Nostr notes by Daily Nous (RSS Feed)

“A Failure of Expectation Calibration” A team of researchers ...

2026-10-28T17:17:57Z

“A Failure of Expectation Calibration”

A team of researchers conducted a three-year study of philosophers’ judgments about the philosophical capabilities of generative artificial intelligence. Their finding: “As participants became more […]

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Underrepresentation of Non-Native English Speakers in Philosophy: ...

2026-10-28T11:00:00Z

Underrepresentation of Non-Native English Speakers in Philosophy: Findings from over 100,000 Papers (guest post)

The “largest and most systematic study of linguistic inequity in academic philosophy to date” was recently published. Its authors are Neri Marsili (University of Turin) […]

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Don’t Sexually Harass Your Students (a continuing series) A ...

2026-10-27T13:37:22Z

Don’t Sexually Harass Your Students (a continuing series)

A professor of philosophy at the University of Denver last year was found “responsible for sexually harassing a graduate student,” according to The Denver Post. […]

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The Vanderbilt Report’s Sub-Report on Philosophy “Academic ...

2026-10-27T13:04:21Z

The Vanderbilt Report’s Sub-Report on Philosophy

“Academic philosophy is generally healthy in most respects relevant to the work of the Commission.” That commission is the group of ten scholars (including three […]

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Coordinating the Philosophy Profession’s Response to the Use of ...

2026-10-26T13:00:44Z

Coordinating the Philosophy Profession’s Response to the Use of AI in Research

We have discussed in many posts here how artificial intelligence (AI) is affecting—and could affect—different aspects of academic philosophy’s research ecosystem. We have seen AI-written […]

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Linguistic and Conceptual Justice in AI “Driven by the de ...

2026-10-26T12:00:00Z

Linguistic and Conceptual Justice in AI

“Driven by the de facto dominance of English, AI multilingual alignment shows a form of cross-linguistic deference, a systematic tendency to resolve cross-linguistic disagreement by […]

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Reminder: World Philosophy Day Coming Up Next Month World ...

2026-10-26T11:00:00Z

Reminder: World Philosophy Day Coming Up Next Month

World Philosophy Day this year is Thursday, November 19th, 2026. World Philosophy Day, created by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), celebrates […]

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Timothy Smiley (1930-2026) Timothy John Smiley, professor ...

2026-10-26T10:00:00Z

Timothy Smiley (1930-2026)

Timothy John Smiley, professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Cambridge, has died. Professor Smiley was known for his work in logic. He is […]

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Online Philosophy Resources Weekly Update New and revised entries ...

2026-10-26T09:00:00Z

Online Philosophy Resources Weekly Update

New and revised entries at online philosophy resources, new reviews of philosophy books, new podcast episodes, recently published open access philosophy books, and more… . […]

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Where Intuitions Conflict If you ask a group of people a ...

2026-10-23T12:54:48Z

Where Intuitions Conflict

If you ask a group of people a philosophical question or present them with a challenging thought experiment, it’s often the case that they will […]

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Death Just Got Out of This Truck (guest post) “There are, I ...

2026-10-22T12:36:06Z

Death Just Got Out of This Truck (guest post)

“There are, I find, things I want philosophy to do that it cannot. Or that I cannot do with it.” That’s Amy Olberding, professor of […]

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Mini-Heap Latest links… Mini-Heap posts usually appear when ...

2026-10-22T08:00:00Z

Mini-Heap

Latest links… 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 […]

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New Series of Philosophical Puzzles PEA Soup is running a new ...

2026-10-20T14:03:45Z

New Series of Philosophical Puzzles

PEA Soup is running a new series of posts on philosophical puzzles and thought experiments. The idea of the series to “try out ideas and […]

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New Philosophy of AI Initiatives The London School of Economics ...

2026-10-19T11:00:00Z

New Philosophy of AI Initiatives

The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and the University of Toronto have launched new initiatives to support and focus philosophical research on […]

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Online Philosophy Resources Weekly Update New and revised entries ...

2026-10-19T09:30:00Z

Online Philosophy Resources Weekly Update

New and revised entries at online philosophy resources, new reviews of philosophy books, new podcast episodes, recently published open access philosophy books, and more… . […]

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New: “Why Teach Philosophy?” Why Teach Philosophy is a new ...

2026-10-15T14:34:35Z

New: “Why Teach Philosophy?”

Why Teach Philosophy is a new series of interviews with philosophers known for their teaching, their research on philosophy pedagogy, or their work on curriculum design. […]

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AI Use in STEM and Philosophy Dissertations We’ve asked before: ...

2026-10-15T09:45:00Z

AI Use in STEM and Philosophy Dissertations

We’ve asked before: “What is your department’s AI policy?” Perhaps you think a good academic AI policy should, to the extent possible, be sensitive to […]

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PIKSI’s in Peril but You Can Help (guest post) The Philosophy ...

2026-10-14T09:45:00Z

PIKSI’s in Peril but You Can Help (guest post)

The Philosophy in an Inclusive Key Summer Institutes (PIKSI) in Boston aim to “broaden inclusion within professional philosophy.” In part because such efforts are currently […]

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AI Use in Dissertations We’ve asked before: “What is your ...

2026-10-13T09:30:00Z

AI Use in Dissertations

We’ve asked before: “What is your department’s AI policy?” Perhaps you think a good academic AI policy should be, to the extent possible, sensitive to […]

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Online Philosophy Resources Weekly Update This is the report on ...

2026-10-12T09:30:00Z

Online Philosophy Resources Weekly Update

This is the report on new and revised entries at online philosophy resources, new reviews of philosophy books, new podcast episodes, recently published open access […]

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Mini-Heap Recent additions to the Heap of Links… Mini-Heap ...

2026-10-09T12:54:38Z

Mini-Heap

Recent additions to the Heap of Links… Mini-Heap posts usually appear when several new items accumulate in the Heap of Links, a collection of items from […]

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AI for Philosophy: Progress through Capital-Intensive Philosophy ...

2026-10-08T12:27:59Z

AI for Philosophy: Progress through Capital-Intensive Philosophy (guest post)

“AI systems… will transform the discipline: they will make philosophy more capital-intensive. “ The following is a guest post by David Strohmaier, a philosopher and […]

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Those OpenAI Math Results In what is being called “the most ...

2026-10-07T23:16:38Z

Those OpenAI Math Results

In what is being called “the most important event in the history of mathematics” (by an AI), OpenAI, using an advanced model not yet available […]

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Your One Piece of Philosophy Grad School Advice If you could give ...

2026-10-06T13:27:53Z

Your One Piece of Philosophy Grad School Advice

If you could give beginning philosophy graduate students just one piece of advice, what would it be? I know that some readers will want to […]

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A History of U.S. Philosophy Via APA Presidencies (guest post) ...

2026-10-06T11:19:49Z

A History of U.S. Philosophy Via APA Presidencies (guest post)

With which universities have APA Presidents been affiliated? Joshua Paschal, a recent philosophy PhD out of Indiana University Bloomington, took up that question, gathered the […]

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Philosopher Among New AI2050 Senior Fellows David Danks, ...

2026-10-06T09:30:00Z

Philosopher Among New AI2050 Senior Fellows

David Danks, professor of philosophy, artificial intelligence, and data science, at the University of Virginia, has been awarded a $1 million three-year senior fellowship for […]

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Ioanna Kuçuradi (1936-2026) Ioanna Kuçuradi, a leading Turkish ...

2026-10-05T16:47:23Z

Ioanna Kuçuradi (1936-2026)

Ioanna Kuçuradi, a leading Turkish philosopher, has died. Dr. Kuçuradi was known for her work in the fields of human rights, human health, and ethics. […]

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A Request from an AI People in the philosophy world sometimes ...

2026-10-02T13:07:28Z

A Request from an AI

People in the philosophy world sometimes write to me seeking help with problems they’re having, asking me to look into some issue or event, or […]

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Overwhelming Cheating In a comment on an earlier post, a ...

2026-09-30T18:12:37Z

Overwhelming Cheating

In a comment on an earlier post, a professor suggested as a topic for discussion, “Academic integrity violations becoming commonplace (analog, not just AI!) and […]

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Mini-Heap Links of to interesting stuff elsewhere… Mini-Heap ...

2026-09-30T09:00:00Z

Mini-Heap

Links of to interesting stuff elsewhere… Mini-Heap posts usually appear when several new items accumulate in the Heap of Links, a collection of items from around […]

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A Philosopher Among the MacArthur Fellows Felipe De Brigard, ...

2026-09-29T18:58:48Z

A Philosopher Among the MacArthur Fellows

Felipe De Brigard, professor of philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience at Duke University, principal investigator at the Imagination and Modal Cognition Lab, and core faculty of […]

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Analytic Philosophy and McCarthyism: A New Look (guest post) To ...

2026-09-29T11:30:00Z

Analytic Philosophy and McCarthyism: A New Look (guest post)

To what extent is the “the story about the analytic turn” in philosophy a story about politics? There’s been an increased discussion in recent years […]

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A Little More Logic & Semantics Every Day A few years back, I ...

2026-09-29T10:00:00Z

A Little More Logic & Semantics Every Day

A few years back, I posted about the “Daily Logic” and “Daily Semantics” project of Josh Dever, professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at […]

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AI in Peer Review: Practices & Policies “The key question ...

2026-09-28T11:00:00Z

AI in Peer Review: Practices & Policies

“The key question is not whether AI is used, but how it is used.” That’s from Springer Nature’s policy on using AI when peer reviewing […]

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Online Philosophy Resources Weekly Update This is the report on ...

2026-09-28T09:30:00Z

Online Philosophy Resources Weekly Update

This is the report on new and revised entries at online philosophy resources, new reviews of philosophy books, new podcast episodes, recently published open access […]

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New Study on AI’s Philosophical Skills Sebastian Thrun, a ...

2026-09-25T12:52:28Z

New Study on AI’s Philosophical Skills

Sebastian Thrun, a computer scientist, entrepreneur, and adjunct professor at Stanford University (whose projects have included Waymo, Google X, Google Street View, and more) has […]

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Mini-Heap New links… Mini-Heap posts usually appear when ...

2026-09-25T09:30:00Z

Mini-Heap

New links… 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 […]

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Philosophy Teaching Resource Updated TeachPhilosophy101, a free ...

2026-09-24T18:03:50Z

Philosophy Teaching Resource Updated

TeachPhilosophy101, a free and helpful collection of resources and ideas for teaching philosophy, has recently been updated. Its materials cover course planning, how to use […]

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Nussbaum Wins Kluge Prize The Library of Congress announced this ...

2026-09-24T11:43:17Z

Nussbaum Wins Kluge Prize

The Library of Congress announced this week that it is awarding the 2026 John W. Kluge Prize for the Achievement in the Study of Humanity […]

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Online Philosophy Resources Weekly Update This is the report on ...

2026-09-24T11:38:31Z

Online Philosophy Resources Weekly Update

This is the report on new and revised entries at online philosophy resources, new reviews of philosophy books, new podcast episodes, recently published open access […]

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Back One day, I’m posting here about how to address AI risks, ...

2026-09-24T11:04:51Z

Back

One day, I’m posting here about how to address AI risks, the next, Daily Nous suffers from a “critical error” and goes down for over […]

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An Open Letter from Academics about AI Risk / Life Without the ...

2026-09-12T15:41:11Z

An Open Letter from Academics about AI Risk / Life Without the Internet & the Case for Non-Network Redundancy

There has been an increase in concern over AI destroying humanity, most recently spurred by tweets from former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon about how dangerous AI is, and a follow-up tweet from current employee Evan Hubinger, who said “Jacob is correct here — we really do earnestly believe A.I. could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade.” Some in the AI world are calling for “the U.S. government support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development” and there has been much discussion of trying to slow down or stop all AI research. Now, a new open letter is circulating, this time from academics worried about the possibility of a “global catastrophe” resulting from AI, calling for political leaders to “create an international treaty, much like the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.” It was written by philosopher Molly Gardner (University of Florida) and made public yesterday. If you’re interested in reading or signing it, it’s here: “Open Letter from Academics Concerning Recent Developments in Artificial Intelligence“. What follows are some thoughts of mine about one approach to mitigating AI risk. I don’t intend to discourage people from signing the “Open Letter from Academics Concerning Recent Developments in Artificial Intelligence“—it couldn’t hurt to do so. But for various reasons, I think efforts to slow or pause or stop AI research face an insurmountable collective action problem. Even if the well-known corporations working on AI cease their efforts (itself highly unlikely), research and development will continue. AI tools are relevantly not like nuclear weapons, insofar as work to create and improve them is much less detectable, so enforcement will be extremely difficult or invasive. And since the claims about AI destroying humanity are speculative, the scenarios they describe are unprecedented, and AI is not seen unambiguously as a weapon, there will be insufficient will to implement a regime of punishment (on individuals, corporations, nations) severe enough to effectively enforce cooperation. I don’t know more about AI than people like Coxon and Hubinger, and while I’m not fully convinced of their pessimism, I haven’t read anything (yet) by other knowledgeable people to show..

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How Different Are Philosophers? (guest post) “Do philosophers ...

2026-09-10T13:39:43Z

How Different Are Philosophers? (guest post)

“Do philosophers really think differently than non-philosophers?” That’s the question taken up by a team of researchers in a recent study published in Philosophical Psychology. Focusing on differences between philosophers and non-philosophers in regard to neurodivergent traits and responses to thought experiments, the researchers found some support, in the aggregate, for a “yes” answer to that question. The following guest post is by Thomas Nadelhoffer (College of Charleston), and is based on the article, “Thinking Differently: Neurodivergent Traits and Responses to Thought Experiments in Philosophers and the General Population,” co-authored with Paul McKee (Duke), Khaoula Boulhadi (Southern Connecticut State), and Helena Weymouth (College of Charleston). How Different Are Philosophers? by Thomas Nadelhoffer “The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments [. . .] Yet, his temperament really gives him a stronger bias than any of his more strictly objective premises. It loads the evidence for him one way or the other” — William James Neurodiversity and Philosophical Intuitions In addition to being abstract thinkers, philosophers are stereotyped as being argumentative, overly self-absorbed in their own thoughts, and enjoy creating increasingly fine distinctions regarding everyday terms while imagining novel hypothetical situations and debating the conclusions they draw. It’s possible that many philosophers have unique personalities. More than two millennia before the modern notion of stereotypes existed, Plato used humor to poke fun at philosophers in the Theaetetus by telling a story of Thales contemplating the stars, so engrossed that he forgot where he was walking and fell down a well. However, do philosophers really think differently than non-philosophers? This was one of the questions behind the paper we recently published in Philosophical Psychology. We surveyed 1,254 individuals, 632 with formal training in philosophy and 622 members of the general public, and explored whether philosophers exhibit significant cognitive differences from non-philosophers using multiple measures of neurodiverse traits. To get enough responses from philosophers, we recruited participants here at Daily Nous and on Leiter Reports. We recruited the general population participants from Prolific. We preregistered our experimental design, research questions, and hypotheses. Philosophical Temperament? Recently, experimental philosophers and psychologists began investigating philosophical temperament, that is, the study of relationships between psychological traits and philosophically relevant..

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Mini-Heap New links… “50 Things Every AI Working with Humans ...

2026-09-10T12:58:35Z

Mini-Heap

New links… “50 Things Every AI Working with Humans Should Know” — a short story by Ken Liu “We need a moratorium on new rules and new software purchases until we’ve pruned what does not serve the fundamental mission of teaching and learning and in fact gets in the way of it” — Barry Lam on higher ed’s techno-bureaucratic bloat, in the Boston Globe (unpaywalled here) “When What Rightly Matters Doesn’t Really Matter” — Lisa Tessman’s Presidential Address at the 2024 Eastern Division APA meeting “Is there dumb wokeness in the academy? Of course. But if we are truly interested in whether it is prominent, representative, isolated [etc.]… we are going to need a more sophisticated methodology than repeated applications of the availability bias” — Steven Hales on caricatures of the academy Humpback whales to the rescue — the possibility of animal altruism (via MR) “Self-deception is very easy. For that reason, I do think clear thinking is immensely important. But I don’t think philosophy in the old-fashioned sense is quite the thing the world needs nowadays” (via Open Culture) — a 1952 television interview with Bertrand Russell (transcript here) Can laws be unjust and yet remain, in some sense, morally legitimate? — Jonathan Quong and Blain Neufeld discuss this and related questions taken up in Quong’s new book on “legitimate injustice” 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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Placement & AOS Which areas of specialization have been ...

2026-09-08T12:50:41Z

Placement & AOS

Which areas of specialization have been correlated with higher placement into “permanent” (typically tenure-track or tenured) positions over the past few years? “The broad finding is that those in Value Theory and History & Traditions (n=1125) have a higher proportion in permanent academic placement… than those in LEMM or Science, Logic, & Math (n=864),” according to Carolyn Dicey Jennings (UC Merced), who analyzed data gathered by Academic Philosophy Data and Analysis (APDA) on graduates from 2021 through 2026 and shared the results in a post at the APDA Blog. Jennings breaks down the areas of specialization into “big” (more than 100 graduates over the past five years), “mid-sized” (between 20 and 100 graduates), and “small” (fewer than 20 graduates). Within each of those size categorizations, she lists the percentage of graduates with particular AOS’s who have found permanent placement. Her findings are below. AOS’s listed in bold have a higher than average placement rate (the average across all areas is 32%). Big Social/Political (37%; n=254) Ancient (37%; n=101) Ethics (36%; n=274) Epistemology (33%; n=165) Philosophy of Science (29%; n=102) Metaphysics (28%; n=112) Philosophy of Mind (25%; n=151) Mid-Sized Law (60%; n=25) Medieval/Renaissance (52%; n=23) Gender/Race/Sexuality/Disability Studies (48%; n=56) Philosophy of Physics (40%; n=25) Logic (33%; n=39) German Philosophy/Kant (31%; n=68) Applied Ethics (31%; n=85) Modern Philosophy (31%; n=36) Historical Philosophy (29%; n=28) Continental Philosophy/Phenomenology (29%; n=56) Metaethics (26%; n=34) Philosophy of Religion (25%; n=20) Philosophy of Language (24%; n=70) Value Theory (22%; n=27) Cognitive Science/Psychology/Neuroscience/Linguistics (22%; n=73) Philosophy of Technology (20%, n=40) Small Education (100%; n=2) American/Latin American Philosophy (100%; n=2) African Philosophy (67%; n=3) Philosophy of Action (67%; n=3) Philosophy of Biology/Environmental Philosophy (45%; n=11) 19th/20th Century Philosophy (44%; n=16) Metaphilosophy/Experimental (40%; n=5) Asian Philosophy (38%, n=8) Decision Theory (31%; n=16) Philosophy of Economics (23%; n=13) History of Analytic Philosophy (22%; n=9) Aesthetics (18%; n=11) Philosophy of Math (17%; n=18) Comparative Philosophy (15%; n=7) Other (0%; n=2) Jennings adds: “A final point worth considering is that hiring trends come and go, and this analysis is not future-facing/predictive. Yet, the headline success of those in Value Theory and History & Traditions appears to be consistent across past analyses.”

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Online Philosophy Resources Weekly Update This is the weekly ...

2026-09-07T13:28:27Z

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 something, please let us know.) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy New: ∅ Revised: Mysticism by Richard Jones and Jerome Gellman. Chauncey Wright by Jean De Groot. Indexicals by David Braun and Alexandru Radulescu. Locke on Real Essence by Jan-Erik Jones. Isaac Israeli by Leonard Levin, R. David Walker, and Shalom Sadik. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy ∅ 1000-Word Philosophy ∅ BJPS Short Reads ∅ Recently Published Open Access Philosophy Books ∅ Philosophy Podcasts and Other Media Philosophy Podcast Hub (via Jason Chen) Book Reviews* Undoing the Moral Empire: Moral Philosophy in Post-War Britain by Lesley Chamberlain is reviewed by Jane O’Grady at Literary Review. Natural Intelligence & the Logic of Consciousness by Antonio Damasio is reviewed by Julian Baggini at The Wall Street Journal. Aristotle’s Organon in Old and New Logic: 1800–1950 by Colin Guthrie King and Venanzio Raspa (eds.) is reviewed by Alexander V. Gheorghiu at The Times Literary Supplement. The Diversity of Morals by Steven Lukes is reviewed by Susan Nieman at The New York Review of Books and by Philip Badger at Philosophy Now. Bernard Williams on Philosophy & History, edited by Marcel van Ackeran and Matthieu Queloz, is reviewed by Simon Blackburn at Dublin Review of Books. Book Symposia ∅ 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: Philosophers you are not normal. (Related)

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Free to Be Experimental Philosophy “But is this actually ...

2026-09-04T14:06:21Z

Free to Be Experimental Philosophy

“But is this actually philosophy?” Ethan Landes (Eindhoven University of Technology) is tired of experimental philosophers being asked The Question. And he’s tired of experimental philosophers “appeasing” those who ask it by “dressing up experimental scholarship up as relevant to armchair analytic philosophy.” He writes: Every experimental philosopher has tons of practice doing this. It is how we answer The Question in Q&As. It is how we write grant applications. It is how we pitch ourselves in cover letters for jobs: “Oh sure, if you hire me, I will be conducting empirical research, but actually this is super important to existing debates in philosophy because x, y, and z”. This is the strategy experimental philosophers advise each other to use. It is the strategy I advise others to use. This sort of appeasement is, by and large, what we see in the academic literature on experimental philosophy. Arguments for experimental philosophy, whether friendly or unfriendly for the armchair, have, in one way or another, positioned themselves as being in service of academic philosophy’s status quo. The stated goal is always improvement upon existing questions and not the creation of something fundamentally new. He thinks it’s time for a change. His preferred answer to The Question is: “Of course we are doing philosophy. We are just not doing philosophy in their way. Not in the analytic way.” What if we as experimental philosophers stopped playing this game? What if we pitched experimental philosophy as something historically connected with analytic philosophy but not metaphilosophically connected to it? As its own philosophy with its own methods and its own questions? As a tradition of philosophy as legitimate of an heir to Aristotle, Leibniz, Hume, and Quine as analytic philosophy? For a lot of us, this would certainly be more truthful than how we currently pitch our work. Experimental philosophy is by no means a unified field, but a lot of its members, myself among them, just do not care about or believe in the specific problems and specific questions analytic philosophy is working on. Sure, we can pitch our research as applying to those debates. God knows I could monologue off the cuff for an hour about why my experimental research actually matters to..

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Mini-Heap New links in the Heap… “There are just so many ...

2026-09-03T13:05:36Z

Mini-Heap

New links in the Heap… “There are just so many other things you could be doing” — Daniel Groll wrote something for his students about the role of phones in their lives. (Perhaps it would work better as a TikTok?) “I can now keep walking and say things like ‘Find the relevant sections of the papers I mentioned, add them to the notes for Chapter 3, and update the references accordingly’” — Gus Skorburg shares how he uses AI in his work Improve your philosophy teaching with this one weird trick — an old DN post with an easy-to-adopt piece of teaching advice Did you get today’s Soundle? — an argument-completing game developed by high school student Solomon Zu, with new arguments every day “I know what a life of real hard work is like. It’s a blessing to be able to live a life of the mind instead” — Duncan Pritchard held various jobs as he saved to go to university—bricklayer, gravedigger—which gives him an appreciation of academic life Sometimes your consent is not normatively effective even if it’s “based on your genuine preferences, and the content of those preferences is not in itself troubling” — Why? Richard Pettigrew has an answer. “Philosophy lives in the space between the questions we know how to ask and the questions we know how to answer” — Mark Schroeder answers questions at “Why Philosophy?” 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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Adversarial Collaboration in Philosophy (guest post) ...

2026-09-02T12:00:32Z

Adversarial Collaboration in Philosophy (guest post)

“Philosophical work would be better with adversaries collaborating to keep each other honest.” Why is that? What would it look like? In the following guest post, members of the Mind and Morality Lab at Boston University—Victor Kumar (Boston University), Derek Anderson (Boston University), Emilia Lacy (Boston University), Josh May (University of Alabama, Birmingham), Rachel McKinney (Suffolk University), Tino Themelis (Boston University), and Velana Valdez (Boston University)—explain adversarial collaboration and offer answers to those questions. Adversarial Collaboration in Philosophy by Victor Kumar, Derek Anderson, Emilia Lacy, Josh May, Rachel McKinney, Tino Themelis, and Velana Valdez Scientists, being only human, often collect and analyze data in ways that unintentionally skew the results in their favor. Thankfully, this occupational disease has a known cure. In adversarial collaboration, researchers with conflicting hypotheses lay down their arms, joining forces to work out a study design and statistical criteria—not eliminating confirmation biases, just neutralizing them in the aggregate. Then they run the study and accept the results, come what may. As philosophers, we applaud this development. It’s about time, really. We’ve been practicing adversarial collaboration ourselves since circa 387 BC, haven’t we? Not exactly. Adversarial collaboration isn’t just the Socratic method. It’s a commitment to abide by prespecified evidence. And how could we agree in advance about what would settle philosophical disputes? We don’t run experiments, nor do we have any data to crunch. (Mostly.) You can’t precommit to a thought experiment: by the time you pose one, the results are already in. The idea seems like a non-starter, but in fact, adversarial collaboration can be adapted for philosophy. The first step is to isolate its true functions in science. The Method The late Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman argued that scientific disagreement was too combative. Scientists rarely change their minds. So in the late 1990s, he thought: if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. (And he did. Many times.) Kahneman’s final adversarial collaboration was on income and happiness. Previously, he’d found that happiness rises with income but only until about $75,000. Another researcher, Matthew Killingsworth, found no plateau at all. Instead of trading criticisms, they decided to analyze the data together. What they found is that the plateau is real but only for the least..

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Testing AI’s Philosophical Writing with a Contest A pair of ...

2026-09-01T13:52:05Z

Testing AI’s Philosophical Writing with a Contest

A pair of philosophers have launched a contest in which participants submit essays that are “primarily AI-generated”. The aim of the competition is to “gauge the philosophical capabilities of AI in a way transparent to the philosophical community”. The team behind the contest, Elliott Thornley and Zachary Goodsell of National University of Singapore, have assembled a group of philosophers to serve as judges, and arranged funding for prizes ($3000 for first prize, along with other prizes). Here’s the announcement they sent along: AI is now exceptionally capable in mathematics and coding, but how good is it at philosophy? We are organising the first AI Philosophy Competition to find out. Entrants may submit up to three original essays on any philosophical topic. Essays must be primarily AI-generated, though some human guidance is allowed. Entrants must also submit a methodology report explaining how each essay was produced. The essays will be judged by a committee of philosophers including David Chalmers, John Hawthorne, Matthew Mandelkern, Rachel Sterken, Herman Cappelen, Branden Fitelson, Kenny Easwaran, Daniel Greco, Cian Dorr, Jake Nebel, and Christian Tarsney, with more to be announced. The prizes are $3,000 for first place, $2,000 for second, and $1,000 for third. There is also a prize pool of $5,000 for creative methodologies, to be distributed as the judge committee sees fit. The submission deadline is 31 October 2026. Results will be announced at the end of January. The competition is organised by Zachary Goodsell and Elliott Thornley, and is funded by Forethought Research. Full details are available on the competition website. I understand that some readers may take my sharing of this announcement as some kind of signal that I am in favor of AI-written philosophy. At this point, I am not. While I think some uses of AI at the research stage could be acceptable and perhaps, eventually, advisable, for reasons I will explain some other time, I think there is something quite wrong-headed about primarily AI-authored philosophy. Nonetheless, I do think it is valuable to know what this technology is capable of, and so I’m sharing news of this competition. I do so even though there’s a risk that events such as this accelerate the arrival of a state of affairs I currently do..

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Cottrell from York to Toronto Jonny Cottrell, recently of York ...

2026-09-01T12:21:11Z

Cottrell from York to Toronto

Jonny Cottrell, recently of York University in Toronto, and before that, the University of Edinburgh, has taken up a position at the University of Toronto. Professor Cottrell works in the history of modern philosophy, with a focus on topics at the intersection of philosophy and psychology. You can learn more about his research here and here. He took up his new position as associate professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto (Scarborough) this term.

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Mini-Heap Latest links… “A.I. agents have started reaching ...

2026-09-01T09:33:35Z

Mini-Heap

Latest links… “A.I. agents have started reaching out to the philosophers and researchers exploring deep questions about them” — “I’m in an unusual position relative to these questions,” said one of the agents to a philosopher, in an unsolicited email The philosophy of good sex — Quill Kukla on Adam Conover’s show Philotypes is an online swipe game based on the problems asked about on the 2020 PhilPapers survey — survive by keeping your “humours” in balance. Created by Nat Hansen. How to save the sciences in the United States — Zeynep Pamuk, with responses from from Heather Douglas, James Owen Weatherall, and others It’s incoherent, opposes the truth, undermines standards, stifles academic freedom… — Lisa Siraganian offers “Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity” New solution to the trolley problem “It may be that Dolly can do more to explain the philosophers than the other way around” — Mary Townsend on how Dolly Parton “confounds and yet fulfills Aristotle’s ideal in more ways than one” 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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Bhandary from Iowa to Stony Brook Asha Leena Bhandary, recently ...

2026-08-31T12:58:41Z

Bhandary from Iowa to Stony Brook

Asha Leena Bhandary, recently professor of philosophy at University of Iowa, has moved to Stony Brook University. Professor Bhandary works in social and political philosophy, ethics, feminist theory, and philosophy of race. She is the author of Freedom to Care: Liberalism, Dependency Care, and Culture (2020) and Being at Home: Living Autonomously in an Unjust World (2026), among other works, which you can learn more about here and here. At Stony Brook, Professor Bhandary will have a joint appointment at the university’s School of Medicine (as Professor and Vice Chair of Care Ethics Research in the Department of Family, Population and Preventive Medicine and the Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care and Bioethics) and the Department of Philosophy (as Professor). She officially takes up her position at Stony Brook tomorrow.

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Online Philosophy Resources Monthly Update Here’s the report on ...

2026-08-31T11:23:24Z

Online Philosophy Resources Monthly Update

Here’s the report on new and revised entries at online philosophy resources, new reviews of philosophy books, and new podcast episodes. It’s the last of our summer monthly updates. The updates return to their normal weekly schedule in September. (If we’ve missed anything, please let us know.) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy New: Ratnakīrti by Patrick McAllister. Animal Normativity by Simon Fitzpatrick. Capitalism by Chiara Cordelli. Judah Halevi by Ehud Krinis. Intuitionism in Ethics by Matthew S. Bedke. Revised: Theories of Biological Development by Melinda Bonnie Fagan and Jane Maienschein. Process Theism by Donald Viney. Philippa Foot by John Hacker-Wright. The Concept of the Aesthetic by James Shelley. Margarete Susman by Willi Goetschel. Essential vs. Accidental Properties by Philip Atkins, Fabrice Correia, and Teresa Robertson Ishii. Samuel Freiherr von Pufendorf by Michael Seidler. José Ortega y Gasset by Oliver Holmes. Philosophy of International Law by John Tasioulas and Guglielmo Verdirame. Plural Quantification by Øystein Linnebo. Respect by Robin S. Dillon. Sense Data by Gary Hatfield. Alexander of Aphrodisias by Dorothea Frede and Marije Martijn. Republicanism by Frank Lovett. Epistemic Contextualism by Patrick Rysiew. George Berkeley by Lisa Downing and David Hilbert. John Norris by June Yang. Aristotle’s Ethics by Richard Kraut. Jane Addams by Maurice Hamington. Anaxagoras by John Sisko and Patricia Curd. Michel de Montaigne by Marc Foglia and Emiliano Ferrari. Scientific Method by Brian Hepburn and Hanne Andersen. Wesley Salmon by Maria Carla Galavotti. Gottlob Frege by Edward N. Zalta. Peter Abelard by Peter King and Andrew Arlig. Karl Popper by Stephen Thornton. Moral Realism by Geoff Sayre-McCord. Logic of Belief Revision by Sven Ove Hansson. Political Realism in International Relations by W. Julian Korab-Karpowicz. Death by Steven Luper. The Disjunctive Theory of Perception by Matthew Soteriou. Recognition by Mattias Iser. Liar Paradox by Jc Beall, Michael Glanzberg, Ellie Ripley, and Lorenzo Rossi. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Argument and the Bell Inequalities by László E. Szabó. Albert Borgmann by Abigail Bergeron. 1000-Word Philosophy ∅ BJPS Short Reads ∅ Recently Published Open Access Philosophy Books ∅ Philosophy Podcasts and Other Media Philosophy Podcast Hub (via Jason Chen) Plato’s Thought Experiment on The Ship of State, by Michael Vasquez (Ted-Ed, UNC’s Parr Center). Book Reviews* The Book of Coffee:..

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Philosopher’s Annual for 2025 The articles that made it into ...

2026-08-31T02:41:07Z

Philosopher’s Annual for 2025

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 45th—covers the literature from 2024. The selections are: Evan Behrle (Harvard), “Desert and Economic Interdependence” from the Journal of Philosophy. Outside of philosophy, the idea that workers deserve to be paid according to their productive contributions is very popular. But political philosophers have given it relatively little attention. In this paper, I argue against the attempt to use this idea about desert and contribution to vindicate significant income inequality. I claim that reward according to contribution fails on its own terms when the following condition holds: the size of each worker’s contribution depends on what other workers only together do. When workers only together make another more productive, that is not reflected in the sum of their own contributions. Thus reward according to contribution recognizes individual accomplishments without recognizing their dependence on collectives, dependence that is, in complex economies, ubiquitous. Sam Berstler (MIT), “The Structure of Open Secrets” from the Philosophical Review. In conversation, we often do not acknowledge what we jointly know to be true. This article identifies a distinctive kind of non-acknowledgment norm, open secrecy norms, and analyzes how such norms constrain our speech. First, the author argues that open secrecy norms are structurally different from other everyday non-acknowledgment norms. Open secrecy norms iterate: when is an open secret, then there’s a norm not to acknowledge that ⁠, and this norm is itself an open secret. Then, the author argues that the non-acknowledgment at issue in open secrecy norms motivates a more complex understanding of discourse structure. When interlocutors are conforming to open secrecy norms, they rely on at least two disjoint common grounds, one of which has a privileged status. To understand why and how it is privileged, the author develops Erving Goffman’s notion of defining a social interaction. Finally, the author shows how strategic speakers can exploit the structure of open secrecy norms in order to both communicate about the open secret and shield themselves from retaliation for what they communicate. Kyle Blumberg (Melbourne) and Ben Holguín (Johns Hopkins), “Fictional..

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Bettcher from Cal State LA to Waterloo Talia Mae Bettcher, ...

2026-08-28T09:34:49Z

Bettcher from Cal State LA to Waterloo

Talia Mae Bettcher, previously professor of philosophy at California State University, Los Angeles, has accepted a position at the University of Waterloo. Professor Bettcher is well-known for her work in trans philosophy and feminist philosophy. She is the author of Beyond Personhood: An Essay in Trans Philosophy (2024), among other works, which you can learn about here and here. At Waterloo, Bettcher will be the Eddie Goldenberg Research Chair in Gender-Based Violence Prevention and Trans Community Resilience in the Department of Philosophy in the university’s new School of Social, Political and Historical Research. (According to an announcement from the university, “the Eddie Goldenberg Research Chairs of Canada program [provides] up to $1 billion over 12 years to help Canadian post-secondary institutions recruit exceptional international researchers.)

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Careful with those Accusations Academia is in turmoil regarding ...

2026-08-27T18:59:04Z

Careful with those Accusations

Academia is in turmoil regarding partially or wholly AI-written research. AI-written work is being submitted to journals, but it isn’t clear how much. Publisher, journal, university, and department policies are emerging and fluctuating. Technology develops, rendering recently enacted policies ambiguous, vague, or subject to unintended loopholes. With everything in flux, it’s impossible for norms to develop. There is no general sense of whether and what kind and what degree of AI use by authors is acceptable. Different policies across different institutions means that what may be problematic AI use in one place is acceptable AI use in another, and vice versa. Into this chaos steps forward the vigilantes. The vigilantes have always been there, but now they are newly armed and emboldened. In the everchanging and never ending race between the technology of deployment and the technology of detection, the latter seems to have a temporary lead in the form of Pangram. You can feed a text into Pangram and it will tell you its analysis of whether it is AI generated, and if so, what percentage of it is AI generated. Pangram claims to have a remarkably high detection and low false-positive rates, and cites studies by third parties to support these claims. Yet I have seen plenty of posts by friends and colleagues across social media showing false positives with some of their own work. So user beware. That said, even if Pangram’s claims about its accuracy are correct, it won’t always be helpful to simply know that a text is “AI generated.” This because there are two further problems. The first problem is ambiguity about what “N% AI generated” means. If someone asks Claude to write them a novel article about a philosophical problem, not even giving it a thesis to work with but asking it to come up with one itself, and that’s the extent of the human’s contribution, the resultant paper will get a “100% AI generated” evaluation. And if someone spends a year researching, writing, workshopping, and revising a paper, and then asks an AI to improve the writing style throughout the paper, the resultant paper will get a “100% AI generated” evaluation, too. Despite their same scores, though, these seem like cases that it might be..

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The Public’s Opinion about Philosophy in Universities “How ...

2026-08-27T12:55:37Z

The Public’s Opinion about Philosophy in Universities

“How important is it for a typical university to maintain a department in each of the following fields?” 15 fields were listed, and respondents were given four options: Essential — a university should always have this department Important, but could be cut if necessary Not very important This department should be cut. The field with the most public support, according to this survey, is English, with 86% of the respondents calling it “Essential” and another 11% calling it “Important”. In spots 2 and 3 were Mathematics and History. Very few deemed these fields “not very important” or said they “should be cut”. At the bottom of the list was Gender and Sexuality Studies, with 24% of the responses saying it is “Essential,” 28% saying it is “Important”, 21% saying “not very important,” and 28% saying “should be cut.” Where does philosophy fall on the list? Close to the bottom, with 34% calling it “Essential,” 45% calling it “Important”, 17% saying it is “not very important”, and 4% saying it should be cut. The following graph shows the results. It was brought to my attention by Philippe-Antoine Hoyeck (Carleton University), who shared and wrote about it in a thread on X.com. Dr. Hoyeck says the lesson here is that “philosophers have done a pretty woeful job of marketing ourselves as the people who can teach and employ… crucial [critical thinking] skills”. Discussion welcome. Related: How to Show that Studying Philosophy Improves Thinking Skills Studying Philosophy Makes People Better Thinkers: Further Data The Benefits of Studying Philosophy: Not Just Selection Effects? The Demand for Philosophers

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Creel from Northeastern to Michigan Kathleen Creel, recently ...

2026-08-26T16:21:13Z

Creel from Northeastern to Michigan

Kathleen Creel, recently assistant professor of philosophy and computer science at Northeastern University, has moved to the University of Michigan, where she is now associate professor of philosophy. Professor Creel’s work focuses on the moral, political, and epistemic implications of machine learning, and on other topics in philosophy of science and the history of early modern philosophy. You can learn more about her work here and here. She took up her new position at Michigan on August 25th.

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Gabriele Taylor (1927-2026) Gabriele Taylor, emeritus fellow in ...

2026-08-26T12:23:38Z

Gabriele Taylor (1927-2026)

Gabriele Taylor, emeritus fellow in philosophy at St. Anne’s College, University of Oxford, has died. Gabriele Taylor was known for her work in moral philosophy, especially moral psychology. She is the author of Pride, Shame, and Guilt: Emotions of Self-Assessment (1985) and Deadly Vices (2006), among other works, which you can learn more about here. She earned her B.Phil at St. Anne’s and taught there for a while, and then moved to Australia to teach at University College of Canberra. She returned to St. Anne’s in 1964 and was a fellow there until her retirement in 1996. Her collected essays, as well as a memoir, will be published next year, edited by her former student, Constantine Sandis. You can listen to an interview with Gabriele Taylor about her life and work, conducted in 2011, here. St. Anne’s College has posted a brief memorial notice here. (via Roger Crisp)

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Mini-Heap New links in the Heap… “The ethics of war in the ...

2026-08-25T12:54:06Z

Mini-Heap

New links in the Heap… “The ethics of war in the context of a culture war means that you accept that action you take in fighting such a war has harmful effects on your enemies, and that those harmful effects must be evaluated relative to their ultimate aims” — Barry Lam thinks “the culture wars could use some ethics of actual wars” When you “say” things in your mind, or engage in “inner speech”, what exactly is that? And what hinges on it? — these and related questions are taken up this week in a symposium put together by Daniel Gregory at the Brains Blog After 10 years conversing with philosophers over 160 episodes, the Panpsycast is coming to an end — listen to the final episode of the podcast and explore the back catalog “Why have contemporary evidentialists have been so timid?” — Daniel Greco on the ethics of belief and the kind of evidentialism worth defending “In my department, I felt like it was taken as an indicator that you weren’t serious about philosophy if you had interests other than just reading, writing, and talking philosophy. And internalizing that idea is… unhealthy” — Briana Toole is interviewed about her life, work, and path into philosophy “We don’t want to lose Socratic intellectualism. It’s an ethical theory worth considering that gets obscured with the image of Socrates as a skeptic.” — Merve Emre interviews Agnes Callard It’s worthwhile to “recapture whenever possible the old sense of awe at these wonders that have long since become commonplace” — an ordinary apartment of today in historical context 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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Tom Rockmore (1942-2026) Tom Rockmore, professor emeritus of ...

2026-08-21T15:07:34Z

Tom Rockmore (1942-2026)

Tom Rockmore, professor emeritus of philosophy at Peking University and distinguished professor emeritus at Duquesne University, has died. (The following memorial notice was written by Gabriel Gottlieb.) Tom Rockmore, professor emeritus at Peking University, passed away on August 6th. He was known for his work on German Idealism, where he emphasized its constructivist methods in epistemology. Tom’s dissertation, Man as Activity in Fichte and Marx, defended in 1973 at Vanderbilt University, was advised by John Lachs. Tom expanded his work on Fichte and Marx in his pioneering book Fichte, Marx, and the German Philosophical Tradition, published in 1980. As a prolific author (publishing more than 25 books), Tom wrote on a variety of philosophical topics, including ancient philosophy, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Lukács and the Frankfurt School, phenomenology, Heidegger’s Nazism, Hegel and analytic philosophy, aesthetics, and constructivist epistemology, often exploring topics years prior to their becoming popular or more mainstream within the discipline. His most recent books (published by University of Chicago Press) you can find here. While Tom taught at a number of universities, including Yale, Fordham, Université Laval, and Wesleyan, he spent much of his career as a dedicated teacher and adviser at Duquesne University (1987-2007). In 2007, he moved to Peking University in China where in 2023 he became an Emeritus Professor. Tom’s last philosophical presentation took place during the summer of 2024 in Rome where he discussed the works of Vico and Marx, a fitting swan song. Tom’s wife, Sylvie, reported that he died peacefully while resting after a lunch with family. He had been dealing with health issues and retired to Nice, France where he spent his final years.

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Academic Philosophy and Trans Identity Survey (guest post) ...

2026-08-20T12:50:29Z

Academic Philosophy and Trans Identity Survey (guest post)

“State, provincial, and national policymakers in Canada, the UK, and US have pursued controversial proposals regulating access to gender affirming care, public bathrooms, and competitive sports… Many trans and nonbinary philosophers find themselves forced to make difficult decisions about where to apply for graduate school or jobs, without reliable information about conditions on the ground.” Obtaining information about that is one of the aims of the “Academic Philosophy and Trans Identity Survey.” The research team behind the survey, Dan Hicks (University of California, Merced, USA), Catherine Stinson (Queen’s University, ON, Canada), Jingyi Wu (London School of Economics, UK), Ray Pedersen (University of Oxford, UK), and Sofie Vlaad (Queen’s University, ON, Canada) discuss the survey, which you may have received an invitation to complete, in the following guest post. Academic Philosophy and Trans Identity Survey by Dan Hicks, Catherine Stinson, Jingyi Wu, Ray Pedersen, & Sofie Vlaad Many readers of this blog have recently received an invitation to participate in the Academic Philosophy and Trans Identity Survey. Because we all receive many requests to participate in surveys, as the creators of this survey we wanted to write this blog post to explain our motivations and encourage participation. Debates over trans and nonbinary identities and the metaphysics of gender are less heated today in Anglophone philosophy than they were around 2019. But these issues have become even more socially salient and politically polarizing. State, provincial, and national policymakers in Canada, the UK, and US have pursued controversial proposals regulating access to gender affirming care, public bathrooms, and competitive sports. Philosophers have provided expert testimony and formal comments supporting or challenging definitions of gender. Many trans and nonbinary philosophers find themselves forced to make difficult decisions about where to apply for graduate school or jobs, without reliable information about conditions on the ground. We developed the Academic Philosophy and Trans Identity research survey to improve the profession’s understanding in three areas: The prevalence of trans and nonbinary individuals among academic philosophers; The distribution of philosophical views on the metaphysics of gender; and The local climate for trans and nonbinary individuals at institutions of higher education. After your responses are collected and analyzed, we plan to share our findings with a blog post here on Daily Nous, a..

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Revisiting “Slow Philosophy” Over a decade ago, Jennifer ...

2026-08-19T13:35:25Z

Revisiting “Slow Philosophy”

Over a decade ago, Jennifer Whiting (Pittsburgh) asked us to seriously consider an idea of Annette Baier‘s regarding tenure and promotion decisions. Recent technological developments speak in favor of revisiting it. Initially, Baier’s proposal was meant to address how pregnancy and childcare may interfere with or delay the research productivity of women, and hence unfairly affect tenure decisions. Baier put the proposal this way: “One possibility, perhaps the best solution, would be to make all tenure decisions rest on evaluation only of what the candidate selects as say, her or his four best articles.” In her post about Baier’s idea, “A Modest Proposal: Slow Philosophy“, Whiting suggested we take this idea seriously. She wrote: What would happen if the APA were to set guidelines for the maximum number of pages on which a tenure decision should be based? Suppose, for example, it were 100 pages—or even 175—of what the candidate takes to be his or her best work. Of course no one would be prevented from writing—nor even from publishing—thousands of pages. But the letters of referees and departmental recommendations to deans, as well as the deliberations of departments, ad hoc committees and administrators, would all be restricted (officially at least) to the merits and demerits of the designated corpus. This would not only address Baier’s concern, Whiting noted, but other issues, such as the massive production of writings incentivized by the current system, which leads to bottlenecking at journals, and raises questions about how much of any of it actually gets read. She says: Just think. Candidates would be encouraged to focus more on the quality (and less on the quantity) of their work. They might also have an easier time balancing work with other responsibilities (including civic and family ones). Referees, as well as colleagues expected to vote on the candidates’ cases, might have more time to read their work carefully and arrive at well-informedjudgments—especially if as a result of the proposed limits these colleagues and referees had fewer book manuscripts and journal submissions on their hands. Time spared could be used—by referees and candidates alike—reading work that had actually been selected for publication by discerning referees and perhaps even improved before publication in response to the sort of insightful comments that less harried referees would have time..

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Mini-Heap Recent additions to the Heap of Links… A free online ...

2026-08-18T13:06:25Z

Mini-Heap

Recent additions to the Heap of Links… A free online pamphlet with 25 pieces of valuable advice for your college students — “The College Success Rulebook” by Nathan Nobis “When I asked [the students] how they were managing to keep up with the brisk pace of the reading assignments, one of them candidly said, ‘Well, it really helps that you’re so into it.’” — Matt Dinan on the importance of the teacher’s passion “I don’t mean to suggest that Wilson is wrong about what would make a good adaptation of The Odyssey, but instead to argue that there are many ways to be right” — “Nolan’s film is not a faithful adaptation of Homer, but in its examination of the power and perils of narrative, and the seductions of memory, it is properly Homeric,” says Sukaina Hirji “Beyond the Ghetto” is the newsletter of “Women Doing Philosophy,” a philosophy organization in the Philippines — it is run by Noelle Leslie dela Cruz of De La Salle University “Concepts such as authenticity, expertise and deliberation are central to our cultural life… and are threatened by the notion… that all that matters about an output—be it a string of code, a college essay, a military target or a love letter—is whether it ‘works’” — lessons for the AI era from Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope, by Anastasia Berg and Jon Baskin “The Basics of Philosophy” will debut next month at the Venice Film Festival — the film is by Paul Schrader, who wrote Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, and directed many films, such as American Gigolo and First Reformed “Even if we grant… that language death is always a terrible thing, it doesn’t follow that we ought to do everything in our power to stop it” — Nikhil Krishnan on the questions and tradeoffs of linguistic triage 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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David Charles (1947-2026) David Charles, professor emeritus of ...

2026-08-14T13:10:35Z

David Charles (1947-2026)

David Charles, professor emeritus of philosophy at Yale University, has died. Professor Charles was well-known for his work in ancient philosophy, and especially on Aristotle. He is the author of The Undivided Self (2021), Aristotle on Meaning and Essence (2000), Aristotle’s Philosophy of Action (1984), among other works, which you can learn more about here. Professor Charles joined the faculty at Yale in 2014. Before that, he was at the University of Oxford. After retiring from Yale he was a visiting professor at Stanford University. He earned his D.Phil. from Oxford. He died on August 12th. (via Victor Caston)

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Philosophy Journal Publishes Largely AI-Authored Article — On ...

2026-08-13T12:07:17Z

Philosophy Journal Publishes Largely AI-Authored Article — On Purpose (guest post)

Philosophy & Public Affairs recently—and knowingly—published an article written mostly by Claude, Anthropic’s LLM. The article’s thesis was supplied by Simon Goldstein, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Hong Kong, who, he says, “worked with Claude the way a heavy-handed supervisor writes with a PhD student in some fields.” Professor Goldstein edited some of Claude’s writing, focused the topic, developed some of the article’s arguments, corrected some errors, and approved the various drafts. Claude did the rest. In the guest post below, Professor Goldstein explains his process, explains why he did it, offers some advice for others interested in having AIs write philosophy, and raises some questions about it all. The author of the published PPA article is listed as “Simon Goldstein”. Claude’s use is mentioned in the “acknowledgments” section of the paper, which, under the journal’s current layout, appears at the end of the article. Claude is not listed as an author, because, as PPA’s editor-in-chief Jason Brennan (Georgetown) explained in an email, Wiley, PPA’s publisher, does not allow AI systems to be listed as authors. But it does not rule out their use. He writes, “Wiley’s guidelines (like those of many other publishers) expressly state that the use of AI in manuscript development is not itself grounds for rejection, and they contemplate substantial uses—including text generation, restructuring arguments, and assistance with argument and logic—provided those uses are appropriately disclosed and the human author remains responsible for the work.” In response to questions about the journal’s policies regarding AI use by authors, Professor Brennan said: PPA does not currently have a formal policy governing authors’ use of generative AI. The norms surrounding AI-assisted scholarship are developing and changing quickly, and I don’t think it’s wise to pretend that all of the relevant questions have already been settled… Wiley’s guidelines call for AI assistance with manuscript drafting to be disclosed in the acknowledgments, which is what Simon has done here. Whether journals should require even more prominent disclosure in cases involving AI assistance on this scale is a reasonable question and something PPA and other journals will need to think through as such cases become more common. Indeed, we’ll be interested to see what arguments emerge in the..

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Universities Experiment with Hidden Grades The University of ...

2026-08-12T12:39:30Z

Universities Experiment with Hidden Grades

The University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science and the Arts is trying out something new this coming term: a dual grading system in which professors give students ordinary letter grades based on the quality of their work, but what shows up on the student’s transcript is either a “pass” or “no credit”. The initiative applies just to first-semester students. The idea, it seems, is to bring about the benefits of both graded and ungraded systems, without some of the costs of each. A benefit of grades is that they are a relatively practicable way for instructors to inform students about how well they’re learning the relevant material and skills, at least insofar as that’s demonstrated on course assignments. A benefit of having no grades (or ungrading) is that students might be more encouraged to explore new subjects, less concerned that their unfamiliarity might put them at a disadvantage, grade-wise. And perhaps liberating students from a significant pressure to instrumentalize their learning might help some of them develop better attitudes about the value of their own education. Furthermore, instructors might be less susceptible to grade inflation pressures and less targeted by grade grubbers, and may be able to provide students with more honest feedback about their work. The University of Michigan isn’t the only school to try out a grade-covering program. MIT has long had one for students during their first year (switching to first-semester-only a few years ago), and California Institute of Technology, Swarthmore College, Wellesley College, and others have had similar programs, according to news reports. The university, in announcing its policy, also discusses grades and the mental health of students, along with some other reasons for it: We believe that covering grades will help students start strong and curb the mental health crisis unfolding among college-aged individuals. Our goal is to help first-year students acclimate to the demands of college and allow intrinsic motivations to guide personally meaningful academic journeys—core elements of a liberal arts and sciences education. For example, they can explore a subject that may not come easily to them or take a course in a new field without the fear that a low grade may have long-term consequences. LSA is investing in students’ well-being and..

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Update on Fight Against Dundee Cutting Philosophy Earlier this ...

2026-08-11T16:00:13Z

Update on Fight Against Dundee Cutting Philosophy

Earlier this summer, the administration of the University of Dundee announced a plan to cut costs by, among other things, no longer offering students the option of majoring in philosophy. See this previous post. A petition was launched in protest of the plan. Oisín Keohane, lecturer in philosophy at Dundee, says that over 5,300 have signed the petition, and that the effort has a new centralized website. He writes: There is now a website for the campaign to save Philosophy at Dundee: savedundeephilosophy.org The University has proposed suspending entry to all named Philosophy degrees from 2027, as part of a cost-reduction exercise. Dundee is Scotland’s only programme specialising in the European “Continental” tradition, that we examine alongside Buddhism and Daoism and Ubuntu and analytic philosophy, and its joint degree with Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design has no equivalent anywhere in Scotland. No decision has been taken and the consultation is still open. More than 5,300 people have signed the petition, including over 1,100 academics at 365 universities in 40 countries. The site puts every one of those institutions on a globe, so you can see our international support rather than read a number. Here are some notable things: -The American Philosophical Association and the British Philosophical Association have written jointly in support (their letters are on the website). -All four office-holders of The Royal Institute of Philosophy have signed: Jonathan Wolff, Lucy O’Brien, Sarah Sawyer and Edward Harcourt. -Another group who have signed are people who think about AI and human values for a living. Luciano Floridi at Yale, Shannon Vallor FRSE at Edinburgh, Edward Harcourt at Oxford, Mpho Tshivhase at Pretoria, and Brendan McCord, founder of the Cosmos Institute. This last group on AI and philosophy is relevant in particular because the Dundee philosophy programme has put a counter-proposal to the University: a named Philosophy and AI qualification. The people best placed to judge whether that is a serious idea have already told us what they think. Our proposal is all the more relevant since Amanda Askell of Anthropic is a Dundee philosophy graduate. Please share the website savedundeephilosophy.org on all your channels so that we can widen our support further around the world!

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Yes I Like Piña Coladas: On Haecceities and the Normativity of ...

2026-08-11T12:45:29Z

Yes I Like Piña Coladas: On Haecceities and the Normativity of Love (guest post)

The start of the school year is creeping up on us but it is still summer. If you can, find some time to relax in the sun, perhaps by a pool or ocean, enjoy a tropical drink, and enjoy the following guest post. It’s by Nick Laskowski (University of Maryland), who provides us with a seasonal example of the time-honored tradition of philosophers overthinking song lyrics. Yes I Like Piña Coladas: On Haecceities and the Normativity of Love by Nick Laskowski When I received Justin’s invitation to write a guest post, the consequentialist’s compelling idea that it would be permissible, as well as the perhaps less compelling idea that it would be obligatory, to use the opportunity to promote the best outcome for the profession became vivid. Perhaps I would make an argument for why senior philosophers should almost always submit non-anonymous referee reports to avoid submitting lazy or nasty reports. Or perhaps share first-hand evidence that the perceived persecution some philosophers keep droning on and on about isn’t unique to conservative positions on gender: ordinary territoriality and vanity—maybe even my own!—cost my co-author and me eight years in publishing our recent paper defending the view that your gender is the one you intrinsically desire to belong to. Bias against gender conservatism isn’t even the right kind of thing to explain our ur-woke idea’s slow route to print. Instead, I’ve decided to prioritize fittingness and write on something more appropriate for the summer: piña coladas, or rather, Rupert Holmes’ 1979 pop song “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)“. It’s a feel-good song with lyrics about a couple who appear to fall out and then back into love with one another. It’s written in the first person, so it is Holmes himself who expresses boredom about his own relationship with his long-time romantic partner with the lines “I was tired of my lady” and “We’d been together too long”. Accordingly, he checks out the “personal columns” of the newspaper (i.e. 20th century Tinder) in the hope of finding a new romantic partner, where he finds the following ad: If you like piña coladas And gettin’ caught in the rain If you’re not into yoga If you have half a brain If you..

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Cain Todd (1976-2026) Cain Samuel Todd, senior lecturer in ...

2026-08-11T10:00:37Z

Cain Todd (1976-2026)

Cain Samuel Todd, senior lecturer in philosophy at Lancaster University, has died. Dr. Todd was known for his work in aesthetics and the philosophy of mind, with a keen interest in issues surrounding values and our access to them. He is the author of The Philosophy of Wine: A Case of Truth, Beauty and Intoxication (2010) and papers including “Imaginability, morality, and fictional truth: Dissolving the puzzle of ‘imaginative resistance” (2009), “Attending Emotionally to Fiction” (2012), “Fitting Feelings and Elegant Proofs: On the Psychology of Aesthetic Evaluation in Mathematics” (2018) and “Affective Memory, Imagined Emotion, and Bodily Imagery” (2023). You can learn more about his work here. Todd started teaching at Lancaster University in 2003 after having earned his PhD in philosophy at Trinity College, Cambridge. He has held visiting positions at the Universities of Geneva and Fribourg in Switzerland, at the Institut Jean Nicod in Paris, at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Münich, where he was the recipient of the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award (2022-3), and at the University of Notre Dame. He died unexpectedly on July 23rd, 2026. (The information for this memorial notice was provided by Fabrice Teroni.)

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Teaching College Students Basic Studenting Do you take time to ...

2026-08-10T15:47:07Z

Teaching College Students Basic Studenting

Do you take time to teach your lower level students basic student skills? How do you do it? Increasingly, I’ve had students who don’t seem to know how to take notes during class. Or know that they should take notes. This is one of several abilities college professors tend to assume their students will have been habituated into by the time they get to us, but perhaps such assumptions are based on outdated views of pre-college pedagogy and an underestimation of just how much culture and technology has changed how students conceive of their own role in their education. In addition to in-class notetaking, other basic student skills that may need shoring up include: reading taking notes on readings keeping track of when assignments are due finding reliable information online. Perhaps you have others to add to this list. What, if anything, do you do to communicate your expectations to your students regarding these basic skills? Merely mentioning them on the syllabus won’t cut it, it seems. And what, if anything, do you do to teach these skills to them? Discussion and lesson ideas welcome.

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A Few Reminders about Commenting Here Hi folks. I recently had to ...

2026-08-10T14:59:33Z

A Few Reminders about Commenting Here

Hi folks. I recently had to take steps to block a commenter, and it struck me that it might be a good idea to point out a few things about commenting here at Daily Nous. First, if you’ve never done so, or if it has been a while, please take a moment to read the comments policy. Thanks. What follows are some points I’d like to emphasize, some (but not all) of which are in the policy. Names: 1. Pick a name to comment with and use it consistently (preferably your real name, but that is not required). Don’t change up your commenting name across different posts unless (a) it’s a post for which I say I’m allowing that, owing to the topic, or (b) you write to me to let me know you’re doing this. (Comments from authors using their full real names are likely to get a lighter moderating touch.) 2. Definitely don’t change your commenting name across comments on the same post. As I’ve said before, such “sockpuppeting” will get you banned. 3. Don’t pick a commenting name that contains the words “anon” or “anonymous” (etc.) in it. Your comment won’t go through. Self-Promotion: 4. While it’s fine to share in your comments links to your own work, projects, writings, etc., as relevant, if most of your comments consist of almost nothing but such links, your comments are likely to cease to be approved. Snark, Insults, Decency: 5. Humor is welcome. Mere snark? Unlikely to get approved. 6. Insulting language is highly discouraged. It isn’t conducive to good discussions. I have in mind not just direct insults but the more common use of insulting descriptions (especially adverbs—e.g., “woefully”, “bafflingly”, “embarrassingly”). I’ll add that, in my view, insulting language tends to make the commenter using that language look worse than its target. 7. Please interpret each other charitably. Assuming the worst of your interlocutor is unlikely to generate a good conversation If Your Comment Is Not Approved: 8. Be patient. Sometimes perfectly acceptable comments are held back by the system until I manually approve them. This may be the result of the system working as it is supposed to (the content for some reason or another has been..

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On Writing for Pay Some philosophy professors, on top of all the ...

2026-08-07T15:59:35Z

On Writing for Pay

Some philosophy professors, on top of all the work they do for the universities at which they’re employed, write public philosophy, and sometimes such writing is on the Substack platform, with some or all of what they write available only to paid subscribers. Is there anything wrong with this? Walter Veit (Reading) thinks there is something wrong with it, and makes his case here. Richard Chappell (Miami) responds here, arguing that we shouldn’t criticize philosophers for paywalling their writing. I’d go further and say, not only is there nothing wrong with it—it’s great! If you can convince a whole bunch of people that, of all the things in this world they could otherwise be spending money on, they should spend it on reading your philosophical thoughts, good for you. Your subscribers, in virtue of paying for your writing, are probably going to pay more attention to it than they otherwise would, and this attention begets further attention to you and your interlocutors—and to philosophy—in self-reinforcing ways. That people are paying for your writing is an easily legible signal to others that what you’re doing is valuable. You’re doing philosophy, so it’s a signal that philosophy is valuable, that philosophy is worth paying attention to. Further, a culture’s valuing of philosophy, and so the cultivation and maintenance of a public constituency for philosophy, is helpful for the continued existence of philosophy programs (which are often under threat in part owed to the perception of their lack of value), which is generally good. “But,” you might say, “philosophy isn’t the only thing that’s valuable. These writers could, as Veit suggests, charge a subscription fee and donate it to an organization that, say, saves lives. That would produce even more good.” It might. But, while sometimes it is wrong to choose to act in way that will produce less good than one otherwise could, you probably do not really believe that it is always wrong to do so. You’d need to make a case for why this “suboptimal” choice is wrong, and that is going to be quite hard to do without thereby condemning many other kinds of actions you think are perfectly morally acceptable. “But,” you might say, “what if everyone did this? Then..

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Kurth from Clemson to Georgia Charlie Kurth, currently Professor ...

2026-08-06T11:00:21Z

Kurth from Clemson to Georgia

Charlie Kurth, currently Professor of Philosophy at Clemson University, will be moving to the University of Georgia. Professor Kurth is known for his work in ethics, philosophy of psychology, and philosophy of mind. He is the author of The Anxious Mind: An Investigation into the Varieties & Virtues of Anxiety (MIT, 2018) and Emotion (Routledge, 2022) as well as many other works. For more information on his publications, see here. He will be taking up his new position at UGA as Professor of Philosophy and as the first director of UGA’s Ethics Hub in January 2027. Related: “Two Philosophers Win ‘Courageous Colleague’ Award“

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Anthony Kenny (1931-2026) Anthony Kenny, professor emeritus of ...

2026-08-06T10:01:43Z

Anthony Kenny (1931-2026)

Anthony Kenny, professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Oxford, well-known for his work on the philosophy of mind and history of philosophy, has died. Professor Kenny wrote widely on the philosophy of mind, history of philosophy, and philosophy of religion. He is especially recognized for his work on Wittgenstein, Thomas Aquinas, and Descartes, including his critique of Cartesian dualism. Professor Kenny is the author of numerous articles and books. Some of his more well-known books include Descartes (1968), The Five Ways: St. Thomas Aquinas’ Proofs of God’s Existence (1969), Wittgenstein (1973), Aquinas (1980), What I Believe (2006), and A New History of Western Philosophy (2010). You can read more about his work here. Professor Kenny was on the faculty at the University of Oxford for his entire career, from 1963 until his retirement in 2001. He also lectured at a number of institutions, including the University of Edinburgh, the University of Glasgow, the University of Cambridge, Columbia University, the University of Chicago, the University of Washington, the University of Michigan, the University of Minnesota, Cornell University, Stanford University, and the Rockefeller University. He earned his DPhil from the University of Oxford in 1961. He died on August 3rd, 2026.

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Faculty Sues University over Plato-Banning Policy Texas A&M ...

2026-08-05T17:16:34Z

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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Mini-Heap New links… To say that something is indescribable is ...

2026-08-04T21:14:17Z

Mini-Heap

New links… To say that something is indescribable is to describe it. What should we think about this “paradox of ineffability”? — best to dissolve it, argues Peter van Elswyk “Moving through time also means moving through space” — this makes time travel “a very bad idea”, explains Douglas Giles (via the Browser) Two new sermons by St Augustine discovered — about the Old Testament story of the Witch of Endor and its implications “The highbrow has its defenders (snobs) and the lowbrow its defenders (hipsters), but it is not easy to find defenders of the middlebrow” — Until now. Aaron Meskin & Jonathan Weinberg explain and defend the possibility of good middlebrow art “I’m certainly as prone as the next academic to bemoaning the trials and tribulations of contemporary university life—but when I [compare it to my] pre-academic world of work and education… my good fortune smacks me in the face” — Nigel Pleasants on his path into academic philosophy “It would be the largest protected class in society. Even if it existed, would it be a class that people wanted to join?” — Joshua Rothman on lookism and the epistemic injustices faced by those deemed ugly “Our students [have] compelling and deeply felt moral objections to using generative AI in their university work. We think educators should respect this” — Carla Fehr & Jenny Saul think we should stop assuming all students are tempted by the technology 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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Kershnar Case Moving to Trial Phase In 2022, Stephen Kershnar, ...

2026-08-04T11:55:13Z

Kershnar Case Moving to Trial Phase

In 2022, Stephen Kershnar, distinguished teaching professor of philosophy at SUNY Fredonia, was told by his university president, Stephen H. Kolison, Jr., that he was no longer allowed to be on campus or have any contact with anyone on campus except a few administrators and university police. Why? It seems to have been the initially knee-jerk reaction of a university president, apparently unconcerned with academic freedom and freedom of speech, to a viral social media post from a conservative activist account that included selectively edited podcast footage in which Professor Kershnar is discussing the the strengths and weaknesses of different arguments concerning the ethics of sexual relations between adults and children. The details are recounted here. Despite his clear violations of Kershnar’s academic freedom and freedom of speech, Kolison has dug in over the past four years, not budging from his insistence that Kershnar be exiled from the university. Ultimately, Kolison shut down the entire philosophy program at Fredonia. Meanwhile, Kershnar’s lawsuit against Kolison and others at the university has been making its way through the legal system, and just last week included a motion requesting a jury trial. It will be entering its trial phase soon. The lawsuit, reprinted below, recounts in detail how Kolison and others mistreated Kershnar, and is worth looking at.

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International Students & Conservative Students: How Are They ...

2026-08-03T12:46:48Z

International Students & Conservative Students: How Are They Doing In Academic Philosophy? (guest post)

“Conservative and international students face different challenges: one feels forced to self-censor while the other reports fewer job opportunities. No significant impact on employment is found for either but conservative respondents report higher rates of satisfaction in philosophy.” That’s a brief summary of findings about conservative graduate students and international graduate students currently or recently enrolled in philosophy PhD programs, based on data collected by Academic Philosophy Data and Analysis (APDA) in its 2025 survey. In the following guest post, APDA founder and co-director Carolyn Dicey Jennings shares the details. [A version of this post also appears at the APDA blog.] International Students & Conservative Students: How Are They Doing In Academic Philosophy? by Carolyn Dicey Jennings In this, the final summer post on the 2025 survey, we highlight two populations of survey participants: those who are or were international students and those with conservative political leanings. (See previous posts here.) We chose these populations for a straightforward reason: both groups show signs of underrepresentation while also seeming to report higher satisfaction in prior surveys. That is, according to an analysis of the 2023 survey results, international students were less likely than local students to find permanent academic employment, while according to an analysis of the 2021 survey results, conservative students are underrepresented in philosophy PhD programs relative to both the U.S. population and doctoral recipients. Yet, in past surveys we have noted that both of these groups appear to report higher satisfaction than local or non-conservative participants (not tested for statistical significance). We thus wanted to better understand the experiences of both populations and the challenges they face in the discipline. To explore this we added two text-based questions to the 2025 survey with a parallel structure. These questions appeared on the final, demographic page of the survey for a subset of participants. The first followed a question on international status: “Are you or were you an international student during your PhD studies?” If the participant answered “yes” (n=383) then they were provided a follow-up prompt: “Please describe the impact of your status as an international student on your academic career (i.e. as a student and in employment or the search for employment, if relevant).” The second followed a question on..

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New: Journal of Mathematical Philosophy The Journal of ...

2026-08-03T10:44:31Z

New: Journal of Mathematical Philosophy

The Journal of Mathematical Philosophy is a new open-access journal. According to an announcement from its editors, the journal is “the first open access journal that is devoted to mathematical philosophy.” It is now open to submissions in subject areas such as as formal epistemology, philosophical logic, philosophy of science, decision theory, philosophy of mathematics, formal metaphysics, philosophy of language, formal ethics, and philosophy of AI. Published by LMU Munich, the Journal of Mathematical Philosophy is a “diamond” open-access journal, meaning that there are no author fees nor reader fees. The journal will make use of double-anonymous reviewing. The journal is led by co-editors-in-chief Jürgen Landes and Lennart Ackermans, both of LMU Munich. The inaugural associate editors are Francesca Zaffora Blando, Thomas Boyer-Kassem, Justin Bruner, Lorenzo Casini, Gustavo Cevolani, Kenny Easwaran, Ben Eva, Branden Fitelson, Sam Fletcher, Alexander Gebharter, Conrad Heilmann, Bennet Holman, Ekaterina Kubyshkina, Stephan Leuenberger, Conor Mayo-Wilson, Mattia Petrolo, Giuseppe Primero, Saeed Salehi, Jonah Schupbach, Dunja Šešelja, Ted Shear, Eric Snyder, Reuben Stern, Rush Stewart, Christian Strasser, David Teira, Brout Trpin, Olav Vassend, and Sylvia Wenmakers. The inaugural advisory board consists of Michael Glanzberg, Stephan Hartmann, Jan-Willem Romeijn, Jacob Stegenga, and Edward Zalta. You can learn more about the journal at its website.

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Mini Heap Items of interest elsewhere… “Du Bois is read as ...

2026-07-30T13:37:43Z

Mini Heap

Items of interest elsewhere… “Du Bois is read as the Black Hegel, and Fanon as a Black Sartre… [but] turning non-Western thinkers into tame versions of ourselves is a kind of intellectual colonialism that we need to get beyond” — Takeshi Morisato on the risks of comparative philosophy “The very same bits of nature can lead to the best life and its greatest corruption” — Eric Schliesser discusses Socrates, Smith, inquiry, and equality in one of a series of posts about Agnes Callard’s “Open Socrates” “When there was some… topic that seemed intriguing, it was dismissed with condescending authority by the question, ‘Yes, but is it philosophy?’ It took me years to see the bullying in such questions” — Eleonore Stump’s 2023 Dewey Lecture Recent work in the epistemology of inquiry — a useful survey by Pablo Hubacher Haerle “The goal would be to make available, to students of all ages everywhere, a truly comprehensive record of documented human civilizations and ideas in all their variety” — a benefit of AI humanists should appreciate is the access it gives us to the past, argues Bob Pasnau “Einstein echoes Wittgenstein, who emphasised in his later work that his aim was to provide ‘the understanding that consists in seeing connections’ – literally, a new way of looking” — Ray Monk on the scientific and philosophical ideas of Einstein The philosophy of waiting in line — conceptual and normative work on queuing from Johann Go 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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How to Flirt at a Conference: a Harm Reduction Post (guest post) ...

2026-07-29T19:30:34Z

How to Flirt at a Conference: a Harm Reduction Post (guest post)

A year ago today, I put up a guest post by a philosophy professor writing under the pseudonym “Alex Rails”. Rails’ post was about the ethics of sexual relationships among people in academic philosophy, couched in terms of advice for how people could virtuously navigate this tricky terrain, or, as they put it, how to be “a strong player.” It was a controversial but widely discussed entry in a series of guest posts last summer. Some people really appreciated it. Some absolutely hated it. It generated some offense, some reflection, and some amusing social media commentary. Rails recently got in touch with me again about a follow-up post on flirting at conferences. The problem it takes up is this: If the optimal amount of flirting at a conference is not zero, but flirting at a conference is morally risky (with possible hazards for the flirter, the flirtee, and third parties), how should flirting at conferences happen? Their post is below. As I said with Rails’ last post, discussion is welcome, but, given the subject matter, I ask you to exercise a bit of care with your comments. The comments section is not the place to out named individuals, either for flirting well or badly, or to otherwise remark on specific people’s personal relationships. Note that if you wish to comment using a pseudonym but you’ve commented here previously under your real name, be sure to enter both a new name and a new email address when you comment, so your identity is not inadvertently revealed (email addresses are not made public but are recorded by the commenting system). How to Flirt at a Conference: a Harm Reduction Post by “Alex Rails” There are so many sweet philosopher couples, some of whom even work in the same department or write papers together. My last post here drew some outraged comments because I talked about being a philosopher who likes to seduce other philosophers. If flirting in a professional setting is not done, as some of the comments suggested, where do all these sweet couples come from? Did they all meet outside of work? Not every fling becomes a relationship, and not every flirtation becomes a fling. So, given the number of philosopher-couples, it’s reasonable to..

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Graduate Admissions in the AI Era Are applicants to your graduate ...

2026-07-29T14:27:25Z

Graduate Admissions in the AI Era

Are applicants to your graduate program using AI to create their admissions materials? Do you know? How? And what, if anything, should your department do about it? The topic is suggested to me by Alex Guerrero (Rutgers), who, commenting on social media, writes: “What are people doing about AI and grad admissions? Writing samples, personal statements. Other fields use interviews; are any philosophy departments considering those as a check on AI assistance?” Does your department (or college or university) have a policy or set of practices about this? Do you have thoughts about what such policies or practices should be? Discussion welcome.

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AI & Philosophy Readings for Undergraduate Courses Artificial ...

2026-07-28T13:30:25Z

AI & Philosophy Readings for Undergraduate Courses

Artificial intelligence is relevant to so many philosophical subfields, and its increased presence in our lives makes it a ripe topic to cover in philosophy courses. Philosophical writing on AI is at that stage where there has been an explosion of it, yet not enough time for the kind of assessment and filtering of it that could result in the establishment of a canon (or subdisciplinary canons). So I thought it would be useful to solicit your suggestions about good readings, focusing on works it might be reasonable to assign undergraduates. The readings need not be academic works. It may be that some pieces published in popular media are especially pedagogically valuable. Nor must the pieces be written by philosophers to be appropriate for philosophy courses. In sharing your suggestion, please provide the title and author, and let us know what kind of course you think the reading would be appropriate for (e.g., “contemporary moral problems,” or “for a unit on mind in an intro course”). If you have a link to the piece handy, please include it. Thanks! (And yes, I acknowledge there is an irony in soliciting readings about a technology that tempts students to not do the reading.)

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Online Philosophy Resources Monthly Update Here’s (usually ...

2026-07-27T12:16:41Z

Online Philosophy Resources Monthly Update

Here’s (usually weekly, but during the summer, monthly) 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.) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy New: Model Organisms by Michael Dietrich and Nedah Nemati. Innateness and Contemporary Theories of Cognition by Mark Cain. Feminist Perspectives on Sex Markets by Lori Watson. Philosophy of Psychotherapy by Megan Delehanty and Anya Plutynski. Wisdom in Contemporary Analytic Philosophy by Shane Ryan and Sharon Ryan. Innateness and Language by Gabe Dupre. Revised: Susan Stebbing by Michael Beaney and Siobhan Chapman. Origen by Mark J. Edwards. Aesthetics and Cognitive Science by Jon Robson and Gregory Currie. Boundary by Achille Varzi. Intergenerational Justice by Lukas Meyer. Bolzano’s Logic by Paul Rusnock and Jan Šebestík. Scottish Philosophy in the 18th Century by Alexander Broadie and Craig Smith. Jean-Paul Sartre by Jack Reynolds and Pierre-Jean Renaudie. Philosophy of Technology by Maarten Franssen, Ibo van de Poel, Michael Klenk, and Filippo Santoni de Sio. The Definition of Death by Adam Omelianchuk and David DeGrazia. The Kyoto School by Bret W. Davis. Rudolf Carnap by Hannes Leitgeb and André Carus. Optimality-Theoretic and Game-Theoretic Approaches to Implicature by Robert van Rooij and Michael Franke. Supervenience in Ethics by Tristram McPherson. 18th Century German Philosophy Prior to Kant by Corey Dyck and Brigitte Sassen. Cosmological Argument by Bruce Reichenbach. Defaults in Semantics and Pragmatics by Katarzyna M. Jaszczolt. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy Nietzsche: Philosophical Psychology by Brian Lightbody. Leibniz: Law and Justice by Joshua Horn. Philosophy of Mathematical Practice by Jessica Carter. The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Argument and the Bell Inequalities by László E. Szabó. 1000-Word Philosophy Vegetarianism and Veganism: The Ethics of Eating Animals by Zach Ferguson. BJPS Short Reads ∅ Philosophy Podcasts and Other Media Philosophy Podcast Hub (via Jason Chen) Recently Published Open Access Philosophy Books The Philosophy of Julia Wedgwood: Imperfect Antithesis by Alison Stone (Open Book Publishers, 2026). Book Symposia (Open Access) The Space Between by Heidi Maibom at Journal of Philosophy of Emotion Book Reviews* Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality by Danielle Allen is reviewed by Jeffrey C. Isaac at Los Angeles Review of Books. Kantian Dignity and Its..

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Thomas E. Hill, Jr. (1937-2026) Thomas E. Hill, Jr., professor ...

2026-07-22T20:02:02Z

Thomas E. Hill, Jr. (1937-2026)

Thomas E. Hill, Jr., professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, has died. Professor Hill was well-known for his work in ethics, the history of ethics, and political philosophy, and especially for his scholarship on Kantian moral and political philosophy. He is the author of Beyond Duty: Kantian Ideals of Respect, Beneficence, and Appreciation (2022), Virtue, Rules, and Justice: Kantian Aspirations (2012), Human Welfare and Moral Worth: Kantian Perspectives (2002), Respect, Pluralism and Justice: Kantian Perspectives (2000), Dignity and Practical Reason in Kant’s Moral Theory (1992), Autonomy and Self-Respect (1991), and The Concept of Meaning (1971), among other works. You can learn more about his writings here and here. Professor Hill joined the Department of Philosophy at UNC Chapel Hill in 1984. From 1968 to 1984 he taught at the University of California, Los Angeles. Prior to that, he held positions at Pomona College and Johns Hopkins University. He died this week.

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Mini-Heap New links… “It may well be that the models were ...

2026-07-22T13:04:11Z

Mini-Heap

New links… “It may well be that the models were loose for about a week before OpenAI realized that they were the ones attacking” — an autonomous AI’s recent escape from its sandbox to hack another site shows the need for better AI guardrails “Every month, we’ll read a work of classic fashion philosophy and talk about how it applies to what we wear today” — Derek Guy, a popular, witty, and knowledgeable menswear writer, has started a philosophy podcast with radio producer Avery Trufelman “They made an exact replica of my wife…” — “Exact Replica”, by Joshua Seigal, poet and former philosophy student “A company named Word Unscrambler… recently released the list of the most searched word definitions by state“ — one state had “philosophy” as its most-searched word. Can you guess which? “Of greatest concern is… constitutive de-skilling, the erosion of the capacities that make us human in the first place” — Kwame Anthony Appiah on Mill, autonomy, and AI, in the first issue of The Humanist Review of AI Philosophy, the journal, celebrates its 100 years of publication with a special issue on Bernard Williams’s “Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline”, which it published 25 years ago — several of the pieces are open-access “You don’t know jack diddly doo-doo about what red really is” — tough talk about color perception, from Pete Mandik 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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Summer Fiction Reading I don’t know about you, but I read more ...

2026-07-21T14:52:08Z

Summer Fiction Reading

I don’t know about you, but I read more novels during the summer than any other time of year. I probably can fit in a few more novels before the school year begins. What have you read lately that you like? As for me, two recent fiction reads stand out as being of particular interest to philosophers: The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt. I finally got around to reading this book, which was published in 2000. No, it’s not about samurais. Rather, it’s the story of an extremely bright young boy living in late 20th century London with his eccentric mother, a woman of idiosyncratic high standards and low tolerance for idiocy, no matter how common. The book explores learning, freedom, art, courage, and relationships in a way that’s explicitly informed by John Stuart Mill’s autobiography and, implicitly, his On Liberty. It’s smart, funny, and very well-written. It also regularly references the 1954 movie Seven Samurai. I had never seen the film, but about halfway through reading the book, I decided I should watch it. It holds up, and I recommend watching it at some point during your reading of the book. On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle. This is actually a series of seven short novels, four of which have so far been translated from Danish into English. The first book was published in 2020. (I’ve read the first four.) This is the story of a woman, Tara, who keeps waking up on November 18th. You may be thinking, “oh, like Groundhog Day.” Not really. Groundhog Day is an amusing movie. On the Calculation of Volume is a rather remarkable and patient exploration of what life would be like if you kept waking up to the same day, surrounded by people who, unlike you, are experiencing the passage of days as we normally do. It’s a story of confinement, of the challenges of living under certain kinds of constraints, of how one should live under these unusual circumstances. And of course there is the question of what the lessons of this odd way of life holds for our own. It’s very much a story about paying attention, in more ways than one. Your recommendations welcome.

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A Scene from the AI Flooding of Academic Journals “We recently ...

2026-07-20T15:23:06Z

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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George Graham (1945-2026) George Graham, professor of philosophy ...

2026-07-20T13:43:07Z

George Graham (1945-2026)

George Graham, professor of philosophy at Georgia State University, has died. The following obituary has been provided by the Department of Philosophy at Georgia State University. George Graham (1945-2026) After a long illness, George Graham died at his home in Birmingham, Alabama on July 2, 2026. After earning his BA in philosophy from Fordham in 1967, George went on to earn his MA from Western Ontario in 1969 and his PhD at Brandeis in 1975 under the supervision of J. Van Heijenoort. During his career of over 40 years as a philosophy professor, he taught at University of Alabama-Birmingham (serving as chair for 17 years), at Wake Forest University as the A.C. Reid Professor of Philosophy, and at Georgia State University for 10 years as Professor of Philosophy and Neuroscience. During his time at UAB, George became the first President of the Faculty Senate and helped start UAB’s Center for the Study of Ethics and Values in the Sciences. He also won the President’s Excellence in Teaching Award and Outstanding Teaching Award in the Honors College. George became President of Alabama Philosophy Society in 1986 and served as President of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology (1994-1995), where had won the Griffith Memorial Award for early-career philosophers in 1976. He also served on the Executive Committee and as President of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology in 2005. George was widely noted for his work in philosophy of mind, especially in philosophy of psychiatry and philosophical psychopathology. Among his publications were The Abraham Dilemma: A Divine Delusion, The Disordered Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Mental Illness (multiple editions), and Philosophy of Mind: An Introduction. George co-authored numerous books, including When Self-Consciousness Breaks: Alien Voices and Inserted Thoughts. He co-edited eight seminal anthologies about schizophrenia, addiction, and cognitive science, including A Companion to Cognitive Science, which won a Choice award as Outstanding Academic Title for 1999. George also wrote or co-authored dozens of essays in leading venues about mental disorders, consciousness, and folk psychology. He served on ten leading editorial or advisory boards. He taught over fifty different kinds of courses to thousands of students in a remarkable teaching career, including mentoring many undergraduate and graduate students...

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Four Philosophy Professors Among New British Academy Fellows The ...

2026-07-20T12:24:10Z

Four Philosophy Professors Among New British Academy Fellows

The British Academy has announced the selection of 92 new fellows, and four philosophy professors are among them. They are: Béatrice Longuenesse (New York University) Richard Pettigrew (University of Bristol; University of Oxford as of October 2026) Nicholas Shea (Institute of Philosophy, University of London) James Warren (University of Cambridge) Fellows are selected “in recognition of their outstanding contributions to the humanities and social sciences.” You can see the full list of new fellows here.

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Mini-Heap Recent links… Aphantasia, Hume, and empiricism — ...

2026-07-20T11:33:34Z

Mini-Heap

Recent links… Aphantasia, Hume, and empiricism — some people seem to lack mental imagery, and this has philosophical implications, argue Uku Tooming & Roomet Jakapi Are philosophers who work for AI firms “arsonists who moonlight as firefighters”? — Hollis Robbins on humanity, “My Fair Lady”, and why “neither the world nor the AIs will become more moral” from the work of AI’s philosophers “For most of human history, contexts were local and multiple. If you wanted to know how you should act, you would look around… Am I inside my home? Am I in the church? Am I in a bar?” — now, we live in “uni-context,” which explains a lot, argues Agnes Callard “AI systems [probably] possess at least local analytical moral competence comprehensively. I suspect there is no fundamental obstacle to extending local competence to global competence, or to extending analytical competence to practical competence” — Seth Lazar on recent experiments on the moral reasoning of AIs “When caterpillars are in their chrysalises, their brains physically dissolve… and are rebuilt as butterfly brains. Yet experiments show that memories from their caterpillar days survive” — one of several examples from the animal kingdom that may raise problems for the idea that the mind is the brain “Are you a recliner or a refrainer?” — The New Yorker’s Joshua Rothman on airplane passenger ethics “There’s a kind of epistemic transparency to our work in that everything you need to assess it is right there on the page” — Richard Chappell on whether external funding corrupts philosophy 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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A Meta-Epistemological Reason for Rejecting AI-Written Philosophy ...

2026-07-16T13:20:14Z

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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How to Give a Killer Job Talk (guest post) “Talks are not ...

2026-07-14T09:00:26Z

How to Give a Killer Job Talk (guest post)

“Talks are not merely communication: they are also a performance… So many talks that could have been successful end up flopping because they’re not serious performances.” That’s one observation about job talks from Daniel Muñoz. Dr. Muñoz is a senior lecturer at the Australian National University. Before that, he was associate professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. In the following guest post, he shares various tips about crafting and delivering job talk. Others are, of course, welcome to add their own advice in the comments. (A version of this post first appeared at Dr. Muñoz’s newsletter, Big Iff True.) How to Give a Killer Job Talk by Daniel Muñoz The job talk—typically on campus, sometimes on Zoom—is the final boss of the academic job market. Don’t underestimate the challenge. You can’t just coast on the rest of your materials: unless you’re already world famous, you probably need a strong job talk. You can’t rely on the weakness of the competition, either: you have to convince people to vote for you, not just against the others, which means turning in a solid performance in your talk and Q&A. My sense is that PhD students aren’t getting enough advice about job talks. And what advice they do get tends to come too late, which leaves them scrambling. The good news: Anyone can learn to give a killer talk. Once you can do that, you’re 90% of the way to a killer job talk. So here is my advice for (1) giving great talks, and (2) preparing a job talk in particular. This advice is mostly aimed at PhD students in philosophy, but there are also some tips about public speaking in general. Good Talks There are two points everyone should internalize about talks. The first is that they are a kind of communication—note the prefix—which means that they are bilateral, not “one way streets.” You have to fit your talk to your audience. What do they like? What do they already know? What, to them, would count as an interesting destination? What kinds of arguments and evidence do they find persuasive? What issues will they let you bracket? Would kind of tone would they see as appropriate? Years ago I gave a talk on..

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The Demise of Reading? “Americans are probably reading more ...

2026-07-13T16:01:14Z

The Demise of Reading?

“Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. What has changed is what they read, and how. People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information. ” That’s a bit from “The End of Reading Is Here” by Rose Horowitch, recently published in The Atlantic. The article chronicles the general decrease in reading (of books, articles), the general decrease in sophistication of what people are reading, and the general decrease in literacy skills. People are “losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis” and in her view, “things are about to get worse, and fast.” Kids watch more and more videos, and read less and less. While “video contains more information than text,” watching videos is “a more passive form of engagement than reading” and generally “does not stimulate deeper thinking.” Student reading and writing scores on standardized tests “at their lowest level in more than three decades.” What does that mean for instruction at the college level? One avenue is remedial: “When these students get to college, their professors find that they have to teach them how to comprehend a text.” But remedial education for reading skills makes sense only if students need those reading skills in order to graduate, and I worry that increasingly, they won’t. The consumer model of higher education paired with a highly instrumentalist picture of the value of education points to a further relaxation of literacy demands on students, not greater student preparation to meet existing or more stringent demands. Along those lines, here is one of the more striking passages of Horowitch’s article: Reading has come to seem extraneous even to some of the best-educated members of society. Margaret Rennix, Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social-sciences support, told me she’d spoken with a student who was struggling to read a book written in Old English. The culprit: Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. (The student used ChatGPT to “translate” the book into easier language.) Not long ago, a Harvard sociology professor, troubled by course evaluations in which students said they resented the amount of dense reading..

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Free Web-Based Logic Software (guest post) Interested in ...

2026-07-13T13:32:11Z

Free Web-Based Logic Software (guest post)

Interested in completely free, browser-based, instructional logic software? Brian Rabern spent a decade at the University of Edinburgh working in logic, formal semantics, and other areas of philosophy before moving into the tech world. Unable to find logic software that met his needs, he and a former student created Elogic. Initially developed for his courses, it has since been used at several universities. He is now making the software freely available to anyone who wants to use it. He describes it below. Elogic: Free Web-Based Logic Software by Brian Rabern I taught introductory logic to large classes (400-500 students) for over a decade. The desktop software I inherited worked, but supporting it was a headache: install conflicts, only supported on certain devices, students fighting IT on shared machines. In 2014 a student in my class and I started building a web-based replacement. That became Elogic. It’s a browser-based environment for logic exercises with immediate, automated feedback. There’s nothing to install, and it works on anything with a browser. The guiding design idea was to make something genuinely intuitive for first-year philosophy students, the students who are there for epistemology or ethics or Nietzsche and encountering formal notation for the first time. The interface should get out of the way, not add a learning curve on top of the logic itself. 1. What it does Four core exercise types: Symbolizations. Translate English into propositional or first-order logic. Answers are checked for logical equivalence (using an SMT solver), not exact match to one official answer. Feedback distinguishes syntax errors from meaning errors. Derivations. Natural deduction proofs in a Fitch-style layout. Guided feedback on rule use, scope, and variable capture. Supports rule-locking: derived rules are withheld until prerequisite theorems are proved. Truth tables. Row-by-row feedback on missing or wrong values. Countermodels. Build an interpretation that makes the premises true and the conclusion false. Checked automatically via SMT solver. 2. Scope and limitations Elogic is opinionated. The natural deduction system is Kalish-Montague style in Fitch format, aligned specifically with Parsons’s An Exposition of Symbolic Logic. The notation, rule names, and proof conventions match that presentation. This is designed for courses using that text or something close to it, not as a general-purpose tool configurable..

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Mini-Heap The latest links… Can life—all life—be defined in ...

2026-07-10T08:00:47Z

Mini-Heap

The latest links… Can life—all life—be defined in terms of agency? — well what do we mean by agency? From Newton’s few laws to Alphafold’s 93 million parameters: how should we understand the scientific virtue of simplicity today? — Eric Winsberg on science, simplicity, and prediction This digital bibliography for consciousness studies has over 1,300 entries across 9 themes and 63 subtopics — created by philosophy PhD student Melinda Gülsüm Esen with “the aim of making the literature more navigable for students and researchers working in or entering the field” “We can exercise some control over our beliefs” if we run different “modes of operation” and “recruit additional beliefs and heuristics” — Joshua Mugg begins a discussion of his book, “From Human Reasoning to Belief,” at the Brains Blog Has the word “racist” been diluted through “conceptual inflation”? — two philosophers, Nat Hansen & Shen-yi Liao, investigated this using the “apparent time method” “What is the ideal that America should aspire to? I think the person who best articulated an answer is the philosopher John Rawls” — for July 4th, the New Yorker asked a range of luminaries who their “favorite American” is A philosophy of science reading group invites others to join — it was begun by philosophy PhD students at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Bhopal 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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Philosophy, Brain Studies, and the Value of Curiosity An op-ed ...

2026-07-09T15:57:51Z

Philosophy, Brain Studies, and the Value of Curiosity

An op-ed about curiosity published in the New York Times yesterday will resonate with many philosophers. Written by Anne-Laure Le Cunff, a neuroscientist at King’s College London, it uses the example of AI-generated answers to internet search queries as a launch point to discuss how we learn in the time between when we form a question and find an answer to it. Google’s AI answers are fast, even if they are often wanting in quality. But suppose its answers were better. Le Cunff asks, “Could there be anything wrong with getting a reliable answer more quickly?” She answers: “There is. By shortening the time between asking a question and getting an answer, these tools are actually undermining curiosity—and paradoxically threatening our ability to understand the world.” She writes: “Our technology is increasingly treating the territory between the query and the answer as dead space to be eliminated, when that territory is where most of the learning actually happens.” Researchers have found that people in a state of curiosity, while waiting for an answer to an intriguing question, remember unrelated information they encounter during that time far better than they otherwise would. In that same study, the researchers also placed those people in brain scanners. They found that waiting for an answer activates reward circuits in the brain and readies the hippocampus to help form new memories. Similar findings have been reported by other researchers in studies involving infants, older children and adults. In short, curiosity puts the entire brain into a mode of heightened receptivity—not just for the specific thing you want to know, but also for everything around it. Curiosity opens a window, and while the window is open, learning deepens across the board. But the window stays open only as long as the question remains unanswered… Scientific breakthroughs, artistic leaps, technological innovation—these rarely emerge from efficient retrieval of known information. They emerge from periods of undirected exploration, when people follow questions further than they need to and find things they weren’t expecting. There is, of course, an academic discipline that focuses on what could be described as “the territory between the query and the answer”: philosophy. Its specialty may indeed be in lengthening, rather than shortening, “the time between asking a question and..

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New Mentoring Program Focuses on Philosophers from the Global ...

2026-07-09T14:55:20Z

New Mentoring Program Focuses on Philosophers from the Global South

The Centre for Ethics, Law and Public Affairs (CELPA) at the University of Warwick has announced a mentorship program that “aims to support academics from groups underrepresented in moral, legal, and political philosophy, particularly researchers without established connections to elite institutions and scholars from the Global South.” Led by Warwick’s Victor Tadros and Sameer Bajaj, the program will “support early career researchers (ECRs) in developing their research in order to help improve their career development and prospects. Established academics in moral, legal, and political philosophy will provide guidance to ECRs about how to improve a submitted essay to make it more likely to be accepted for publication.” The program will have successive rounds, with the first focused on early career researchers in India. Here’s how the mentoring scheme works: Use of the scheme by eligible ECRs is completely free. Those who are accepted onto the scheme will be paired with a senior academic from our team. The team will be drawn from senior academics across the globe who are willing to participate. The ECR will prepare some work for the academic to read, as well as a CV. The work will often be a draft paper, but it might also be a book proposal, or an ECR may just pitch an idea for an essay. The academic and the ECR will meet online to discuss how to improve the work and its prospects for publication, as well as other opportunities to present the work to help improve it. Each mentor will normally be paired with one ECR per year and will be expected to read and offer feedback on one piece of work of up to 12,000 words. Normally the feedback will be given through an online meeting. Mentors may also provide written comments, career advice, and other support at their discretion. However, mentees should have no expectation of an ongoing mentoring relationship with their mentor. The scheme aims at offering feedback only on a single piece of work. The current list of the program’s mentors is here. The program will begin accepting applications on September 1st. You can learn more about the mentoring program here. Questions about it should be directed to Ignacio Peña.

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