Top News, Articles, and Interviews in Philosophy

Beall from Connecticut to Notre Dame

6. December 2019 Philosophy News News
Jc Beall, currently Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut, has accepted an offer from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. Professor Beall is known for his work in logic and philosophy of logic. See his site for links to his work (as well as to various elements of the “logic scene”). He also has interests in philosophy of religion and philophical theology, as well as metaphysics and epistemology. Professor Beall has been at the University of Connecticut since 2000, though he has held numerous visiting and fractional appointments at various institutions over the years, and he spent the 2018-19 academic year as a Research Fellow at Notre Dame’s Center for Philosophy of Religion. He takes up his new position as the O’Neill Family Chair in Philosophy at Notre Dame in the Fall of 2020. The post Beall from Connecticut to Notre Dame appeared first on Daily [More]
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APA Member Interview: Phillip Barron

6. December 2019 Philosophy News News
Phillip Barronis a PhD candidate in philosophy at the University of Connecticut, focusing on aesthetics and philosophy of language. He is also a poet. His first book of poems, What Comes from a Thing (Fourteen Hills Press, 2015), won the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s Nicolás Guillén Award for philosophical literature. Currently, he is a pre-doctoral fellow [More]
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The Origins of Unfairness: Social Categories and Cultural Evolution

6. December 2019 Philosophy News News
2019.12.04 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews Cailin O'Connor, The Origins of Unfairness: Social Categories and Cultural Evolution, Oxford University Press, 2019, 240pp., $25.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780198789970. Reviewed by Ann E. Cudd, University of Pittsburgh Why is unfairness ubiquitous in human interaction, and especially prominent along the lines of gender, race, and in some societies, caste? In this book, Cailin O'Connor offers explanatory models based in evolutionary game theory to answer this question. She shows that if we model many common interactions as coordination problems, we can see why cultural evolution makes gender and racial distinctions useful ways to choose strategies and divide the outcomes of interactions in ways that favor one group over another. These models are simple yet powerful. They show us how unfair conventions and norms that penalize women and racial or ethnic minorities could have arisen making only minimal assumptions about human psychology or physiology, and why unfairness in human interaction is so hard... Read [More]
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APA Project Grant Recipients

5. December 2019 Philosophy News News
The American Philosophical Association (APA) has announced the winners of its 2019-2020 Small Grants and Diversity and Inclusiveness Grants. The Small Grants Program has a pot of $25,000 to split among projects proposed to the APA’s Board. This year’s winners of Small Grants, according to a press release from the APA, are: AAPT Graduate Student and Early Career Seminar on Teaching and Learning, Summer 2020 ($5,000) Project Coordinators: Alexandra Bradner (Kenyon College), Jennifer Mulnix (University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth), Emily Esch (College of St. Benedict, St. John’s University), Stephen Bloch-Schulman (Elon University) The American Association of Philosophy Teachers’ biennial Graduate Student and Early Career Seminar on Teaching and Learning brings together philosophers from all over the country to study materials on the teaching of philosophy in a four-day, interactive workshop led by philosophers with pedagogical expertise. The seminar provides participants with research-based best practices from both the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) and the science of learning. AAPT Summer Seminar on Teaching and Learning Philosophy ($4,500) Project Coordinators: Stephen K. Miller (Oakwood Friends School and Marist College), Wendy Turgeon (St. Joseph’s College) At the 2020 AAPT Summer Seminar on Teaching and Learning Philosophy, selected high school and middle school educators will discuss new approaches to engaging students with [More]
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APA Awards Grants to Ten Projects for 2019–2020

5. December 2019 Philosophy News News
The American Philosophical Association is pleased to announce that it will provide grants to ten philosophy-related projects in the 2019–2020 fiscal year. For more information on these programs, visit the funded projects page of our website. Small Grant Program Each fiscal year, the APA Eastern Division provides $25,000 for the APA’s Small Grant Program. This year’s [More]
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Sophie de Grouchy

5. December 2019 Philosophy News News
[New Entry by Sandrine Berges on December 5, 2019.] Sophie de Grouchy (1764 - 1822) was a French philosopher whose book The Letters on Sympathy offers clear and original perspectives on a number of important moral, political, and legal philosophical issues. As well as this book, which she published together with her translation of Smiths's The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1798, Grouchy wrote and published other texts pseudonomously and anonymously. In particular, Grouchy published articles defending republicanism and participated in the writing [More]
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I Don’t Tweet About The Availability Heuristic As Much As You Think

5. December 2019 Philosophy News News
Charles Lassiter, associate professor of philosophy at Gonzaga University, knows more about my tweeting than I do. Why? Well, for one thing, he also knows more about statistical analysis than I do. But more to the point: Professional philosophy feels like a club where there are insiders and outsiders. Insiders get to refer to famous people by first name and tell silly stories about them. Outsiders smile politely. Social media—and the Interwebs in general—is, I think, one way that the playing field might get leveled… Two possibilities. (1) the Interwebs & social media are the great equalizer. Anyone who wants a shot to get to know a Big Shot can. (2) the Interwebs & social media follow something like a Matthew Effect. So which is it? Who gets talked about in philosophy social media?…  I emailed Dr. Justin Weinberg (I can call you “Justin” now, right? We’re buddies. Oh the many silly things we’ve talked about and done…). I wanted to run the idea past him of analyzing and blogging about the @DailyNousEditor account—hereafter referred to as ‘DN’. He kindly agreed and expressed interest in the results.  (Of course you can call me Justin, Charlie—fun times raiding Hume’s wine cellar with you the other day!) And so Professor Lassiter began his analysis. In a series of posts, he reports on what he found out along the way, including: Who my top Twitter partners have been over the past four years (those to whom I most frequently reply [More]
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Akademischer Assistent (W/M/D)

5. December 2019 Philosophy News News
Job List:  Europe Name of institution:  Universität Leipzig/Institut für Philosophie Town:  Leipzig Country:  Germany Job Description:  An der Fakultät für Sozialwissenschaften und Philosophie, Institut für Kommunikations- und Medienwissenschaft, Professur für Strategische Kommunikation ist ab 1. März 2020 folgende Stelle zu besetzen: AKADEMISCHER ASSISTENT (M/W/D) zunächst befristet für 3 Jahre mit Verlängerungsmöglichkeit um weitere 3 Jahre, 100 % einer Vollbeschäftigung Details siehe pdf-Datei über [More]
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