocks conscious?’, aimed at a class of 9-13 year-olds. The goal is to inform children about a philosophical question, and present one or two thoughts on the matter. The project also aims to spread the word about philosophy’s breadth. Rather than going for the ‘classic’ topics and thinkers, we aim for more contemporary issues that can capture the popular imagination. For example, we want people to know that philosophy has something to say about what animals are thinking?) The project is generously supported by an Impact Acceleration Account Grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (grant number AH/X003388/1) and it’s in partnership with SAPERE P4C, a charity that provides philosophical resources to schools, colleges and communities. The Videos For several years, I have recorded video interviews with philosophers and used them in my teaching, both at undergrad and postgrad level. What I really love about this format is that, in an interview, philosophers will often talk about the background motivations for thinking about an issue in a certain way and sometimes explain the things in their own lives that led them to a certain idea. This is what inspired a video-interview format. The project was also inspired by The Philosophy Garden, a set of free philosophy resources for kids, also based at the University of Birmingham (for more info on The Philosophy Garden, see this Daily Nous article). Most of the interviewees are..
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2025-05-23 15:22:37 UTC

A Way Analytic Philosophy Is More Accessible than Other Humanities?
Philosopher Samantha Brennan (Guelph) is the daughter of bakers who emigrated from Northern England to Canada, and who never went to college. In a post at #First-Gen Philosophers, Brennan recounts some of the ways she noticed class differences throughout her education: I entered university not knowing much about upper-class backgrounds and I often felt like I was above many things richer fellow students valued. My undergrad aesthetic was 80s punk, and the rejection of nice cars, summer homes, and warm winter vacations all seemed part of the package. I felt it was my academic and political commitments, not my class background, that separated me from richer students. But likely, it was a bit of both… That was the other big difference: working. I worked close to full-time throughout my undergraduate studies and studied hard. I didn’t once attend orientation week. Why do that when you could work and earn money? I also never lived in residence as it was too expensive. My experience differed from that of my classmates from wealthy families but I was never convinced that their experiences were better. My parents were so proud of me and so happy. Their parents nagged and exerted lots of pressure. I developed an excellent work ethic, some very good habits, and really enjoyed my studies. Time spent reading and doing school work felt like a treat. Often, the rich kids seemed anxious and miserable… Graduate school felt positively luxurious. I was all in once I learned I’d get paid for studying and for being a TA. Brennan then comments on class and the accessibility of analytic philosophy: In a way, I think I lucked out, falling in love with philosophy. Of all the humanities disciplines analytic philosophy is probably the one that relies the least on one knowing the music and literature of the upper classes. I liked the idea that we read small amounts of things very closely. The kind of abstract thought that philosophy rewards doesn’t rely on a knowledge of social codes and cues. I no longer think that the best philosophy is abstract in this way but it made for an easier point of entry. It’s even acceptable, within Philosophy, to be scornful about upper-class things...
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2025-05-22 12:18:18 UTC

Mini-Heap
New links… “Any sign of struggle on my part seemed to be taken as evidence that, perhaps, I was not cut out for intellectual life and did not care enough about philosophy” — an interview with Vanessa Wills King Lawrence the Lion and Maple the Meerkat navigate tricky philosophical questions in a new BBC series for kids — “Fantastic Philosophy” is narrated by Stephen Fry “You can leave the country and stay with the struggle or stay in the country and not participate in the struggle, and to be blunt, the majority of people in the US are not participating” — Rebecca Solnit enters the debate over academics leaving the US “Wealth concentration has fallen—not risen—over the past century… The dominant quantitative fact of the century is… a dramatic wealth equalization propelled by mass asset ownership” — an economist on the risks of “misreading inequality” “‘A philosopher!’ said the doctor; ‘Can yon screw your head off and on.’ ‘No, sir’ I said. ‘Oh, then, you are no philosopher.’” — Jeremy Bentham is “interviewed” by Richard Marshall “Nihilism” is the word of the week at NPR — owing to the bombing of a fertility clinic in California “I became more and more interested in the role probability plays in thinking about… how strong something is as a reason for believing something else” — Brandon Fitelson and Sean Carroll discuss probability 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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2025-05-20 10:45:25 UTC

Mini-Heap
Latest links… “By seeing knowledge as mere facts to be distilled without the struggle that leads to the ecstasy of enlightenment, my students are depriving themselves of one of the most profound delights of humanity” — Steven Gimbel on the thinker’s high Are recent episodes of “wild” scientific speculation the product of “badly digested versions of the work of two twentieth-century philosophers”? — Carlo Rovelli thinks so “The aim of the philosopher… is to tell men what they ought to think, rather than what they do think” — Henry Sidgwick is “interviewed” by Richard Marshall “I am not a national security threat; I’m a philosopher-citizen who desires to make sure that human creative capacities aren’t imprisoned” — George Yancy responds to the Trump administration’s banning of his books from the Naval Academy “The best you’re ever going to get is a catalog of possibilities, none reliable and all in some way vexed” — it is difficult to write wisely about death, but damn can Amy Olberding write about that difficulty There’s “what one says,” which is not the same as expressions of “what I think”. ChatGPT can handle the former, but only we are capable of the latter — Chad Engelland on the implications of this distinction “They should be leading from the positions of incredible safety they occupy” — a different take on the departure of fascism scholars from the US to Canada 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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2025-05-19 11:38:35 UTC

Online Philosophy Resources Weekly Update
The weekly report on new and revised entries at online philosophy resources, new reviews of philosophy books, and new podcast episodes… (If we’ve missed anything, please let us know.) SEP New: The Ethics of Abortion by Elizabeth Harman. Revised: Anomalous Monism by Steven Yalowitz. Philosophy of History by Daniel Little. The Theology of Aristotle by Peter Adamson. Abu Bakr al-Razi by Peter Adamson. Zeno of Elea by John Palmer. Dynamic Choice by Chrisoula Andreou. Events by Roberto Casati and Achille Varzi. Holes by Roberto Casati and Achille Varzi. IEP ∅ 1000-Word Philosophy ∅ BJPS Short Reads ∅ Book Reviews* A Philosophy of Shame: A Revolutionary Emotion by Frédéric Gros is reviewed by Nina Power at The Telegraph. Also a History of Philosophy, Vol. II: The Occidental Constellation of Faith and Knowledge by Jürgen Habermas, translated by Ciaran Cronin is reviewed by Martin Jay at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Varieties of Voluntarism In Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy by Jörn Müller and Sonja Schierbaum (eds.) is reviewed by Monika Michałowska at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Plato and the Tyrant: The Fall of Greece’s Greatest Dynasty and the Making of a Philosophic Masterpiece by James Romm is reviewed at Kirkus. Philosophy Podcasts – Recent Episodes (via Jason Chen) Compiled by Michael Glawson * The Book Reviews section contains links to reviews of books by philosophers in non-academic media as well as in open-access reviews published in academic journals. BONUS: A virtue?
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https://dailynous.com/2025/05/19/online-philosophy-resources-weekly-update-401/

2025-05-17 11:49:42 UTC

Portmore from Arizona State to Notre Dame
Douglas W. Portmore, previously professor of philosophy at Arizona State University, will be moving to the University of Notre Dame, where he will be professor of philosophy. Professor Portmore is known for his work in normative ethics. He is the author of, among other things, Opting for the Best: Oughts and Options (2019) and Commonsense Consequentialism: Wherein Morality Meets Rationality (2011), and he is currently writing a book entitled Kantsequentialism: A Morality of Ends. He is the editor-in-chief of Ethics. You can learn more about him and his research here and here. Portmore’s hire is due in part to the Notre Dame Ethics Initiative, “a University-wide strategic effort that aims to establish Notre Dame as a premier global destination for the study of ethics.” He takes up his new position in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame in the fall of 2025, though he won’t start teaching there until the spring of 2026.
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2025-05-13 17:17:09 UTC

Two Recent Proposals for Fixing the Referee Crisis in Philosophy
Two philosophers have recently floated proposals for fixing the referee crisis in philosophy. What crisis? Well here’s one statement of it. In the culmination of a four-part series on the problem at his blog—the last part is here, and includes links to the previous ones—Daniel Rubio (Toronto Metropolitan) focuses on what he identifies as “the inefficiency in editors seeking referees.” Here’s how he describes the problem: Most editors have a process like the following: after they read a paper, they ask people in their network who they think would be good. If no one bites, and they run out of suggested referees from their declines, they go to databases like PhilPapers (as suggested here) or look at authors in the paper’s footnotes to find more people. This makes it easy for people to fall through the cracks, or for editors to ask people at the wrong time. There has been a recent attempt at further improvement, in the form of a public spreadsheet where people can indicate their availability. But a google sheet is a clunky interface, and it relies on people knowing about it and regularly updating their status. His recommendation is a database to which editors add minimal descriptions of papers that have passed desk review, and from which registered users can select papers to referee: It would be better if available philosophers could volunteer to referee papers. It’s much easier for a journal (or journals) to maintain a viewable database of submissions than for the profession as a whole to maintain a database of available referees. And willing referees would not have to wait to be asked in order to contribute; they could simply find a paper that looked like a good fit and volunteer. This may not eliminate all of the inefficiencies in the referee search process, but it would take a big bite out of them. Of course, the details matter. Tentatively, I suggest the following: once a paper has passed desk review at a journal, it is added to the database with a number, subdisciplines, and keyword tags from a standard menu such as the one PhilPapers offers. This will preserve anonymity and prevent any gaming of the system by friends/associates. Registered users (with some sort of..
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2025-05-13 13:36:49 UTC

Non-US Institutions Marketing Positions to US Scholars Looking to Flee the Country
The continuous news about agencies like the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation having their funding cut and their grants being rescinded, the Trump administration’s attacks on academic freedom, plus the high-profile emigration of some US academics, has created a marketing opportunity that non-US institutions of higher education are starting to take advantage of. The message they’re sending is: “hey US academics, if you’re worried about lack of funding and freedom in the Unite States, come work here!” And that message is sometimes directed specifically at philosophers. For example, this is from a recent ad from Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland circulated on PHILOS-L and posted on their website: The Interdisciplinary Centre for Ethics (INCET) at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, invites applications from US scholars seeking a postdoctoral position in a stimulating international environment, particularly those considering relocation to Europe due to recent US research funding reductions. Our research interests include (but are not limited to) ethics, bioethics, practical ethics, experimental philosophy, moral psychology, philosophy of science, political philosophy, philosophy of law, and epistemology. Jagiellonian University in Kraków is one of the oldest universities in Europe (established in 1364) and is now one of the best universities in Central Europe. The university offers an engaging academic and cultural life. The city itself is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Central Europe and offers many opportunities for spending leisure time. Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) offer an opportunity to fund applicants’ own research fellowships at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Ethics (INCET). Expressions of interest for the US candidates looking to relocate to Europe due to recent US research funding reductions should be submitted by 31 May 2025 with 1) a CV with the list of publications, and 2) a short research proposal (no more than 1 page). Institutions and individuals are welcome to list other opportunities aimed at providing an academic refuge for US philosophers. (via Tomasz Żuradzki)
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2025-05-05 19:33:24 UTC

Brake and Dandelet (and two others) to Wisconsin
Elizabeth Brake, currently professor of philosophy at Rice University, and Sophia Dandelet, currently associate professor of philosophy at the University of Cambridge, have accepted offers from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Wisconsin also made two other hires this season. Professor Brake works in ethics, political philosophy, and feminist philosophy, and has written on topics such as love, sex, marriage, amatonormativity, procreative ethics, and environmental justice. You can learn more about her work here and here. She takes up her position as full professor of philosophy at Wisconsin in fall 2025. Professor Dandelet works in epistemology and ethics, and has written on topics such as epistemic rationality, truth, doxastic wrongs, and epistemic coercion. You can learn more about her work here and here. She will be associate professor of philosophy at Wisconsin beginning in spring 2026. Wisconsin’s Philosophy Department also picked up two hires at the assistant professor level: Sam Roberts, currently assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Konstanz, who works in logic, metaphysics, and philosophy of math (starting at UW this fall), and Alex Kerr, a recent postdoc at Princeton University who works on sense perception and philosophy of emotion (starting in spring 2026).
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2025-05-05 12:57:59 UTC

Acquisitions, Revenue, and Morale Down at Harvard University Press
“Harvard University Press published 142 new titles in the fall of 2016. Last fall, it put out just 26.” And “revenue from new books — the ‘frontlist’ — declined by half since 2018.” These figures are from a lengthy investigative report published at The Harvard Crimson about Harvard University Press (HUP). What explains the drop? Reporters William C. Mao and Veronica H. Paulus write: In September 2017, George T. Andreou ’87 became the director of HUP. Since then, press staff alleged — in interviews with The Crimson, union surveys, and letters to Harvard administrators — that he has belittled HUP employees to their peers, instilled a fear of retaliation and layoffs, and mismanaged the publishing house. That environment has caused an exodus of talent, staff say. Since 2018, at least 50 employees have left the press — and, in interviews and in letters obtained by The Crimson, several cited Andreou’s leadership as a key catalyst for their departures… “I have never in my professional life in trade publishing experienced the kind of abusive, egotistical and unprofessional behavior that I have seen consistently over the course of the last two and a half years,” a former editor wrote in a 2020 letter to [then-provost Alan] Garber that called for Andreou’s removal. The reporters note that circa 2020 decline in output “was not unusual among academic presses as the Covid-19 pandemic hit.” Still, “university presses at some peer schools, however, recovered from their pandemic-related dips in output after several months. HUP did not. Instead, its publishing numbers fell precipitously over the next several years,” as you can see on the following graph: Read The Crimson’s report for further details.
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2025-05-05 11:34:19 UTC

Philosopher’s Apparent Role in Government’s “Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria” Report Revealed by Metadata
A philosopher is apparently listed as the creator of part of a controversial report released May 1st by the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) regarding gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth. Philosophers working for the government is a topic regularly covered here at Daily Nous. That’s one reason for this post, but not the only one. The Department of Health and Human Services is led by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., known for his advocacy of positions widely rejected by the medical profession, scientists, and other experts. Kennedy was appointed by President Donald Trump, who, throughout his second term so far, has been attacking universities and cutting off the federal funding that supports much research in US institutions of higher education. The anti-expertise and anti-education agenda of the Trump administration makes it surprising that any academic would agree to work for it. Nonetheless, there seems to be some evidence that one academic—philosophy professor Alex Byrne of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose writing on transgender issues has been controversial—has done just that. That evidence is in the metadata of the appendix of an HHS report, “Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria“. The appendix itself is titled “Overview of Systematic Reviews“. The following is a screenshot I took of part of the metadata of the appendix, as viewable in a plain text-reader app like Notepad, which lists “Alex Byrne” as the creator of the appendix: The text “<dc:creator>” is a tag that refers to “an entity primarily responsible for making the resource”. (The “dc” part is a reference to “Dublin Core“, a standard for metadata design.) To my knowledge, the listing of Byrne’s name in the metadata was first pointed out by Florence Ashley, an assistant professor of law at the University of Alberta, in a post on Bluesky the day the report was released. Whether the metadata is accurate and being interpreted correctly I can’t say for certain at this time. The text of the report and appendix do not name any authors. According to a press release about the report from HHS, the authors “are not initially being made public, in order to help maintain the integrity” of the report’s “post-publication peer review”. This seems disingenuous, as it is..
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2025-05-01 12:45:57 UTC

The Integrity of Academic Integrity Enforcement
The philosophy professor heading up the office at his college that handles student violations of academic integrity, like cheating, is dealing with a seemingly stonewalling upper administration, and needs some help. Further, there’s some reason to think that political considerations are playing a role in the administration’s inaction. The professor writes: I’m in need of advice from the readers of Daily Nous! I’m a philosopher who serves as an academic integrity officer at a public liberal arts college—and I have a problem. Several faculty members have reported to me that they’ve discovered two students who have been systematically cheating in their classes by generating their papers using AI, when this is expressly forbidden. (One of the students did this in several philosophy classes.) Some of these classes were from last semester, but our policies explicitly allow students to be charged for past infractions if new evidence comes up, as it did in these cases. So, no problem, right? The academic integrity cases get filed, and things take their usual course. Except…. not this time. The administration is simply refusing to have these cases heard. They’re also simply refusing to say why they’re not having these cases heard. And, by the way, there is no possible doubt that the students are in violation. I suspect that what’s happening here is that the administration is caving to parental and/or political pressure to give these students a free pass. The parents of one of the students contacted the Governor’s Office, who then sent at least one email to the administration on their behalf. I’m not privy to what might have happened here. But it looks like at least one of the students is getting a free pass on multiple counts of cheating because the administration is worried about parental/political response if they’re subjected to the usual academic integrity proceedings—proceedings that would likely preclude them from graduating this May. I suspect that the other student is benefiting from this. The cases are very similar, and so if one student gets a pass then the other one does also. I’m loathe to just go along with this, toe the administration line, and ignore the students’ infractions. Students shouldn’t be getting college credit for philosophy classes that..
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2025-04-28 17:21:11 UTC

Teaching Humanities in the AI Era: Is this the Bargaining or the Acceptance Stage?
“What, again, is education? The non-coercive rearranging of desire.” That’s D. Graham Burnett, professor of history at Princeton University, in an article in The New Yorker that you should read. In the article, Burnett, whose area is history of science and who has focused quite a bit on the topic of attention, documents some of his experiments using large language models (LLMs) as research and teaching tools. In this post I’ll focus on the teaching side. In one of his courses, “Attention and Modernity: Mind, Media, and the Senses”, he gave the students an assignment that had them make use of one of the LLMs. An assignment in my class asked students to engage one of the new A.I. tools in a conversation about the history of attention. The idea was to let them take a topic that they now understood in some depth and explore what these systems could do with it. It was also a chance to confront the attention economy’s “killer app”: totally algorithmic pseudo-persons who are sensitive, competent, and infinitely patient; know everything about everyone; and will, of course, be turned to the business of extracting money from us. These systems promise a new mode of attention capture—what some are calling the “intimacy economy” (“human fracking” comes closer to the truth). The assignment was simple: have a conversation with a chatbot about the history of attention, edit the text down to four pages, and turn it in. How did the students do? Burnett says: Reading the results, on my living-room couch, turned out to be the most profound experience of my teaching career. I’m not sure how to describe it. In a basic way, I felt I was watching a new kind of creature being born, and also watching a generation come face to face with that birth: an encounter with something part sibling, part rival, part careless child-god, part mechanomorphic shadow—an alien familiar. He then proceeds to provide several examples of the truly fascinating work his students submitted. Seriously, read the article. What’s his takeaway from this “for those who are responsible for the humanistic tradition—those of us who serve as custodians of historical consciousness”? Those whose job is “helping others hold those artifacts and insights in..
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2025-04-28 11:00:45 UTC

Are Human Reasoning Abilities Declining?
In a piece at the Financial Times (and in a Bluesky thread about it), John Burn-Murdoch, the chief data reporter for the newspaper, goes over some of the worrying findings that might support a conclusion that human capacities to reason and understand are “deteriorating,” especially since the early-to-mid 2010s. He clarifies that what he is talking about are not changes to “the fundamental biology of the human brain” over the past 10 to 15 years, but rather the effects of social, technological, educational, and situational changes on our ability to think well. While I’m not in a position to assess whether Burn-Murdoch is giving us a complete picture of the relevant data, what he does share seems worrisome. The data includes: declining average scores for teens on science, reading, and math assessments declining average scores for adults on numeracy and literacy increased reports by 18-year-olds in “difficulty thinking or concentrating” and “trouble learning new things” decline of leisure-time reading Burn-Murdoch notes that the early-to-mid 2010s drop-offs we see across much of this data corresponds with “our changing relationship with information, available constantly online.” He continues: Most discussion about the societal impacts of digital media focuses on the rise of smartphones and social media. But the change in human capacity for focused thought coincides with something more fundamental: a shift in our relationship with information. We have moved from finite web pages to infinite, constantly refreshed feeds and a constant barrage of notifications. We no longer spend as much time actively browsing the web and interacting with people we know but instead are presented with a torrent of content. This represents a move from self-directed behaviour to passive consumption and constant context-switching. The data seem relevant to the discussion here and elsewhere earlier this month about “the average college student at the average college” these days. It may also point to an opportunity for colleges and universities to respond to what could be considered a “critical reasoning crisis” by supporting and promoting philosophy departments and other departments whose work and teaching are primarily oriented around reasoning well. Admittedly, there is only so much that additional critical reasoning courses at the college level could likely do to move the needle on this data. Broader cultural changes are..
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2025-04-24 11:49:44 UTC

A Trove of Data about Philosophy Departments in the US
How many philosophy departments are there in the United States? How many people do they employ? How many students are there in philosophy courses each year? How many people major or minor in philosophy? How many are working on graduate degrees in philosophy? These and other questions are answered in Philosophy Departments Today: Findings from the 2024 Department Survey, a new report from Humanities Indicators, a project of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. The report on philosophy departments is part of a larger study of fourteen humanities disciplines, The Academic Humanities Today. Before we turn to the answers, I want to take a moment to thank Robert Townsend, Program Director for Humanities, Arts, and Culture at the Academy. He and his team at Humanities Indicators—Norman Bradburn, Carolyn Fuqua, Maysan Haydar, and Sara Mohr—produced this report, providing us with useful data about the humanities in higher education at a time when serious study of the humanities seems scorned by the broader culture and higher education is under attack from politicians. The data was collected via the Humanities Department Survey (developed by Humanities Indicators) and administered between November 2023 and June 2024 to chairs of departments of American studies, anthropology, art history, classical studies, communication, English, history, languages and literatures other than English (LOTE), linguistics, musicology, philosophy, race/ ethnic studies, religion, and women’s/gender studies. The response rate for philosophy departments was 49%. The counts, percentages, and averages in the report are estimates based on the survey data and, according to the report “a sample of all institutions of higher education reporting to the U.S. Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System that they had conferred at least five degrees from academic year 2017–18 to 2021–22 in ‘Philosophy,’ ‘Logic,’ ‘Ethics,’ ‘Applied and Professional Ethics,’ ‘Philosophy, Other,’ or ‘Bioethics/Medical Ethics.'” Further information about the report’s methodology can be found in the full technical report. Now to some of the findings (what follows quotes liberally from the Philosophy Department report, as well as the overall Academic Humanities report): Departments & Programs 744 departments in the US award degrees in philosophy. Of these, 200 (27%) award graduate degrees, with 120 (16%) awarding PhDs. Undergraduate Enrollments & Degrees Departments awarding degrees in philosophy had undergraduate..
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2025-04-22 21:59:26 UTC

New Ohio Law Ends Philosophy Major at Univ. of Toledo
In order to comply with Senate Bill 1 of the Ohio Legislature (SB1), the University of Toledo will no longer be allowing students to become philosophy majors. The philosophy major is one of nine degree programs the university says it is ending because of SB1. The others are Africana Studies, Asian Studies, Data Analytics, Disability Studies, Middle East Studies, Religious Studies, Spanish, and Women’s and Gender Studies. The legislation orders the state’s public institutions of higher education to “eliminate any undergraduate degree program it offers if the institution confers an average of fewer than five degrees in that program annually over any three-year period.” It also prohibits “the continuation of existing diversity, equity, and inclusion offices or departments” or the establishment of new ones. It requires institutions of higher education to “affirm and declare” that it “shall ensure the fullest degree of intellectual diversity.” Though this and related clauses in this section of the legislation “do not apply to the exercise of professional judgment about how to accomplish intellectual diversity within an academic discipline, unless that exercise is misused to constrict intellectual diversity” and “nothing in this section prohibits faculty or students from classroom instruction, discussion, or debate, so long as faculty members allow students to express intellectual diversity.” SB1 also includes clauses about limiting the right of public employees to strike, and about their collective bargaining agreements. The legislation is facing some popular pushback, and there is currently a petition calling for a referendum on it that registered voters in Ohio may sign. Signatures for the petition, which must be collected in person, not online, are being submitted to the state attorney general in waves. The first wave of 1,000 signatures was submitted on April 21st. Information about the petition and where it can be signed is here. I am told that it is SB1’s clause about graduation rates, and not those about DEI, that triggered the decision to end the philosophy major. It’s worth noting then, that the clause about graduation rates includes the following: The chancellor may grant a waiver to a state institution for a program to which this division applies. State institutions shall appeal for a waiver in a form and manner determined by the..
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2025-04-10 17:37:56 UTC

Philosophers Among New ACLS Fellows
The American Council of Learned Societies has announced its new class of fellows, and four philosophy professors are among them. They and their projects are: Stephen C. Ferguson (North Carolina State University) “On the Black Side of Philosophy: Black Philosophers Confront Black Power and Communism” Abstract: The Black Power Era, from the 1960s to the 1970s, is a period marked by the radical reimagining of Black identity, nationalism, and liberation. This project highlights the overlooked contributions of Black philosophers—academic and non-academic—during and after the Black Power Era. While cultural and political figures have dominated scholarly attention, this study foregrounds the philosophical voices who engaged with the era’s ideological ferment. The project examines how Black thinkers such as Eugene C. Holmes, William R. Jones, Adrian Piper, Charles Johnson, Cornel West, Charles Mills, Walter Rodney, Cedric Robinson, John H. McClendon and others grappled with the interwoven dynamics of racism, national oppression, class exploitation, and the contested relevance of Marxism. Through a dialectical analysis of their engagements with liberalism, conservatism, and revolutionary politics, this project reconstructs the complex theoretical landscape in which Black philosophy developed in response to the promises and failures of US democracy. Ultimately, the project contributes to contemporary debates about racism, democracy, and social change, challenging dominant paradigms and foregrounding Black philosophy as a vital site of critical theory and political imagination. Eric Godoy (Illinois State University) “Public Power: Ethical Energy and Democracy’s Role in a Just Transition” Abstract: The transition to renewable energy is well underway and energy scholars have called for more engagement from normative fields to help guide a just transition. This project unites the normative, theoretical work of environmental ethics and politics with the empirical field of energy studies to defend an account of energy democracy, a transition framework that embraces democratic ideals—e.g., equity, transparency, and shared power. This framework best avoids reproducing the injustices of the fossil fuel era. Relatively few philosophers have written on energy transition justice. A careful conceptual analysis of democracy resolves some tensions in its often-contradictory ideals as well as reinforces the connection between democratization and justice. By contrast, alternative forms of nondemocratic power endemic to the fossil fuel energy system have given rise to a host of justice issues. A defense..
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2025-04-09 11:00:06 UTC

Abrol Fairweather (1969-2025)
Abrol Fairweather, a philosopher at San Francisco State University, has died. Dr. Fairweather worked primarily on virtue epistemology and related topics. He is the co-author, with Carlos Montemayor, of Knowledge, Dexterity, and Attention: A Theory of Epistemic Agency (2017). You can learn more about his writing here. Fairweather was a lecturer in philosophy at San Francisco State University, and also at the University of San Francisco. He earned his PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his undergraduate degree from the University of California, Los Angeles. The following obituary is by Carlos Montemayor. Abrol Fairweather (March 9, 1969-April 5, 2025) Abrol Orion Fairweather grew up and spent most of his life in the west coast of the USA. As a teenager, he lived in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, where he attended the Palisades Charter High School. He then enrolled at UCLA for his undergraduate degree, receiving his BA in philosophy in 1992. At UCLA, Abrol met Philippa Foot, with whom he interacted frequently. He always spoke of his meetings with her fondly, and he was certain that his conversations with Foot were the best way of doing philosophy, through engaged understanding with someone who cares deeply about it. Foot inspired Abrol’s lifelong interest in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and in the set of views that fall under the umbrella of virtue theory. He continued his studies in philosophy at UC Santa Barbara where he obtained his doctoral degree under Anthony Brueckner in 2005. Abrol lectured at University of San Francisco, but he primarily taught at San Francisco State University, where he guided many students who succeeded in pursuing philosophy at the graduate level. Abrol was a passionate and energetic teacher who loved teaching a wide variety of topics, including philosophy of religion and introduction to philosophy, which reflected his capacious philosophical outlook. His interests included philosophy of science and ethics, both areas in which he contributed to the profession. Abrol is best known as the co-editor, with Linda Zagzebski, of the important volume Virtue Epistemology: Essays in Epistemic Virtue and Responsibility (2001, Oxford University Press). This pioneering book started a discourse on epistemic virtues that led to other fundamental debates in epistemology, for instance, the possibility of..
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2025-04-07 11:00:08 UTC

How Many People Applied for Academic Philosophy Jobs in 2024? (guest post)
How many people applied to academic philosophy jobs last year? Which types of institutions had the most applicants? Which types of jobs? In the following guest post, Charles Lassiter (Gonzaga University) shares the results of a survey he conducted of search committee chairs on these questions. For other posts by Professor Lassiter about the philosophy job market and related topics, see here. (A version of this post first appeared at Professor Lassiter’s blog.) How Many People Applied for Academic Philosophy Jobs in 2024? by Charles Lassiter Hello! In Fall 2024, I sent out surveys to search committee chairs to get a sense of how many people are on the job market. Thank you to everyone who completed the survey. And a very special thanks to Kate Ferrell for her help in compiling names and emails. I sent out 229 surveys for jobs advertised between October 1, 2024 and January 10, 2025. I received 72 responses, which gives a margin of error around +/-9%. The average number of applicants from the responses I received is 137.5. So the average number of people applying for a job is, given some big assumptions, in the ballpark of 125 to 150. The really big assumption is that my sample is representative of all jobs. There are two reasons to think the sample isn’t representative. First, completion is voluntary, so there’s that bias. Second, among replies, jobs at universities with PhD programs are over-represented in the sample. Roughly 1/3 of the jobs advertised in my dataset were at PhD-granting institutions but around 1/2 of the replies I received were from PhD-granting institutions. So I think the 125-150 range is roughly right, but there’s a lot of wiggle room. First up, the distribution of applicants by program: Medians were used instead of means because, for both BA and PhD programs, higher values were inflating the averages. The largest values in the Doctorate facet are 628 and 638 applicants. These were a postdoc and TT positions at R1’s. I can appreciate people wanting to shoot their shot. The smallest value for Doctorate programs is seven. Seven! The job is a one-year sabbatical replacement at an R1. The maximum for BA programs is 330 for a Metaphysics and Epistemology TT position with a 3/2 load. The minimum? 41 for an..
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2025-04-05 13:38:08 UTC

Philosophers’ Books among those Banned from US Naval Academy Library
In January, Donald Trump issued an executive order banning certain books on race, gender, and other topics from public schools for kindergarten through grade 12. Last week Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told the US Naval Academy, though it is a college, that he would be banning books from it. The Naval Academy released the list of banned books yesterday, and several books by philosophers are on the list, including books by Linda Alcoff, Lawrence Blum, Steven C. Ferguson II, Donald F. Koch, Chris Lebron, John H. McClendon III, Charles Mills, Shannon Sullivan, Peter Wenz, Laura Westra, and George Yancy. They are: Visible identities : Race, Gender, and the Self by Linda Martín Alcoff I’m Not a Racist, But– The Moral Quandary of Race by Lawrence Blum Pragmatism and the Problem of Race by Donald F. Koch. The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea by Christopher J. Lebron Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race by Charles Mills Beyond the White Shadow: Philosophy, Sports, and the African American Experience, edited by John H. McClendon III and Steven C. Ferguson II Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege by Shannon Sullivan Faces of Environmental Racism: Confronting Issues of Global Justice, edited by Laura Westra and Peter S. Wenz. Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race in America by George Yancy Pursuing Trayvon Martin: Historical Contexts and Contemporary Manifestations of Racial Dynamics, edited by George Yancy and Janine Jones White Self-Criticality Beyond Anti-Racism: How Does it Feel to Be a White Problem?, edited by George Yancy (I may have missed some books by philosophers. Please let me know by email or in the comments if I did. Thanks.) The complete list of 381 banned books is here.
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2025-04-02 11:00:58 UTC

The Multi-Day In-Class LockDown Browser Essay Assignment (guest
Many professors in philosophy and other disciplines believe that having students write take-home essays is important. Essays give students the opportunity to spend a lot of time pondering their topic, with ideas percolating in their brains over days, and students develop and exercise valuable skills throughout the thinking and writing and revising that goes into a good paper. And now CheatGPT appears to be killing off this valuable pedagogical tool. Or is it? Maybe some innovation is in order. Perhaps there is a way to get much of what is good in such assignments while avoiding the risks of students cheating on them with artificial intelligence. That’s what John Robison thinks. Dr. Robison, a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at Indiana University Bloomington, has developed a way to approximate the take-home essay in a cheat-resistant way. In the following guest post, he tells us how he did it, and why. The Multi-Day In-Class LockDown Browser Essay Assignment by John Robison 1. The Value of Humanities Courses A successful humanities course helps students cultivate critical, personally enriching, and widely applicable skills, and it immerses them in the exploration of perspectives, ideas, and modes of thought that can illuminate, challenge, and inform their own outlooks. One major part of making a humanities course successful in that way involves crafting assignments that have students exercise and develop the relevant critical thinking skills. In philosophy, we’re especially interested in positioning our students to become better at critically, creatively, and empathetically engaging with arguments from multiple perspectives—identifying questions and problems, mapping out different ways of grappling with them, finding genuine strengths and weakness in those different possible approaches, and synthesizing all of that to inform and defend their own view. Historically, the out-of-class essay assignment has been our best assessment for getting students to most fully exercise and develop those skills. Through the writing process, students can come to better understand a problem. Things that seem obvious or obviously false before spending multiple days thinking and writing suddenly become no longer obvious or obviously false. Students make up their minds on complex problems by grappling with those problems in a rigorous way through writing. It’s one thing to talk about some philosophical problem in a..
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2025-03-28 12:26:14 UTC

Mini-Heap
Links of interest to people interested in philosophy… Can you be friends with an AI chatbot? Should we be concerned that people think you can be? — Vox asks philosophers about AI friendship The Universal Declaration of Human Rights says people have a right to “share in scientific advancement” — What does that entail? More than you might think, argues Michela Massimi It’s time for Vermont’s statewide Public Philosophy Week — The Vermont Digger reports, with comments from Tyler Doggett, Lorraine Besser, and links to the schedule of events They are “functionally illiterate” with “atrocious” writing skills; they “lie”, “cheat”, “vanish”, and “just don’t care” — Steven Hales on today’s average college student What is it for a product to be creative? Must it be made by a creative agent? — Catherine Wearing on AI creativity The Anti-Authoritarian Academic Code of Conduct — by Rachel Barney New: “Daybreak”, a podcast from the Centre for Research in Post-Kantian Philosophy at the University of Warwick — the first episode’s topic: ressentiment, with a focus on Andrew Huddleston’s paper on it in Ethics 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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2025-03-27 12:45:23 UTC

Philosophy Department Survival Strategies: Alumni Relations
Alumni can have a surprisingly strong voice in university and college decisions, and they can also help individual departments in various ways. What is your department doing to maintain good relations with its graduated philosophy majors and minors? This is the fifth installment in the occasional Philosophy Department Survival Strategies series. Alumni have the ear of administrators in virtue of them being likely donors to their alma mater, as well as being living advertisements for it. They are technically outside of the university or college, so, unlike faculty or staff, their expression of their views about the university may not be as easily discounted as rent-seeking. Yet, like faculty and staff, they often care very much about the school and are motivated to express their views and act in support of them. So alumni are potentially valuable allies for any department facing budget cuts or threats to its programs. They are also potentially valuable partners for a department being proactive in developing relationships and initiatives that strengthen it, thus making it less likely to face cuts or threats. Alumni can make department-specific donations, help develop career-building networks for your students, attend departmental programs, and even be a part of such programs (e.g., a program for students on how philosophy is relevant to various careers outside of academia). And once a relationship is established with an alum, they can be briefed on the potential danger philosophy departments in general are in, preparing them for future advocacy on the department’s behalf, if need be. They can also be encouraged to be forthcoming to the administration in their praise and support of the department—helping to make it unthinkable, should the time come to cut programs, that philosophy would be on the kill list. Having good relationships with alumni requires keeping track of them. How does your department do that? Do you rely on central university offices to supply this (and if so, do they include those alums for whom philosophy was a second major?—a problem at some schools)? Do you also maintain your own records? Do you have an official “alumni relations officer” among the faculty in your department? It’s important to keep alumni informed about what’s going on in the department, its..
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2025-03-25 12:39:25 UTC

Philosopher to Lead New Animal Sentience Center
The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) will be launching a new center focused on “studying the feelings of other animals scientifically” making use of “the emerging science of animal sentience to design better policies, laws and ways of caring for other animals.” The Jeremy Coller Centre for Animal Sentience will be led by LSE professor of philosophy Jonathan Birch, author of, among other things, the recently published The Edge of Sentience. Funded by a £4 million donation from the Jeremy Coller Foundation, the Centre will bring together researchers across a range of disciplines—philosophy, veterinary medicine, evolutionary biology, comparative psychology, neuroscience, behavioural science, computer science, artificial intelligence, economics, and law—to develop and promulgate ideas relevant to policy and advocacy work regarding animals. The Centre will be up and running in autumn this year. Further information here.
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2025-03-24 12:30:45 UTC

Philosophers in Administrative Positions
(Moving this to the top again; first published on April 18th, 2024). A few months ago during a discussion here about the demand for philosophers, the importance of philosophers in high-level administrative roles came up. – Here’s the relevant bit: One thing we should do is encourage universities and colleges to better promote the distinctive value of philosophy and the study of the liberal arts more broadly. But how do we get universities to take up the mission of sending that message? What you need are people in positions of power who care about sending that message. That’s us… And so it would serve philosophy well if more philosophers took up administrative positions at the colleges and universities. We don’t need philosopher kings, but philosopher deans and associate deans, philosopher provosts, and philosopher university presidents would be helpful. Perhaps it would be good to have a running list of philosophers in these roles. For one thing, it’s a bit of profession-wide recognition for taking up a potentially valuable position. It can be beneficial for philosopher-administrators to be able to easily find out about each other. The list could also be useful as a resource for philosophers considering moving into administrative positions. And it could help us figure out whether having philosophers in administrative positions is actually good for philosophy at those institutions (and perhaps more broadly). So let’s gather this information. What we’re looking for are philosophers in college- or university-wide administrative roles. If you know of any, add their name, title, and institution in the comments, with a link to their university page. I’ll start with a few names to get a list going. Periodically, I’ll move names provided in the comments to the list in the post itself. Thanks. Philosophers Currently in College- or University-Wide Administrative Positions Anne Abaho, Dean, School of Social Sciences, Nkumba University Christa Acampora, Dean of Arts and Sciences, University of Virginia Lanier Anderson, Senior Associate Dean for the Humanities and Arts, Stanford University William Bechtel, Senior Associate Dean of Academic Personnel, School of Arts and Humanities, UC San Diego Rufus Black, Vice Chancellor, University of Tasmania Teresa Blankmeyer Burke, Director, School of Arts and Humanities, Gallaudet University Frédéric Bouchard, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and..
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2025-03-20 12:12:45 UTC

Mini-Heap
Links to things of interest to people interested in philosophy… “There is a need for a discipline that stands to epistemology as chemical engineering stands to chemistry” — it’s not applied epistemology, nor social epistemology, says Noah Gordon, but “practical epistemology” The partner of a philosopher provides anthropological observations of and advice about philosophers for others in their position — here’s a sample from the late (2011-2012) lamented “Philosiology” (which Fiona Woollard reminded me of) “Overall the accusations of large-scale Antisemitism [on U.S. college campuses] are best understood as gaslighting” — Mathias Risse explains why Did the reactions to Newton change something about the way philosophy was practiced? Do they explain the split between physics and philosophy? — Eric Schliesser on why it matters to include Newton in the history of philosophy “A newly fertilized human egg isn’t conscious, and a preschooler is, so consciousness must emerge somewhere in between” — When? And how do we figure that out? Findings discussed at a conference at NYU organized by Claudia Passos-Ferreira Should we have the contents of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy carved in stone? — someone is trying to start a project to do this for Wikipedia The epistemic challenges of “slopaganda” — Michał Klincewicz, Mark Alfano, & Amir Ebrahimi Fard on the manipulative powers of the increasing amount of generative AI slop on the internet 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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2025-03-19 09:30:32 UTC

New Editor at Public Affairs Quarterly
Public Affairs Quarterly (PAQ) has a new editor-in-chief: Jessica Flanigan (University of Richmond). Jason Brennan (Georgetown), who had been the editor-in-chief of PAQ, is stepping down from the position. Readers may recall he recently became editor-in-chief of Philosophy & Public Affairs. Professor Flanigan asked that the following message about PAQ be shared: As always, Public Affairs Quarterly invites philosophical research on any topics related to ethics and public policy, including business ethics, PPE, the philosophy of race, bioethics, public health ethics, the philosophy of sex, egalitarianism, the philosophy of education, and political philosophy, more generally. We are especially interested in submissions that break new ground by addressing timely topics and creative essays that are accessible to non-specialist readers. We encourage early-career scholars to send their work to PAQ. We are focused on evaluating essays quickly and providing high-quality editorial feedback for all essays that are sent for review The change in editor-in-chief is effective immediately.
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2025-03-18 12:14:27 UTC

New: Minorities and Philosophy x Philosophers for Sustainability
Minorities and Philosophy (MAP) and Philosophers for Sustainability (PfS) are joining forces to launch the MAP Climate Ambassadors Initiative. The initiative aims to promote environmental sustainability in academic philosophy by way of a network of organizers. There are MAP chapters in many departments of philosophy, and the idea is to have at least one “climate ambassador” in each chapter. J.C. Ward (Wake Forest), one of MAP’s co-directors, share the following information about it: The ambassadors will have the opportunity to collaborate and to attend and organize events focused on strategies for advocating for sustainability. They will be expected to share what they have learned with their own MAP chapters and department. For example, ambassadors might attend one of the Philosophers for Sustainability virtual workshops on the APA Good Practices Guide as it relates to sustainability. Following the event, ambassadors could put on similar workshops on their campus and/or region. There are many ways to participate. We expect that this will be a dynamic group that has a significant impact on the field of philosophy. They are looking for volunteers to become Climate Ambassadors. Further details are here.
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2025-03-17 12:33:17 UTC

Sandra Harding (1935-2025)
Sandra Harding, a philosopher well-known for her work in feminist theory, postcolonial theory, and philosophy of science, has died. Professor Harding was recognized for her development of standpoint theory, and is the author of, among other works, The Science Question in Feminism (1986), Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?: Thinking from Women’s Lives (1991), Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and Epistemologies (1998), Science and Social Inequality: Feminist and Postcolonial Issues (2006), Sciences From Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities (2008), and Objectivity and Diversity: Another Logic of Scientific Research (2015). You can learn more about her writings here. Harding retired in 2014 from her position as Distinguished Professor of Education and Gender Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she had been since the mid 1990s. Prior to that, she was professor of philosophy and women’s studies at the University of Delaware. Her first teaching position was at SUNY Albany, in its now closed Allen Center. She earned her PhD in philosophy from New York University and her undergraduate degree from Rutgers University. You can listen to an oral history interview with Professor Harding about her life and her work here. An obituary is here. She died on March 5th.
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2025-03-14 12:38:14 UTC

Three Philosophers & a Mathematician Join Together to Study Goal-Directed Behavior in Collective Entities
A $600,000 grant was awarded to a team of researchers to study “The Emergence and Evolution of Goal-Directed Behavior in Collective Entities.” Led by philosopher Derek Skillings (University of North Carolina, Greensboro), the team also includes Benjamin Allen (Mathematics, Emmanuel College), Patrick Forber (Philosophy, Tufts University), and Rory Smead (Philosophy, Northeastern University). The research will focus on holobionts or “superorganisms”—host organisms and the things that live inside of them and on them. Traditional examples of holobionts are coral reefs or lichens, though some have argued that humans and many other organisms are better understood as holobionts. Professor Skillings says that “We used to think these… amalgamations of symbioses were the exception in nature. But now we are realizing no, actually, it’s probably everything.” The grant, which will support the project for three years, is from the John Templeton Foundation. The project will involve research, workshops, and a conference this summer. Related: We Are Not Human Individuals
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2025-03-04 12:37:36 UTC

Mini-Heap
Recent links… The Trolley Problem makes it to SNL — in a love song by Jane Wickline “An essential function of power is in constructing the lenses through which the public interprets their reality” — Danielle Wenner on current politics and the “third face of power” “We draw comfort when someone confides that they have suffered in the same way we have done. But why?” — Kieran Setiya on Julia Nefsky’s “Misery Loves Company“ “Without it, the will to lead a good life is a will-o’-the-wisp, yet it lacks the intrinsic value of the other virtues” — resistance fighter & philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch’s ideas about loyalty “What is this you that your experiences are present before? [Perhaps] really nothing more than a witnessing, featureless point”? — Hedda Hassel Mørch on the “shared self view” “The net result was a lot of confusion about human internal anatomy that persisted for centuries” — Douglas Campbell on why the ancient Greeks avoided human dissection “Your brain never tells you ‘We really can’t tell what the color is because we don’t have all necessary information available’ [or] ‘your assumptions did much of the heavy lifting here’” — on the dress (and other disagreements) (via MeFi) 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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2025-03-03 12:00:33 UTC

Philosophy Major Retention Data
How many college graduates end up getting their undergraduate degree in the major they declared when they initially started college? That’s one of the questions taken up in a new study, “From Matriculation to Completion: How College Students Move Between Majors.” The study is by Humanities Indicators, based on an analysis by National Student Clearinghouse, and focuses on students who entered college in 2017. The study asked “whether college students who start a humanities degree are more or less likely to finish it than those who start other majors, and how the movement into and out of humanities majors compares to those of other fields of study.” It looked both at broad categories (e.g., humanities, natural sciences, engineering, business, etc.) as well as individual majors within the humanities. Among its findings regarding the humanities as a whole: Almost two million students started working toward a bachelor’s degree in fall 2017; of that number, 91,751 (4.6%) selected a primary major in one of the humanities disciplines. An average of around 7.5% of the bachelor’s degrees awarded from 2017 to 2022 were in the humanities. The difference between matriculations and degrees is explained by the humanities gaining more majors from other fields than it lost to either attrition or its own students switching to another major. Students who start their studies in a humanities discipline are slightly more likely to complete a bachelor’s degree within seven years than college students generally (and even more likely to do so if they completed an associate’s degree before starting at a four-year institution). Among students who completed a degree in a humanities discipline, more than half (55%) had started their studies in another major—either a nonhumanities field or a general liberal arts major. Of the almost 92,000 students who began their studies with a major in the humanities, 49,808 (54%) finished with a degree in the humanities. This was slightly below the rates at which students completed their degree in their original major in other fields, including in engineering (58%) and business (57%), but similar to the rates for students starting in the arts, social and behavioral sciences, and health and medical sciences. The humanities’ rate was substantially higher than that of education or the natural..
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2025-02-26 11:00:34 UTC

Philosophers Awarded Large Grants from Italian Science Fund
The Italian Science Fund (FIS) of Italy’s Ministry of University and Research has announced the winners of its latest round of multi-million euro grants, and several philosophers are among the recipients. They and their projects are: Silvia De Toffoli (IUSS Pavia) Humanizing Mathematical Knowledge: Fallibility, Technology, Know-How The project investigates mathematical knowledge from an innovative perspective, highlighting its human dimension and, in particular, its historical and practical aspects. It explores the fallibility of mathematical knowledge, the essential role of notations and diagrams in knowledge acquisition, and the impact of computational tools and artificial intelligence on mathematical practice. (€1.6 Million) Francesco Guala with co-investigator John Michael (University of Milan) The Normative Roots of Social Kinds We will study social kinds—‘folk’ and scientific—that are simultaneously real and normative. We are interested in understanding how norms and values play important epistemic roles in stabilising behaviour and facilitating inferences across social properties. Using methods of cognitive neuroscience, cross-cultural and comparative psychology, we will also investigate the cognitive and social mechanisms which underpin social normativity. A key working hypothesis is that kinds facilitate coordination by providing cues and signals that modulate normative attitudes and expectations in joint action contexts. (€2 million) Federico Faroldi (University of Pavia) Generic Reasoning The project investigates how a single significant instance may support general conclusions, with possible exceptions being tolerated. It considers examples in normative reasoning, natural and social sciences, and mathematics and recent AI models to build a theory of generic reasoning based on truthmaker semantics. (€1.3 million) Carlo Martini (Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, Milan) Demarcation for Dummies The project will revisit the problem of demarcation between science and pseudoscience, starting from the problem of disinformation. Disinformation is a widely debated topic, but the connection between disinformation and pseudoscience is not, despite much disinformation resulting from a combination of: 1) non-experts impersonating experts in some fields of science, and 2) laypeople’s inability to distinguish between experts and pseudo-experts. There is a lively debate as to why people believe disinformation: Are they stupid? Is motivated reasoning to blame? Are there other factors? The project starts from the observation that we are unfortunately hard-wired to believe both science and pseudoscience, but our inability to distinguish science from pseudoscience opens us up to..
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2025-02-25 12:37:11 UTC

Online Philosophy Resources Weekly Update
The weekly report on new and revised entries at online philosophy resources, new reviews of philosophy books, and new podcast episodes… (If you notice something missing from the update, let us know. Thanks.) SEP New: Maria Montessori by Patrick Frierson. Revised: Ramon Llull by Ernesto Priani. Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples by Richard J. Oosterhoff. Inductive Logic by James Hawthorne. Paul Feyerabend by Eric Oberheim and John Preston. Mary Wollstonecraft by Sylvana Tomaselli. Religious Diversity (Pluralism) by David Basinger. The Ethics and Rationality of Voting by Jason Brennan. Informed Consent by Nir Eyal. Properties by Francesco Orilia and Michele Paolini Paoletti. The Psychology of Normative Cognition by Daniel Kelly, Evan Westra, and Stephen Setman. Ordinary Objects by Daniel Z. Korman and Jonathan Barker. IEP Benedict de Spinoza: Philosophy of Religion by Blake D. Dutton. 1000-Word Philosophy ∅ BJPS Short Reads ∅ Book Reviews* The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius by Patchen Barss is reviewed by Jenann T. Ismael at The TImes Literary Supplement. Knowing Science by Alexander Bird is reviewed by Jennifer Jhum at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Iris Murdoch and the Political by Gary Browning is reviewed by Nikhil Krishnan at The Times Literary Supplement. Laws of Physics by Eddy Keming Chen is reviewed by Dustin Lazarovici at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People by Emily Herring is reviewed by John Banville at The Nation. Fewer Rules, Better People by Barry Lam is reviewed by Evan Selinger at Boston Globe, by Andrew Stark at The Wall Street Journal, and at Kirkus Reviews. Sartre and Analytic Philosophy by Talia Morag is reviewed by James Kinkaid at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (updated 2024 ed.) by Martha Nussbaum is reviewed by Kate Fullagar at Inside Story. Morality by Degrees by Alastair Norcross is the subject of an open-access symposium at Utilitas, with contributions from Ben Eggleston, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Elinor Mason, Shelly Kagan, and Alastair Norcross. Philosophy Podcasts – Recent Episodes (via Jason Chen) Compiled by Michael Glawson BONUS: Cosmic Comeback * The Book Reviews section contains links to reviews of books by philosophers in non-academic media as well as in open-access reviews..
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2025-02-24 18:18:27 UTC

When Philosophers “Compress a Philosophical Idea into a Picture”
“Philosophical cartoons are treated as ephemera but they can make a great philosopher more compelling to their contemporaries. It takes skill to compress a philosophical idea into a picture that, once seen or recalled, could help an audience understand.” . That’s Nathan Ballantyne (ASU) in an article about the philosophical cartoons created by Roderick Chisholm. Here’s one of them: Ballantyne writes: Observers might naturally assume that the history of philosophy is a history of words. When you want to know about past philosophers, you read their texts. Sometimes scholars seek to understand earlier thinkers by setting them in historical context—revealing how, for instance, thinkers’ ideas were shaped by relationships and experiences. But even for historians, the deeper story is typically found in private letters, diary entries, students’ notes, course syllabi, and other written records. A logocentric perspective seems inevitable. We measure a philosophical life by its words and everything else becomes ephemera. Logocentrism misses the fact that far more than printed words make a philosopher whatever they are. That is because philosophy is a social practice. If Chisholm had done nothing more than sit alone in his basement, pecking away at his typewriter, it is doubtful we would know of him today. During his career, he actively engaged with students and colleagues, traveled near and far to deliver lectures, and performed in public settings. His work and his reputation depended on his charisma. And I want to suggest that some small part of his charisma flowed from his making ideas incarnate in cartoons. The cartoons were in his bag of tricks for philosophical performance and his audiences got a kick out of them. I appreciate Ballantyne’s appreciation of academic charisma (an idea for which he credits William Clark), and its manifestation in the images philosophers have created to illustrate their (and others’) thoughts. History provides some examples. Below is Scheme of the Necessity of Logic for Grasping the Other Branches of Knowledge (Typus necessitatis logicae ad alias scientias capessendas), designed in 1622 by the Carmelite professor of logic Jean Chéron, an engraving that, in the words of art historian Susanna Berger, “depicts the human quest to reach wisdom.” You can read more about that particular work and some others here. Other examples..
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2025-02-06 12:12:20 UTC

Krister Segerberg (1936-2025)
Krister Segerberg, professor emeritus of philosophy at Uppsala University, has died. Professor Segerberg was known for his work in logic, particularly modal logic. You can learn more about his writings here and here. He joined the Uppsala faculty as Chair Professor of Theoretical Philosophy in 1990, where he worked until his retirement in 2001. Prior to that he held positions at the University of Auckland in New Zealand and Åbo Akademi University in Finland. He earned two PhDs—one from Stanford University and one from Uppsala. His undergraduate degree was from Columbia University. A memorial notice has been posted at the Uppsala Department of Philosophy website, along with some personal notes. Those with their own remembrances to share there may email them to Matti Eklund as well as post them in the comments here. (via Matti Eklund)
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