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2026-08-05 17:16:34 GMT

Faculty Sues University over Plato-Banning Policy
Texas A&M is being sued by a group of professors and the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas over a policy that led to, among other things, a professor being banned from teaching Plato’s Symposium, the cancellation of an “Ethics and Public Policy” course, and the closure of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program. The policy, instituted by the university’s Board of Regents in the fall of 2025, prohibits courses from “advocating race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity.” The policy does not define “advocating” but the university appears to have interpreted it to mean “including”. The results of this have been a number of academic freedom violations and some faculty fleeing the university. According to the lawsuit, the university’s policy and its implementation of it “violate Plaintiffs’ First Amendment free speech and Fourteenth Amendment due process rights. The Censorship Policy imposes unconstitutionally vague, viewpoint discriminatory, prior restraints on First Amendment protected academic speech throughout the Texas A&M University System.” The lawsuit refers to the policy in question as “the Censorship Policy” and states: On its face, the Censorship Policy imposes a complete prohibition, in all core curriculum courses, on courses “advocat[ing]” particular disfavored views of race or gender, or any topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity, but the Policy does not impose any corresponding ban on opposing views on these issues. For non-core and graduate courses, any “teaching” at all—not just “advocacy,” though the Censorship Policy does not define either term—on disfavored viewpoints of race or gender or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity is prohibited. Exceptions are only permitted through a standardless pre-clearance process available “in limited circumstances,” upon a showing of a “necessary educational purpose” that the Policy does not define. The lawsuit makes clear that the policy involves the kind of viewpoint discrimination incompatible with the free speech protections, and that it intends to “cast a pall of orthodoxy” over A&M classrooms: While there is considerable ambiguity about what is allowed and what is not, it is clear that the Censorship Policy is asymmetric on its face. As written and enforced, the Censorship Policy burdens only one side of each contested question. Because it forbids “race ideology”..
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2026-07-20 15:23:06 GMT

A Scene from the AI Flooding of Academic Journals
“We recently received a double-digit number of submissions from authors in the Far East… where we had strong evidence of machine generated content. Nothing made much sense in these papers, the authors, with their yahoo and aol type email addresses, frequently supplied false university affiliations, among other glaring problems. I suspected that these submissions were a test of our detection systems more so than anything else.” That is Udo Schuklenk, professor of philosophy at Queen’s University, writing in his capacity as one of the editors of the journal, Bioethics. His editorial was prompted by his journal’s publication of a critique of an article in the Journal of Medical Ethics (JME) for, among other things, multiple citations to “bibliographic fictions” (seemingly the result of unacknowledged AI use), which led to the latter article’s retraction. The now-retracted JME article is “Panem, corticoids and circenses: the ethical fallout of Enhanced Games,” by Alexis Demas (who, Schuklenk notes, used a yahoo email address and whose stated institutional affiliation could not be verified). The critique of the JME article, published (open access) in Bioethics, is by Ognjen Arandjelović (University of St. Andrews), and is titled “Against Moral Panic and Citation Fiction: A Critique of “Panem, Corticoids and Circenses” and a Proposal for Editorial Gatekeeping on Reference Integrity“. Arandjelović discusses the reference failures and what to do about them in section 4 of his article, and I recommend people look at it. Here’s the introduction to that section: It is tempting to treat reference failures as a mechanistic problem that could be addressed through technology and bureaucracy by installing more automated checks, tightening and enforcing checklists, reminding authors of their obligations. Not only banal, that response misdiagnoses the failure mode. In a publication culture where fast-turnaround commentaries are rewarded, reviewers often treat references as decorative rather than load-bearing, and journals rarely suffer meaningful consequences for bibliographic unreliability, low-grade fabrication, and high-grade sloppiness become rational strategies. The core issue, then, is not attempting to help authors avoid mistakes. Authors know this. Rather, the challenge is in making it costly (in probability and consequence) to submit work with citations that do not exist or do not support what they are cited for. In other words, what is needed is deterrence, not assistance;..
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2026-07-16 13:20:14 GMT

A Meta-Epistemological Reason for Rejecting AI-Written Philosophy
“The fact that you, an expert human, generated the text is evidence that the view is worth thinking about—more so than if the text were generated by an LLM.” That’s Eric Schwitzgebel (UCR), writing at The Splintered Mind about why he doesn’t want to receive AI-written emails about philosophy, and why philosophy journals should reject AI-written submissions. Here’s more context: I’m talking about evidence about evidence: meta-epistemology. Your email or your article presents evidence for a particular philosophical view (alternatively, evidence that you support a particular philosophical view). In a simple world, I could evaluate this evidence entirely on its face: How good is the proposed view? But in the actual, complex world, it helps to have evidence about the quality of the evidence. The fact that you, an expert human, generated the text is evidence that the view is worth thinking about—more so than if the text were generated by an LLM. This holds even if the text is exactly the same, which of course it wouldn’t be. An increasingly large part of the function of journals is to provide evidence about evidence—the value of their imprimatur. The fact that an article appears in Nous or Ethics is evidence that it has been through rigorous review and was judged worthy by several expert humans applying unusually demanding standards of quality and importance. Its appearance in those journals is thus evidence (imperfect of course!) that the reasoning is of high quality and the arguments worth taking seriously. Similarly, if I know that an email or an article was written by a respected colleague, reflecting their positive creative exertion in trying to choose the right words, guided by their intuitive expertise in how to phrase things, I have better reason to take it seriously than if I know that it was generated by an LLM and reflects only their passive after-the-fact assent. Philosophers sometimes suggest that we shouldn’t care if an argument was human-generated or AI-generated—that insisting on human-generated prose is fetishizing personal human interaction rather than facts and argument quality. In a way, that’s true: A sound argument is a sound argument. Similarly, we shouldn’t care if an article was written by David Chalmers and published in Philosophical Review or whether it was written by..
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2026-07-06 12:00:30 GMT

Time for Philosophy’s COI Policies to Grow Up (guest post)
“Philosophy’s broadening impact has generated increasing interest from industries looking to partner with academic philosophers. Ties are now especially common between philosophers and technology companies producing AI products. These changes call for discipline-wide reflection on the norms of research integrity.” That is an excerpt from an open letter calling “for philosophy journals to strengthen or implement new policies requiring author disclosure of relevant industry ties and conflicts of interest (COI).” The letter was written by Cailin O’Connor (UC Irvine) and Craig Callendar (UC San Diego), who explain their reasoning for it in the following guest post. “Norms surrounding conflict disclosure (financial and non-financial) are basically non-existent” in philosophy, they say, and “improved disclosure is one easy first step” we can take to “protect the integrity of our research.” Time for Philosophy’s COI Policies to Grow Up by Cailin O’Connor & Craig Callendar Both of us have been working on industry mis- and dis-information in science. By the mid-twentieth century it was clear cigarettes caused lung cancer, but the tobacco industry developed a suite of techniques to influence scientific research on a range of topics, which helped protect their products for decades, allowing them to rack up profits even while millions died. Fossil fuels, agrochemicals, pharmaceuticals, sugar and many other industries use more or less the same techniques to protect a range of products, sometimes with disastrous consequences for public health. The “tobacco strategy” of influencing science often involves techniques that work within the norms of academia, and that may not tip off academics to the role they play in industry influence campaigns. Businesses need not directly fund research in order to skew the results of inquiry in their favor. For example, industry can support just those areas of inquiry that yield desired findings—for instance by emphasizing the role of social media users in the spread of misinformation, rather than platforms, or by highlighting the role exercise plays in health, rather than soda. We recently started circulating an open letter aimed at improving conflict-of-interest disclosure policies in philosophy journals. We encourage you to sign and share it. Why? It is past time for philosophy to start worrying about the tobacco strategy in our own discipline, and to take actions to protect the integrity..
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2026-06-30 17:00:03 GMT

Utilitas Pausing Submissions, Bringing on More Editors
The philosophy journal Utilitas is temporarily halting submissions. An announcement posted on the journal’s website today states: “We would like to apologise for the current delays in reviewing and accepting new submissions. We are currently between editorial teams, and will be pausing submissions until we are able to manage the backlog that has occurred as a result of this.” One of the journal’s editors, Christopher Woodard (Nottingham), is stepping down. He informs me that the publisher, Cambridge University Press, is seeking to increase the number of editors at Utilitas. It has not yet been announced how long the pause in submissions will be. In discussing the reasons for the backlog, Professor Woodard mentioned the difficulty of combining editorial duties with the increasing duties of academic life. I don’t know the statistics for Utilitas but editors at other journals have mentioned increases in the number of submissions over the past several years. (It may also, in this case, be worth recalling this recent post about cuts at Nottingham.) It could be useful to hear about other journals that are struggling with these and related issues, and the steps they have taken to cope with them. Related: “What Can Journals, Publishers, and Authors Do Now to Improve the Publication Process in Philosophy?” “JESP to Pause New Submissions” “Journal of the History of Philosophy Stops Accepting Papers in Early Modern” “Moratorium and New Editors at Mind“
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2026-04-03 10:00:06 GMT

Charles E. Scott (1935-2026)
Charles E. Scott, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Research Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Vanderbilt University and Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Penn State University, known for his work in continental philosophy, has died. The following obituary is by Nancy Tuana. Charles E. Scott (1935-2026) Charles E. Scott, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Research Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Vanderbilt University and Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Penn State University, a highly regarded continental philosopher, died on March 30, 2026. He was 90. Dr. Scott’s contributions to continental philosophy were highly influential. He published 17 books and anthologies—among them Living with Indifference, The Lives of Things, The Question of Ethics, and Telling Silence. In 2020 he co-authored with Nancy Tuana Beyond Philosophy: Nietzsche, Foucault, Anzaldúa. He published over 200 articles and chapters on thinkers such as Foucault, Heidegger, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, as well as on topics such as psychoanalysis, ethics, death and dying, and love. He was working on a new manuscript, Ever For Ever Now. He served as the Director of the Robert Penn Warran Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt as well as the Founding Director of the Vanderbilt University Center for Ethics. Charles Scott’s philosophy, Michael Naas explains, “always begins, like philosophy itself, in wonder, in astonishment, though that wonder is often to be found in places that are rarely taken seriously, let alone explored, by philosophy. He begins the first chapter of The Lives of Things by suggesting that ‘facts’ —facts of all things!—‘are as effective as ‘poetic experiences’ in occasioning astonishment and a sense of wonder.’ We are now in the wondrous universe of Charles Scott, for whom ‘experiences of astonishment do not require universal necessity or something transcendent beyond our worlds of meaning.’” Dr. Scott brought that deep sense of wonder to the classroom. Students remember him as a powerful orator with a keen sense of humor. He was, as John Lysaker recounted, “one who gives us back to ourselves richer than ever without robbing us of the task that each of us is, the task of finding ourselves in the conduct of life.” Robert Bernasconi writes, “For an original thinker, Charles Scott had the rare ability to be able to help others develop..
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2026-04-01 17:18:25 GMT

What Is a Practical Joke?
It’s April Fools Day—a day of jokey trickery—of practical jokes. Unlike in year’s past (2025, 2024, 2023, 2022…) I have no jokey post. Depending on how you feel about that I’d like to say either “I’m sorry” or “You’re welcome.” I thought about soliciting examples of great practical jokes in philosophy, but of course that raised the question: “What is a practical joke?” or “What is it to make a practical joke?” It does not appear that much has been written about practical jokes. One recent exception is “Practical Joking, Lying, and Denying” by Emanuel Viebahn (Hamburg) in The Philosophical Quarterly (ungated version here). While insightful on the relationship between deception and practical joking, it does not offer an answer to our definitional question. So let’s be good philosophers and define our terms. Fill in the blank in X is a practical joke if and only if _______________ or in A makes a practical joke on B when _______________ (or, if you prefer a different definition structure, go with that). With luck, we’ll get some good suggestions in the comments, counterexample them into shape, and see which one is the best. If there is a clear winner, I’ll update this post with the definition, giving credit to its author, such that afterwards your name will forever be associated with practical jokes. Is that a prize? (“What is a prize?”…)
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2026-04-01 09:00:54 GMT

QS 2026 “World University Rankings” in Philosophy
The 2026 “QS World University Rankings” have been published. These contain rankings by subject matter, including philosophy. The rankings are conducted by the London-based education data firm Quacquarelli Symonds. As I noted in a post about an earlier version of these rankings: In the QS rankings, a school’s overall score for a particular subject is determined by a weighted formula that varies by area. In the arts and humanities, for the 2023 results, the formula used is: 60% academic reputation, 20% employer reputation, 7.5% citations per paper, 7.5% H-index, and 5% “International Research Metric“. (It is not clear why these factors are given these particular weights.) QS does not specify whether its rankings are intended to assist prospective undergraduate or graduate students. The rankings have come under fire at various points for methodological concerns as well as conflicts of interest. Some of the results in philosophy will strike many readers as odd. So be aware that these rankings are controversial (as, of course, is the very idea of fine-grained rankings of places to study philosophy), and take note of alternative sources of information, such as departmental websites, Academic Philosophy Data & Analysis and the Philosophical Gourmet Report (noting that various criticisms have also been made of the latter). With those caveats in mind, here are the top 50 schools in the 2026 QS Rankings in Philosophy: Rank University Name Employer Reputation H-Index Citations Citations Per Paper Academic Reputation 1 New York University (NYU) 75.7 90.5 96.8 100 2 Rutgers University–New Brunswick 57.2 77.5 85.7 97.7 3 University of Oxford 100 100 94.2 88.6 4 Australian National University (ANU) 82.8 85.5 93.2 91.4 5 University of Pittsburgh 40.3 78.3 84.7 96 6 University of Wollongong 63.7 79.1 97.4 90.4 7 University of Cambridge 98.1 88.6 88.6 86.1 8 The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) 97.1 87.1 95.6 85.2 9 Harvard University 98.4 83.7 87.1 84.2 10 University of Toronto 86.1 82.5 84.5 83.8 11 Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München 77.5 83.1 85.3 82.2 12 University of St Andrews 74.3 81.8 87.7 81.9 13 Princeton University 80.9 83.1 90.5 80.7 14 Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin 85.2 79.1 86.8 81.3 14 King’s College London 88.8 83.7 87.5 80.3 16 The University of Sydney 76.7 84.9 87.7 80.3 17 Stanford University 95.8 81.2 88.1 79.2 18 Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia) 70.5 81.8..
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2026-03-26 12:44:44 GMT

Mini-Heap
Recent additions to the Heap of Links… Fallacies as “memetic mimicry” — Steven Hales borrows from nature to describe fallacies and their significance “How do we balance the creativity needed to discover new mathematical connections with the rigor needed to ensure that every logical step is undeniable?” — debates over formalization and technology in mathematics evoke questions that may apply to philosophy, too “After holding only one virtual conference… the APA decided to pull the plug on the experiment” — Miroslav Imbrišević is critical of the APA’s online conference experiment Boston University removed Pride Flags hanging in offices. Is this institutional neutrality or institutional politicking? — Either way, “we have a nice stockpile” of reserve flags in case they’re removed again, says philosopher Susanne Sreedhar, who directs the Women’s Studies program “When the worst parts of [Professional Managerial Class] liberalism interact with the worst features of analytic philosophy, the result is just monumentally unappetizing” — but Ben Burgis on his “complicated feelings about academia in general and philosophical academia in particular” Sometimes, to go along with the stipulations of an example is to grant too much substantive ground — Guy Crain attempts to disarm the “pacifist dilemma” by attending to its choice architecture “If the left is to pull people toward it, it needs to… offer a vision of the good life that goes beyond the pursuit of equality” — and turn towards Marx’s idea of species-being, says Jonny Thakkar 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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2026-03-23 11:15:14 GMT

Shortcuts to the End of the University?
“It’s not just the problem of brazen cheating. In some ways, the more insidious threat LLMs pose to undergraduate learning is the promise of instant shortcuts.” . That’s Paul Sagar, Reader in Political Theory at King’s College London, writing at Unherd. He continues: Why struggle through that difficult article, why read that complicated book, why force yourself through the problem set, when the internet can just summarize it for you? The answer to which is: because it is only through the struggle, the forcing, the wrestling with ideas for yourself, over the course of years, that you can truly train and develop your mind. Indeed, this is the reason university humanities degrees put such a high premium on writing. Writing is thinking. Until you have tried to put your ideas on the page, you never really know if you understand them and have them under control. Unfortunately, the truth of these facts only becomes apparent with experience—which is exactly what undergraduates lack. You may also be surprised to hear that people in their late teens and early twenties tend not to be good at putting off immediate pleasure in exchange for distant reward. Traditionally, one thing that universities were good at was teaching young people this skill by forcing them to acquire it. (One learns by doing.) LLMs, however, pose a direct threat to this entire process. They are a quick-fix drug dangled before students’ noses whose true effects appear to be the stunting of intellectual development. That’s the problem. What’s the solution? By this point, it is abundantly clear that the only pedagogically robust response to LLMs in universities is at least a partial return to traditional methods. Reliance on online coursework has to be reduced; a significant return to paper and pen is required. This is the only way we can guarantee that students are not cheating in (all) their submissions. It is only by demanding that they prove their knowledge directly, in person, that we can incentivize them to go away and learn properly in their own time. Everybody in higher education knows this already. But one problem with that solution is that it’s not clear that university administrators are on board with it. At KCL, Sagar says, faculty were..
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2026-03-23 09:00:22 GMT

Online Philosophy Resources Weekly Update
This is the weekly report on new and revised entries at online philosophy resources, new reviews of philosophy books, new podcast episodes, recently published open access philosophy books, and more. (If we missed anything, please let us know.) SEP New: ∅ Revised: The Epistemic Basing Relation by Keith Allen Korcz. Carl Hempel by James Fetzer. Margaret Fuller by Daniel Howe and Sonia Di Loreto. IEP ∅ 1000-Word Philosophy Pragmatic Encroachment: Do Our Practical Interests Affect What We Know? by Alexandra Lloyd. BJPS Short Reads ∅ Recently Published Open Access Philosophy Books ∅ Philosophy Podcasts & Other Media The Philosophy Podcast Hub – a list of new philosophy podcast episodes maintained by Jason Chen. Could Lotteries Replace Elections? (TedEd) by Michael Vasquez. Book Reviews* The Ethics of State Responses to Refugees by Bradley Hillier-Smith is reviewed by Michael Blake at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Being Reasonable: The Case for a Misunderstood Virtue by Krista Lawlor is reviewed by Andrew Irwin at The Spectator. Language, Science, and Structure by Ryan Nefdt is reviewed by Christopher Viger at British Society for Philosophy of Science. Also of interest: Tim Crane’s review of Michael Pollan’s A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness, in the Times Literary Supplement. 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: Embarrassing.
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2026-03-19 09:00:51 GMT

Mini-Heap
L i n k s . . . “It asks us to dig into ourselves, and cultivate emotions of love and reciprocity” — Martha Nussbaum discusses opera’s relevance to political freedom, on WNYC Sometimes you learn that you actually have no duty to perform some task that you had thought you had a duty to perform — “I am interested in morally evaluating the feeling of relief I then often have,” says Alex Pruss “Habermas… wrote the most powerful modern account of why this particular civilisation mattered. He spent the rest of his career trying to escape the implications of his own argument” — on Habermas’ conservatism (via The Browser) “Can we know what the universe is like via the best tools that we have?… The answer is no.” — a fascinating interview with JB Manchak The titular character of Saint-Exupéry’s “The Little Prince” was supposedly based on a Canadian child who ended up becoming a philosopher — Thomas De Koninck was a professor at Université Laval “Bioethics has surprisingly little to offer practicing physicians” — a brutal and important essay by a retired anesthesiologist; valuable despite underrating the actual positive impact of bioethics “Virtually a chrestomathy of moral wisdom, proffered in a narrative voice that is all-seeing, all-comprehending, all-forgiving” — an appreciation of the “moral beauty” of Middlemarch, from George Scialabba 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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2026-03-12 03:50:29 GMT

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 GMT

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 GMT

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 GMT

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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https://dailynous.com/2026/03/09/new-free-ma-program-in-philosophy/

2026-03-04 10:30:23 GMT

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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2026-03-03 11:00:08 GMT

Mini-Heap
Items of interest elsewhere… “I really don’t know how it happened, how it is that I came to feel myself equal to tackling the headiest of topics” — Rebecca Newberger Goldstein recalls getting hooked on the “ecstasy” of abstract ideas “The core aspiration of the project was to create opportunities for the public to do the humanities rather than only learn about the humanities” — Stone Addington on “a game-like crash course” to demonstrate “the impressive depth of the humanities and its centrality to a full life” “The science of poetry is relevant to its art… [K]nowledge of what you can do in a poem, facilitates the writing of better poetry” — Brad Skow on knowing-how, knowing-that, and the obscure rules of meter “If Churchland is right, reasoning just is the transformation of vectors in a high-dimensional activation space that maps the relevant cognitive realm” — Matt Brown on why anyone interested in whether and how AI’s “think” should revisit Paul Churchland’s work “The ‘moral ostrich’ category of human failing… [people] ought to have been asking morally relevant questions… but dismissed them because they valued plausible deniability above all” — Saba Bazargan-Forward and others are asked by the NYT about complicity & Epstein “I once gave a talk in the economics department at Princeton where I described myself as someone with a Ph.D. in mathematics, who calls himself a computer scientist, and is giving a talk to economists about a subject mainly studied by philosophers” — computer scientist Joe Halpern, whose work was significant to many philosophers, has died (via Christian List) Taking philosophy to the street — one way to do it 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/2026/03/03/mini-heap-705/

2026-03-02 10:00:57 GMT

Online Philosophy Resources Weekly Update
This is the weekly report on new and revised entries at online philosophy resources, new reviews of philosophy books, new podcast episodes, recently published open access philosophy books, and more. (If we missed anything, please let us know.) SEP New: Disability and Well-Being by Stephen M. Campbell, Joseph A. Stramondo, and David Wasserman. Aesthetics in Chinese Philosophy: Painting and Calligraphy by Yolaine Escande. Revised: George Boole by Stanley Burris and Marcel Jackson. Economics in Early Modern Philosophy by Margaret Schabas. Fine-Tuning by Simon Friederich. Liberalism by Shane D. Courtland, Gerald Gaus, and David Schmidtz. Natural Deduction Systems in Logic by Francis Jeffry Pelletier and Allen Hazen. Animalism by Stephan Blatti. Scientific Pluralism by David Ludwig and Stéphanie Ruphy. IEP Time by Bradley Dowden. 1000-Word Philosophy ∅ BJPS Short Reads ∅ Philosophy Podcasts – Recent Episodes (via Jason Chen) Recently Published Open Access Philosophy Books ∅ Book Reviews* The Epistemology of Desire and the Problem of Nihilism by Allan Hazlett is reviewed by Alex Gregory at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Laws of Nature and Chances: What Breathes Fire into the Equations by Barry Loewer is reviewed by Craig Callender at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Neurocognitive Foundations of Mind by Gualtiero Piccinini (ed.) is reviewed by Rex Welshon at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality: A Guide by Rex Welshon is reviewed by Guy Elgat at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. 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: Eliminating the impossible
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https://dailynous.com/2026/03/02/online-philosophy-resources-weekly-update-425/

2026-02-27 13:25:26 GMT

Anthropic’s Statement on the Department of War’s Demands
Pete Hegseth, the US Secretary of War, earlier this week ordered Anthropic, the company that makes Claude artificial intelligence products, to allow the Department of War unrestricted use of Claude. Anthropic is resisting, saying that certain restrictions on Claude’s use are necessary to protect “democratic values”. Below is an excerpt from a statement by Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, about the conflict, which I thought made for an interesting read, especially for people working in social and political philosophy, philosophy of war, and business ethics. Certainly some readers will dismiss what follows as a marketing tactic or corporate propaganda, which it may be. But nonetheless, its content raises important and interesting issues. Here’s the excerpt: Anthropic understands that the Department of War, not private companies, makes military decisions. We have never raised objections to particular military operations nor attempted to limit use of our technology in an ad hoc manner. However, in a narrow set of cases, we believe AI can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values. Some uses are also simply outside the bounds of what today’s technology can safely and reliably do. Two such use cases have never been included in our contracts with the Department of War, and we believe they should not be included now: Mass domestic surveillance. We support the use of AI for lawful foreign intelligence and counterintelligence missions. But using these systems for mass domestic surveillance is incompatible with democratic values. AI-driven mass surveillance presents serious, novel risks to our fundamental liberties. To the extent that such surveillance is currently legal, this is only because the law has not yet caught up with the rapidly growing capabilities of AI. For example, under current law, the government can purchase detailed records of Americans’ movements, web browsing, and associations from public sources without obtaining a warrant, a practice the Intelligence Community has acknowledged raises privacy concerns and that has generated bipartisan opposition in Congress. Powerful AI makes it possible to assemble this scattered, individually innocuous data into a comprehensive picture of any person’s life—automatically and at massive scale. Fully autonomous weapons. Partially autonomous weapons, like those used today in Ukraine, are vital to the defense of democracy. Even fully autonomous weapons (those that take humans out of the loop entirely and automate selecting and engaging..
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2026-02-24 10:00:55 GMT

Malcolm Budd (1941-2026)
Malcolm Budd, emeritus professor of philosophy at University College London, has died. Professor Budd was especially well-known for his work in the philosophy of art and music and on the philosophy of Wittgenstein, but also had interests in the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of nature, the philosophy of perception, moral philosophy, and the philosophy of Kant. His books include Music and the Emotions (1985), Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Psychology (1989), Values of Art (1995), The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature (2002), and Aesthetic Essays (2008), among other works. You can learn more about his writings here. He joined the philosophy faculty of University College London in 1970, and was the Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic there from 1998 until his retirement in 2001. As a student at Cambridge University he studied mathematics and philosophy. Professor Budd died on February 22, 2026.
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2026-02-23 14:34:10 GMT

Michelle Beer (1941-2026)
Michelle Beer, professor of philosophy at Florida International University, has died. Professor Beer taught at FIU from 1982 until her retirement in December 2025. A specialist in metaphysics and the philosophy of science, she was well-known for her article “Temporal Indexicals and the Passage of Time,” first published in The Philosophical Quarterly in 1988 and later reprinted in The New Theory of Time, edited by L. Nathan Oaklander and Quentin Smith. You can learn about her other writings here. Before receiving her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh, she was an undergraduate in Physics at Brown and a master’s student in Physics at Yeshiva University, where she studied with Peter Bergmann, who himself was a student of Einstein. An ardent defender of the B-theory, her interest in the philosophy of time was informed by her background in physics. At FIU, she taught a wide variety of courses, principally in her areas of specialization, but also in feminist philosophy. An early adopter of vegetarianism, she championed animal welfare throughout her life. (This memorial notice was written by Céline Leboeuf.)
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2026-02-20 15:32:20 GMT

Florida Implements Stronger Thought Policing
With measures borrowed from history’s totalitarian regimes, political leaders in Florida are taking unprecedented steps to indoctrinate students and prevent them from learning about the world in ways that may lead them to question the leaders’ ideology. The State University System of Florida’s Board of Governors recently developed a newly revised edition of a textbook and syllabus for introduction to sociology courses at the system’s schools. Their adoption is mandatory at the state’s public colleges, while the administrators at the state’s universities will decide whether to also adopt them. Reportedly, Florida State University and Florida International University adopted the textbook, while the University of Florida has not. According to the Independent Florida Alligator, The state-approved textbook is 267 pages—compared to about 665 pages in the original Openstax Introduction to Sociology… Faculty say the new version removes entire units on media and technology, global inequality, race and ethnicity, social stratification, gender, sex and sexuality [and] it also eliminates a section addressing the government-led genocide of Native Americans. On the social media site Bluesky, Zachary Levenson, associate professor of sociology at Florida International University, said, “those who teach Intro to Sociology at Florida colleges (as opposed to universities) received a ready-made curriculum from the state and were ordered to teach it.” He shared an excerpt from the curriculum: What we have here is a branch of the Florida government forbidding the discussion of a wide range of sociological topics and theses in sociology courses. It is a violation of academic freedom and freedom of expression backed by the force of law and with the aim of curtailing knowledge and enforcing a political ideology. It is, in short, a strategy of totalitarianism.
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https://dailynous.com/2026/02/20/florida-implements-stronger-thought-policing/

2026-02-17 10:00:41 GMT

Summer 2026 Philosophy Programs
Reminder: if you’re organizing a philosophy summer program, you can list it here at Daily Nous. Just go to the page that’s right for your program and follow the instructions: Summer Philosophy Programs for HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS Summer Philosophy Programs for UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS Summer Philosophy Programs for GRADUATE STUDENTS and/or PHDs
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https://dailynous.com/2026/02/17/summer-2026-philosophy-programs/

2026-02-16 14:00:51 GMT

Crafting a Critical Thinking Course that Sticks with Students (guest post)
A forthcoming study shows that a critical thinking course focused on a few good, relatively easy to learn, and useful reasoning strategies can impart lessons that remain effective long after the course has ended. The study, authored by Michael Bishop (Florida State), Adam Feltz (Oklahoma), and Paul Conway (Southampton), will be coming out in The Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. In the following guest post, Michael Bishop describes the course, the motivation for it, the design of the study, and the results. An appendix at the end of the post contains the study’s questions. Crafting a Critical Thinking Course that Sticks with Students by Michael Bishop Two large longitudinal studies conducted by Adam Feltz, Paul Conway, and me suggest that a critical thinking class can promote large and enduring improvements in how students think about important everyday issues. These studies are described in an article forthcoming in The Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. Background In Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment (2005), JD Trout and I defended the view that good reasoning strategies are reliable, cheap (i.e., easy to use), and useful. We argued that this view, Strategic Reliabilism, provides a powerful framework for evaluating and repairing our epistemic practices. To prove the ameliorative power of Strategic Reliabilism, I revised my critical thinking class. This turned out to be a long-term project. (Thanks, tenure!) I stopped teaching reasoning strategies that were expensive (e.g., expected utility, rules of logic and probability) or of dubious utility (e.g., informal fallacies). And I started teaching good, cheap, and useful reasoning strategies. For the purposes of a critical thinking class, I took good reasoning strategies to be those that tend to produce accurate judgments (for theoretical reasoning) or favorable outcomes given the reasoner’s values (for practical reasoning). The class teaches students to use reasoning strategies for sampling arguments, testimony, the law of large numbers, herd reasoning, overconfidence, mental accounting, confirmation biases, and status quo biases. Here are five examples of good, cheap, and useful reasoning strategies I teach, each with its own rhyming ditty. Causal Rule: Don’t infer causation from correlation. Causal arguments have holes if they don’t have controls. Regression Rule: For events that have a central tendency, recognize that extreme events tend..
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https://dailynous.com/2026/02/16/crafting-a-critical-thinking-course-that-sticks-with-students-guest-post/

2026-02-16 10:00:10 GMT

Online Philosophy Resources Weekly Update
This is the weekly report on new and revised entries at online philosophy resources, new reviews of philosophy books, new podcast episodes, recently published open access philosophy books, and more. (If we missed anything, please let us know.) SEP New: Sikh Philosophy by Arvind-Pal S. Mandair. Revised: David Lewis by Brian Weatherson. Pierre Duhem by Roger Ariew. Arcesilaus by Charles Brittain and Peter Osorio. Presentism by David Ingram and Jonathan Tallant. Peter Auriol by Russell L. Friedman and Giacomo Fornasieri. IEP ∅ 1000-Word Philosophy ∅ BJPS Short Reads ∅ Philosophy Podcasts – Recent Episodes (via Jason Chen) Recently Published Open Access Philosophy Books Walking Together: Challenging Philosophical and Ethnographic Paradigms from the Ground Up by Anna Bloom-Christen (Routledge). Book Reviews Death in a Shallow Pond by David Edmonds is reviewed by Dylan Neri at Philosophy Now. Also a History of Philosophy, Vol. III: Rational Freedom: Traces of the Discourse on Faith and Knowledge by Jürgen Habermas is reviewed by Andrew Buchwalter at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, and by Matthew McManus at Liberal Currents. Confucian Comparative Political Philosophy by Yong Li is reviewed by Yutang Jin at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Archimedes: Fulcrum of Science by Nicholas Nicastro is reviewed by Claire Hall at London Review of Books. Post-Liberalism by Matt Sleat is reviewed by Paul Sagar at The Times Literary Supplement. A Social History of Analytic Philosophy by Christoph Shuringa is reviewed by Sean Ledwith at Counterfire, and by Peter Ludlow at 3:16 AM. Al-Ghazālī and the Ideal of Godlikeness by Sophia Vasalou is reviewed by Janne Mattila at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Compiled by Michael Glawson BONUS: Aesthetic Moralism
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https://dailynous.com/2026/02/16/online-philosophy-resources-weekly-update-423/

2026-02-12 20:26:28 GMT

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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https://dailynous.com/2026/02/12/can-ai-write-a-useful-philosophical-literature-review-guest-post/

2026-02-12 10:00:03 GMT

APA Joins Other Organizations in Calling for Texas A&M to Rescind Censorship Policies
The American Philosophical Association (APA) has signed onto to a letter by PEN America to the Texas A&M University System Regents “to request that they rescind two policies, passed in fall 2025, that have resulted in the censorship of academic courses across the institution, and the announced closure of the University’s Women’s & Gender Studies Program.” The policies (discussed here, here, and here) are “an unacceptable incursion on the principles of academic freedom that form the well-established bedrock of American universities,” according to the February 10th letter. The APA is one 36 organizations to sign onto the PEN letter. Here’s the text of the letter: Dear Texas A&M University System Regents, We, the undersigned organizations, are writing in defense of academic freedom to request that you rescind the recent changes to Policies 08.01 and 12.01 that have resulted in censorship of course content at Texas A&M, including the cancellation of certain classes and the announced closure of the University’s Women’s & Gender Studies Program. As stewards of the Texas A&M University System, the Regents have the obligation to uphold academic freedom and encourage, rather than stifle, open inquiry in and out of the classroom. The revisions made in November and December 2025 to Policy 08.01, Civil Rights Protections and Compliance, prohibit academic courses from “advocating race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity.” The campus president may review and exempt “specific non-core curriculum or graduate courses in some disciplines” but only “in limited circumstances upon demonstration of a necessary educational purpose.” Revised Policy 12.01, Academic Freedom, Responsibility and Tenure, prohibits faculty from teaching “material that is inconsistent with the approved syllabus for the course,” with no allowance for flexibility. These policies limit students’ access to course content related to race, gender, and sexual orientation, and constrain professors’ ability to teach effectively by prohibiting instruction responsive to class discussions or current events. National organizations—including PEN America, the AAUP, and FIRE—joined the Texas AAUP-AFT, the Texas AFT, and local stakeholders in raising concerns about the chilling effect of these policies. Unfortunately, a wave of content restrictions and mandated syllabus revisions has since swept across the Texas A&M System. Courses have been cancelled, including a graduate course on Ethics in Public Policy that was cancelled after the start..
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https://dailynous.com/2026/02/12/apa-joins-other-organizations-in-calling-for-texas-am-to-rescind-censorship-policies/

2026-02-11 10:00:54 GMT

A Brief Appreciation of Rawls
If you appreciate Rawls, you should read this brief essay by Joseph Heath. If you don’t appreciate Rawls, you should read this brief essay by Joseph Heath. If you’re in the first group, you’ll enjoy how Heath captures Rawls’s importance. If you’re in the second group, reading Heath’s essay may help you become a member of the first group. One thing Heath does is draw attention to Rawls’s innovative reconceptualization of the social contract approach as something oriented not just towards the legitimation of state authority, but to the creation of the basic structure of society, including its major economic institutions. If this does not strike you as interesting, let alone innovative, it’s only because, as Heath puts it, “the intellectual dominance of Rawls has been so complete, for so long, that we have all become desperately bored of talking about him.” Heath’s remarks on Rawls’s second book are worth quoting at length: A Theory of Justice attracted a great deal of attention, and a great deal of criticism, when it was published in 1971. At the time, Rawls was still treating questions of political philosophy (such as “what is justice?”) the same way that Plato did—as a set of intellectual puzzles that needed to be solved (such that, once we figure out what justice is, we can proceed to build a society that will embody the ideal). The problem that he immediately encountered was also as old as Plato. Having put forward his most clever argument in support of his favored conception of justice, he found that most people still disagreed, and insisted on defending their own quite different views. This led to the second big move in Rawls’ work, which took the form of a curve ball that he threw everyone in his second book, Political Liberalism. Most philosophers, when they encounter objections to their arguments, double down on the original method, trying to come up with better arguments, with the hope that this will silence the critics and end all disagreement. Rawls, however, took a different tack. If one were to imagine his response to critics stated conversationally, it would go something like this: “I have given you my preferred conception of justice. You have given me yours...
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2026-02-10 15:06:52 GMT

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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https://dailynous.com/2026/02/10/mini-heap-701/

2026-02-10 11:00:38 GMT

Philosophia’s Outstanding Referee Award
In 2024, Philosophia: A Global Journal of Philosophy introduced an “Outstanding Referee Award“, joining a small number of journals that single out particular referees for special acknowledgement of their services. The award is intended to “recognize those referees who stand out from among the many scholars who lend their time and expertise to comment on manuscripts submitted for consideration with Philosophia“, said the journal’s editor-in-chief, Mitchell Green (University of Connecticut). This year’s winner is Elizabeth Schechter (University of Maryland). Professor Green writes: Dr. Schechter’s report on the manuscript they agreed to review was exemplary for its insight, charity, and actionable suggestions for improvement offered the author. As such, their contribution was a paradigm of the kind of input from external reviewers that makes high-quality, double-blind refereed journal publication possible. The prize includes free online access to the entire contents of Philosophia for a year, a cash prize of 250 euros, and the appearance of the winner’s name on the journal’s homepage.
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https://dailynous.com/2026/02/10/philosophias-outstanding-referee-award/

2026-02-06 12:25:35 GMT

Hyska from Northwestern to Leeds
Megan Hyska, currently assistant professor of philosophy at Northwestern University, will be moving to University of Leeds, where she will be associate professor of philosophy. Dr Hyska‘s research is in social philosophy of language, social metaphysics, and social epistemology, focusing especially on questions about political communication. She has written on topics such as social organizing, social movements, propaganda, AI-generated media, the act of address, and the value of communication itself. You can learn more about her work here and here. She takes up her new position at Leeds in August, 2026. (via Pekka Väyrynen)
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https://dailynous.com/2026/02/06/hyska-from-northwestern-to-leeds/

2026-02-06 12:12:55 GMT

Tenure to Be Eliminated at Many Public Colleges in Oklahoma
It appears that no new tenure-track hires will be made at public regional universities and community colleges in Oklahoma. J. Kevin Stitt, the governor of Oklahoma, has issued an executive order recommending as much to the state’s Regents for Higher Education, who, it’s predicted, will comply with the recommendation. “Existing tenure agreements” made prior to the executive order will remain in effect. Whether that refers only to agreements that have granted tenure, or also to agreements with existing tenure-track faculty about being eligible to be considered for tenure is unclear, though language in the order suggests it is the former. Tenured and tenure-track hiring at the state’s two research universities—the University of Oklahoma at Norman and Oklahoma State University’s main campus in Stillwater—will continue, with tenured employees subject to post-tenure review at least once every five years. Below are two pages of the executive order: According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, more than 900 faculty members at regional and community colleges in Oklahoma currently have tenure.
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https://dailynous.com/2026/02/06/tenure-to-be-eliminated-at-many-public-colleges-in-oklahoma/

2026-02-04 12:56:22 GMT

When the University President Endorses the “Indoctrination” Narrative
For some reason, Renu Khator, the longtime president of the University of Houston and chancellor of the University of Houston System, is insisting that all faculty at the University of Houston sign a form declaring that they’re not indoctrinating their students. The requirement seems to endorse the idea that universities are overrun with professors who are busy “indoctrinating” students and using their classrooms for “advocacy” rather than teaching. They’re not. Rather, this complaint, though disguised as a concern for good pedagogy, is just one form of political and cultural attack by rightwing politicians on the institutional autonomy of universities and the academic freedom of professors. Here’s the form faculty are required to complete: Why is President Khator doing this? Is it political pressure? Others have not succumbed so easily. For example, “when trustees demanded that President Patricia Okker of the New College of Florida declare that her faculty were indoctrinating students, she put her job on the line instead.” In messages to the faculty, Khator talks as if the form were required by Texas State Bill 37. Khator says: I write to you today to outline the process we are embarking on as we comply with the requirements of SB37 as they pertain to the core curriculum…. Our responsibility is to give [students] the ability to form their own opinions, not force a particular one on them. Our guiding principle is to teach them, not indoctrinate them. But the form is not required by Bill 37, which says nothing about indoctrination tests. Rather, it is about requiring a periodic review of the general education curricula and certain programs at institutions of higher education in Texas. It also lays out the responsibilities of institutions of higher education in the state: (1) transmit culture through general education; (2) extend knowledge; (3) teach and train students for professions; (4) provide for scientific, engineering, medical, and other academic research; (5) protect intellectual exploration and academic freedom; (6) strive for intellectual excellence; (7) provide educational opportunity for all who can benefit from postsecondary education and training; and (8) provide continuing education opportunities. Here’s one of Khator’s emails to the faculty about this: At least one professor at the University of Houston plans to..
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2026-02-02 17:22:43 GMT

Is Artificial General Intelligence Here?
“For the first time in human history, we are no longer alone in the space of general intelligence.” In a commentary published today at Nature, a group of researchers, including two philosophers, argue that “once you clear away certain confusions, and strive to make fair comparisons and avoid anthropocentric biases, the conclusion is straightforward: by reasonable standards… we have artificial systems that are generally intelligent.” In the piece, Eddy Keming Chen (Philosophy, UCSD), Mikhail Belkin (Computer Science, UCSD), Leon Bergen (Linguistics, UCSD), and David Danks (Philosophy, UVA) offer what they think is a reasonable clarification of the idea of general intelligence (AGI), evidence that today’s AI fits with this clarified definition, address an array of objections, and discuss why this is important. You can read the article here. They acknowledge that when it comes to general intelligence, “there is no ‘bright line’ test for its presence—any exact threshold is inevitably arbitrary”. Still, progress in figuring out what has general intelligence is possible, since, “we recognize paradigm cases without needing exact boundaries.” For example, “humans are paradigm examples of general intelligence; a pocket calculator lacks it, despite superhuman ability at calculations.” In assessing what has general intelligence, we need to make sure we’re not demanding more for non-humans than for humans, they think. So when it comes to methodology, they say: “When we assess general intelligence or ability in other humans, we do not attempt to peer inside their heads to verify understanding—we infer it from behaviour, conversation and problem-solving. No single test is definitive, but evidence accumulates. The same applies to artificial systems.” They then survey some of that evidence, observing that some current AI’s perform not just at “Turing-test level” proficiency but in ways comparable to expert humans. They note that “current LLMs even exceed what we demand of humans: we credit individual people with general intelligence on the basis of much weaker evidence.” They also respond to various objections, such as: LLMs are just stochastic parrots, LLMs lack world models, LLMs only understand words, LLMs lack agency, LLMs lack a sense of self, LLMs “hallucinate”, and others. As for the significance of AGI, the authors write: Nicolaus Copernicus displaced humans from the centre of the cosmos. Darwin displaced humans..
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2026-02-02 13:42:20 GMT

A New Hub for Bioethics Bowl Information
A new website serves as a centralized source of information for “Bioethics Bowl,” a learning competition modeled after the popular Ethics Bowl events, but with a focus on issues in clinical, biomedical research, and healthcare ethics. The site was created by Mark Wells (Northeastern University). He writes, “While Bioethics Bowls competitions have been running for years now, this is the first website to gather information about those competitions into one place.” The site contains information about upcoming competitions, resources for running the competitions, and other information. You can check it out here.
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https://dailynous.com/2026/02/02/a-new-hub-for-bioethics-bowl-information/

2026-01-30 18:09:38 GMT

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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https://dailynous.com/2026/01/30/humes-tomb-vandalized-with-satanic-symbols/

2026-01-28 16:42:18 GMT

Value Capture in Philosophy
“Value capture is… where your values are rich and subtle or in the process of developing that way. And you get put in a setting or near a technology or an institution that presents you with a simplified, typically quantified version, and the simplified version takes over.” That’s C. Thi Nguyen, professor of philosophy at the University of Utah and author of the newly released The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game, in an interview on the podcast of journalist and commentator Chris Hayes. Value capture happens in various contexts, for example, joining a social media platform “to connect to people, and then becoming obsessed with likes or follows… or going to school out of a love of education, and getting becoming obsessed with GPA.” He continues: “You might’ve thought that if anybody is not vulnerable to this, it would be [philosophers].” But as it turns out, “we are vulnerable as hell.” He then shares part of his story: So I went into philosophy because I loved weird, interesting questions about like the meaning of life and why any of this is here and why are things beautiful. And then I went into philosophy grad school and I got enculturated. And in philosophy, there is a status ranking collated by survey of what the status is of the journals you publish in and the departments you can be at. And you don’t know any of this when you go to grad school. You’re like, philosophy is cool. I want to think about the meaning of life. And then almost everyone comes out being like, what is my highest rank publication? What is the ranking of my job? And there’s a shift. And this is the shift that I started thinking about because when that happened, what my sense of what I was trying to do changed because as it turns out for various complex institutional reasons, a lot of the stuff that gets you published in high status journals is not big meaningful questions. It’s fairly technical work on fairly arcane issues and it’s kind of micro moves. I mean, I would say some of these micro moves are very valuable, but it’s like tiny technical logic pushing… And I..
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https://dailynous.com/2026/01/28/value-capture-in-philosophy/

2026-01-27 13:55:28 GMT

Are Current Events Making Their Way Into Your Classroom? How?
Though philosophers are often (if not quite accurately) thought to have been asking the same questions for thousands of years, philosophers throughout history have responded in their work to the circumstances of their day. We are living in strange, transformative, possibly calamitous times. There are a number of questions we could ask about how our work has been responsive to, or affected by, what has been happening in the world. For today, though, let’s focus on a question about teaching sent in by a assistant professor of philosophy. They write: How are current events being addressed in philosophy courses? I teach a contemporary moral problems course in which we cover topics like freedom of expression and immigration, but I do not quite know how (or whether) to introduce and manage discussion of the current and highly sensitive real-world events related to them. How much of today’s news should I be bringing into the classroom? What are other professors doing? Have they changed-up their readings to ones more relevant to the news? Have they altered their assignments? Or is it business as usual? Also, I feel like generally I try to teach, at least lower-level courses, in such a way that my students are uncertain of my own views. I think this makes for more effective teaching. But that “neutrality” seems not only difficult but perhaps inappropriate for many of the current events I have in mind. This professor says they’d be grateful for constructive advice on whether and how to discuss or address some of these highly charged current events. Readers?
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https://dailynous.com/2026/01/27/are-current-events-making-their-way-into-your-classroom-how/

2026-01-26 14:49:45 GMT

On the Use of AI in Comments
I’ve updated the Comments Policy at Daily Nous with a passage about using AI to write comments here. The update was occasioned by a recent discussion in which a few accusations were tossed around that commenters were submitting AI-written comments. Here’s what I added: Regarding the use of artificial intelligence (AI) / large language model (LLM) tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and the like: Generally, please do not submit comments written in whole or in part by these tools. That said, quoting the writing of these tools in order to discuss their outputs or capabilities, if relevant to the topic of the post, may be acceptable. If you do this, you should clearly identify the text as AI-generated and identify which tool(s) you used. translation or minor editing of comments using AI tools or apps/software that makes use of AI may be acceptable, provided that you clearly identify the text that was translated or edited by an AI tool and identify which tool(s)/software you used. As I say [earlier in the comments policy], Daily Nous is a space for philosophers, academics, students, and other interested parties to discuss news and issues related to philosophy and the philosophy profession. Discussion here is a social enterprise entered into on the expectation that our interlocutors are other persons interested in conversing about the topic under consideration, and that the words they are using are their own. I think that’s a reasonable and valuable expectation that helps contribute to the quality of the discussions here, and I want to protect it against behavior that would undermine it. If you suspect a comment is AI-authored, please let me know about it by emailing me here, and I will take a look and, if I think you’re right, remove it. Please do not make such accusations in the comments thread, as doing so is not conducive to a good discussion atmosphere. Thank you. Comments welcome.
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2026-01-23 14:27:05 GMT

APA Names Schechtman Next Board Chair
The American Philosophical Association (APA) has announced that the new chair of its Board of Officers will be Marya Schechtman. Marya Schechtman is a Liberal Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Her three-year term as APA Board Chair begins on July 1st, 2026. She succeeds R. Lanier Anderson (Stanford) in the position. Professor Schechtman was president of the Central Division of the APA in 2023–2024 and served on the Central Division Executive Committee from 2010–2013 and 2022–2025. You can learn more about her here and more about the APA’s Board of Officers here.
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https://dailynous.com/2026/01/23/apa-names-schechtman-next-board-chair/

2026-01-22 13:54:14 GMT

Lessons from a Legal Analysis of the Renee Good Shooting
What’s one thing that could make ICE agent Jonathan Ross’s lethal shooting of innocent US citizen Renee Good even worse? If it were legally justified. How would this make it worse? The shooting was a horrific event. If it were determined to be legally justified, then (a) it would be harder, if not impossible, to hold anyone properly accountable for it happening, (b) it would become less likely that any kind of amends would be made to Renee Good’s family, (c) it would increase the likelihood of similarly horrific events happening, by telling agents they have sufficient legal cover to be less cautious with others’ lives, (d) it would likely discourage people from observing ICE to witness (and perhaps, via witnessing, calm) their actions, and discourage people from protesting ICE, (e) it would suggest that the problem with ICE is bigger than you might have thought; addressing it involves not just getting agents to comply with existing laws and policies but to change those laws and policies, and (f) it would weaken the extent to which Good’s killing could be used for what you might think are beneficial political ends, e.g., to use its awfulness to motivate political or social efforts to rein in the now Gestapo-like ICE. But why countenance this? Does anyone really think Good’s killing was legally justifiable? As it turns out, plenty of people do. A poll last week found that 35% of registered voters, and 77% of Republican party supporters, think the shooting was legally justified. And so do some philosophers. In a guest post at the newsletter of Dan Demetriou (University of Minnesota, Morris), Tim Hsiao, currently a fellow at the Firearms Research Center at the University of Wyoming College of Law (and previously an assistant professor of philosophy), argues that “the shooting was justified.” (Of course to say an action is legally justified is not thereby to say it is morally justified, or to say that it wasn’t bad.) Hsiao says that the law permits ICE agents to “stop and detain someone even if they haven’t actually been confirmed to have committed a crime. There only needs to be reasonable grounds, based on articulable facts, to suspect that a crime might have been..
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https://dailynous.com/2026/01/22/lessons-from-a-legal-analysis-of-the-renee-good-shooting/

2026-01-21 15:47:16 GMT

Bas van Fraassen Wins Schock Prize
Bastiaan “Bas” van Fraassen, professor emeritus of philosophy at Princeton University, has been awarded the 2026 Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy. The Schock Prizes are bestowed by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (KVA). Winners each receive 600,000 Swedish kronor (approximately $66,000). Professor van Fraassen was awarded the prize “for having developed a compelling empiricist approach to science that has decisively moved beyond logical empiricism, profoundly influenced contemporary philosophy of science, and shaped the debate on scientific realism.” The KVA prize announcement states: According to empiricism, we get all our knowledge through our senses. At the same time, there are things we think we know that cannot be directly observed (such as elementary particles and force fields in physics). Therefore, it is impossible to rely solely on observations to know which assumptions are correct. It is conceivable that different theories could lead to exactly the same predictions about what can be observed, but still differ in their assumptions about underlying, unobservable quantities. Some earlier empiricists argued that such assumptions cannot be seen as true or false statements about reality, an interpretation that has proven deeply problematic and has therefore been generally abandoned in recent years. Instead, constructive empiricism, as formulated by Bastiaan C. van Fraassen, has gained traction. According to it, one can interpret assumptions about unobservable conditions literally (as statements about reality) while remaining skeptical of claims to knowledge that go beyond what we can observe. The goal of science, which is considered to be developing theories that are consistent with our observations, is achieved in any case. The full prize announcement, including the winners of the Schock prizes in Mathematics, Visual Arts, and Musical Arts, is here.
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https://dailynous.com/2026/01/21/bas-van-fraassen-wins-schock-prize/

2026-01-20 13:58:15 GMT

On Philosophy’s Importance
“You want to know why philosophy matters? This is the true answer, and the one upon which we must plant our flag: philosophy is the most productive force ever discovered by human beings and we are responsible for modernity. Philosophy is the great gear deep in the heart of the world, and when that gear moves, the Earth trembles.” That’s Steven Hales, professor of philosophy at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, in a glorious rallying cry posted at his newsletter, Scriptorium Philosophia. He continues: It is philosophers who created systematic ethics, interconnected principles defensible by reason, instead of mere lists of rules handed out by the gods. We are the ones who developed formal logic and the laws of deductive inference. We are the ones who criticized the divine right of kings and laid down the foundations of constitutional governments. We are the inventors and architects of the scientific method. He notes that “philosophy is the first academic discipline, the first show from which all the others are spin-offs” and proceeds to describe the disciplinary speciation philosophy gave rise to. Furthermore, philosophers have “sacrificed everything” to bring you all of this, he says, recounting many of the philosophers who have been punished or killed for philosophizing in history. And now today, there’s this: “our entire field is under attack by a managerial class convinced the only purpose of college is getting 22-year-olds their first job. They are cynics who know the price of everything but the value of nothing.” He writes about the personal and cultural importance of philosophy, the humanities more broadly, and the arts, telling philosophers to stand tall. If you need some motivation this morning, or just want to feel good about philosophy, check it out. And then send it to your dean.
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https://dailynous.com/2026/01/20/on-philosophys-importance/

2026-01-17 16:59:55 GMT

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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https://dailynous.com/2026/01/17/university-of-austins-experiment-a-report/

2026-01-14 11:32:37 GMT

Stratmann Wins JHP Article Prize
The Journal of the History of Philosophy has announced that the winner of its 2025 article prize is Joe Stratmann, assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Professor Stratmann was awarded the prize for his paper, “Autonomy without Compromise: Wolff, Kant, and the Grounds of Moral Laws“, which was published in the journal in January of 2025. Here is the paper’s abstract: Moral autonomy might seem to harbor inconsistency. Whereas nomos suggests that moral laws are grounded in our essence or nature (and thus are not up to us), autos suggests that they are grounded in some free act of self-legislation or prescription (and thus are up to us). Latter-day Kantians often respond by compromising on autonomy, deflating either nomos or autos. This investigation reconstructs how Christian Wolff, Kant’s great rationalist predecessor, already forged a path for embracing autonomy without compromise. His reconciliation, I argue, rests on distinguishing different respects in which moral laws stand in need of grounding. I further unravel why no parallel reconciliation is found in Kant. This, I conclude, still leaves open that Kant may similarly seek to embrace autonomy without compromise. More information about the article prize, including a list of previous winners, can be found here.
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https://dailynous.com/2026/01/14/stratmann-wins-jhp-article-prize/

2026-01-13 19:39:51 GMT

A Dishonest Response from TAMU President Tommy Williams
The interim president of Texas A&M, Tommy Williams, has publicly replied to last week’s reports of his university telling a philosophy professor to remove readings by Plato and others from the syllabus of his moral problems course. In a message to faculty posted on the Texas A&M website, President Williams writes: I want to address recent reports that we’re banning Plato altogether at Texas A&M. This is simply not true. Stunts intended to create this kind of noise discredit your hard work to incorporate a wide array of perspectives into your classes. A variety of courses this spring will teach Plato dialogues. We can – and will – teach and assign readings from the great thinkers of history while complying with updated System policies. This is a dishonest and cowardly reply. It is dishonest because it misrepresents the “recent reports” it purportedly addresses, and it is cowardly because in it Williams does not himself describe and defend what his university did, but instead changes the topic. Perhaps some random person said that Texas A&M is “banning Plato altogether,” but the post here about these events (which was viewed around 200,000 times in a single day and shared widely across the web), and every other news story about it, has been quite clear about what happened, namely that the university told philosophy professor Martin Peterson that he could only teach his moral problems course if he removed the Plato readings (and some other material) from it. See the emails here. If Mr. Williams’ reply was honest, it would have instead said, “I want to address recent reports that a professor has been told by the administration to remove a reading of Plato’s dialogues from his course. This is true.” If Mr. Williams’ reply was not cowardly, it would have then defended the ordered removal of Plato from Dr. Peterson’s course, and not insulted Dr. Peterson’s quite reasonable construction of his course and his expressions of concern about his academic freedom as a “stunt”, nor changed the topic to other courses. It’s like a burglar defending himself against accusations he stole a pie cooling on the window sill by saying, “I want to address recent reports that I took everything they..
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https://dailynous.com/2026/01/13/a-dishonest-response-from-tamu-president-tommy-williams/

2026-01-12 13:00:53 GMT

Fighting AI with AI
Is there a German word for a feeling that combines admiration, weariness, and a touch of disgust? That word would be handy as we continue to catalog attempts to teach in a world of artificial intelligence, such as this one from professor of technology and business Panos Ipeirotis (NYU). As students are increasingly tempted to use AI to read assigned texts and write assigned papers, many professors are increasingly desperate for ways to ensure their students are actually learning. A popular recommendation is the oral exam. Have a conversation with the student in an AI-free environment in which their learning can be assessed. It sounds like a good option, and it often is. (I’ve used them myself over the past few years.) But the problem is that they don’t scale. If you have too many students, you won’t have enough time to give oral exams (and certainly not enough time to give each student multiple such exams during the course, which is probably much more effective at incentivizing learning than just one). What to do? Here’s Professor Ipeirotis’s idea: have an AI conduct the oral exam! And so he developed an AI examiner, and tried it out: We used ElevenLabs Conversational AI to build the examiner. The platform bundles the messy parts (speech-to-text, text-to-speech, turn-taking, interruption handling, …) into something usable. And here is the thing that surprised me: a basic version for a low-stakes setting (e.g., an assignment) can be up and running in literally minutes. Minutes. Just write a prompt describing what the agent should ask the student, and you are done. Two features mattered a lot for our setup: Dynamic variables: pass the student’s name, project details, and other per-student context into the conversation as parameters, to allow personalized exams Workflows: build a structured flow with sub-agents instead of a single “chatty” agent trying to do everything Here’s what the exam was like: We ran a two-part oral exam. Part 1: “Talk me through your project.” The agent asks about the student’s capstone project: goals, data, modeling choices, evaluation, failure modes. This is where the “LLM did my homework” strategy dies. You can paste an assignment into ChatGPT. It is much harder to improvise consistent answers about specific decisions when someone is drilling into..
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https://dailynous.com/2026/01/12/fighting-ai-with-ai/

2026-01-12 10:00:33 GMT

Mini-Heap
Recent links… “Data is not available upon request” — a study (via Brian Earp) “What might I learn from those encounters that I had not already gleaned from the analytical papers and philosophical discussions?” — photographer Dan Turello reflects on taking portraits of humanoid robot Sophia and human David Chalmers How to make sure the writing gets done — Ingrid Robeyns shares what has worked for her Do humans have an innate “number sense”? — the cognitive science and philosophy of mathematical perception “I didn’t die yesterday… In fact, I have not died on any single day in all of history! Today is just another typical day, so I conclude by induction that I will not die today. This reasoning can be applied every day going forward, and therefore I will never die” — Steven Hales offers 10 “proofs” that he’s immortal Today’s cultural and technological environment—one of informational abundance—has led to the development of mutated strain of the availability heuristic — Guy Hochman calls it the “unavailability bias” (via The Browser) “For [a household] robot to uncritically accept the desires of a family to eat as large a quantity of factory-farmed animal products as its members desire is ethically problematic” — Tse Yip Fai & Peter Singer on AI, robots, and the future of animal welfare 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/2026/01/12/mini-heap-696/

2026-01-07 02:34:54 GMT

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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https://dailynous.com/2026/01/06/texas-am-bans-plato/

2026-01-05 15:47:58 GMT

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 GMT

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 GMT

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 GMT

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 GMT

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 GMT

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 GMT

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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https://dailynous.com/2025/11/26/kind-nickel-awarded-prize-for-philosophy-in-psychiatry-and-psychotherapy/

2025-11-17 13:00:31 GMT

Large Grant for Philosopher & Archaeologist on Indigenous Community Flourishing
Philosopher Krushil Watane and archaeologist Thegn Ladefoged, both of the University of Auckland, have won a major grant from the Marsden Fund of The Royal Society Te Apārangi (New Zealand) for work on the persistence and flourishing of indigenous communities. The project, “Ko te Rerenga o te Matuku (The Flight of the Bittern)” brings together archaeology, philosophy, history, the cultural knowledge of the Ngāti Manu hapū (tribal community), and the concept of collective continuance (owed to Kyle Whyte) “to understand how resilience and recovery have developed through lived experience,” according to a press release. “Ngāti Manu’s narratives and aspirations will guide each stage of the research, connecting oral record and archaeological evidence with contemporary issues of place and wellbeing. Narratives and aspirations will guide each stage of the research, connecting oral record and archaeological evidence with contemporary issues of place and wellbeing,” it continues. The grant is for NZ $853,000 (approximately US $484,000) You can learn about the other Marsden Fund Awards here.
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https://dailynous.com/2025/11/17/large-grant-for-philosopher-archaeologist-indigenous-community-flourishing/

2025-11-11 13:31:52 GMT

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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https://dailynous.com/2025/11/11/mini-heap-688/

2025-11-11 12:00:59 GMT

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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2025-11-10 13:30:33 GMT

Is this the Fastest Growing Undergraduate Philosophy Program in the US?
“In Fall 2022, we had four students majoring or minoring in Philosophy; today we have 31.” That’s Paul Butterfield, assistant professor of philosophy at Alfred University in New York. He adds, “we estimate that, over five years, we will have increased our enrollment tenfold.” You probably have questions about how they did it. Professor Butterfield was kind enough to share some of their strategies, which we’ll get to. But he had some requests, which I’ll turn to first. He says, “we’d just like to make contact with other departments who are investing time and effort to increasing their popularity with students, in order to hear about what has and hasn’t worked for them.” You can respond to that in the comments, or reach out to Professor Butterfield directly. Along those lines, let me remind readers of “Philosophy Departments Under Threat: Information, Pro-Active Strategies, Defense” as well as the occasional series, “Philosophy Department Survival Strategies.” He is also seeking data that will help frame the department’s achievements, particularly when it comes to interactions with administrators, promoting the department to prospective majors, and approaching possible benefactors. He’d like to be able to compare their department’s growth to philosophy departments at other institutions. So do any of you know of any repository of data that tracks the enrollment of undergraduate philosophy programs across time? I provided him with some leads, but even reports such as this one don’t include that data. If you are aware of anything that can help, please let us know. Now how did the Philosophy Department at Alfred achieve its growth? Butterfield says: “When I arrived at Alfred in 2022, I made increasing our student numbers my main priority. I credit our achievements to a small number of relatively simple steps, consistently applied.” Those steps: We have pivoted explicitly to a student-focused approach to course offerings. This means that we’ve made sure our topics are responsive to student interest, but also that we are seen to be sensitive to student input. For this reason, we have openly consulted with students about the kinds of philosophical topics they’d like to discuss. I’ve had conversations with Philosophy majors who have mentioned philosophical questions they have about their own personal interests, and these conversations have..
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2025-11-09 19:10:20 GMT

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 GMT

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 GMT

“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 GMT

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 GMT

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 GMT

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 GMT

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 GMT

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 GMT

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 GMT

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 GMT

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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2025-09-01 12:50:25 GMT

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..
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2025-08-29 22:17:37 GMT

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.
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2025-08-26 11:00:48 GMT

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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2025-08-25 10:45:09 GMT

“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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2025-08-25 08:30:36 GMT

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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2025-08-21 12:12:58 GMT

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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2025-08-17 22:38:27 GMT

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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2025-08-11 08:30:17 GMT

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 GMT

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 GMT

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 GMT

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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2025-07-01 11:30:56 GMT

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 GMT

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 GMT

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 GMT

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 GMT

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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https://dailynous.com/2025/06/02/online-philosophy-resources-weekly-update-402/

2025-05-27 18:40:30 GMT

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 GMT

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 GMT

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 GMT

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 GMT

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 GMT

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 GMT

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 GMT

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 GMT

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 GMT

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 GMT

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 GMT

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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