Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

New Books in October

Authors and/or publishers kindly sent me the following new books in October:

The Atheist's Guide to Reality:  Enjoying Life Without Illusions by Alex Rosenberg (W.W. Norton & Co., 2011).

Unpopular Privacy:  What Must We Hide? by Anita L. Allen (Oxford University Press, 2011).

The Fate of Wonder:  Wittgenstein's Critique of Metaphysics and Modernity by Kevin M. Cahill (Columbia University Press, 2011).

Snapshots of the Plutocracy

The U.S. is, however, more just than Mexico.  Charts like this (as well as these) are really crucial to understanding the United States.

The U.S. Overall "Top Ten" for 2011

Friday's post about the big "movers" generated enough queries about the shape of the U.S. top ten that I might as well post those results here (with the mean score in parentheses after the school name):

1.  New York University (4.8)

2.  Rutgers University, New Brunswick (4.5)

3.  Princeton University (4.4)

4.  University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (4.3)

5.  Harvard University (4.1)

5.  University of Pittsburgh (4.1)

7.  Massachussetts Institute of Technology (4.0)

7.  Yale University (4.0)

9.  Stanford University (3.9)

9.  University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (3.9)

Oxford was #1 in the U.K., by a wide margin, and #2 internationally, with a mean of 4.7.

SPEP Hypocrisy

Spiros notices an example.

The unseasonably early winter snowstorm in the Northeast...

...means Occupy Wall Street needs your help NOW!

(Thanks to Nathan Jun for the pointer.)

"What can I do with a humanities degree?"

A useful site from Bruce Janz, Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Central Florida.

PGR 2011: The Big "Movers" in the Overall Survey

So we had nearly 270 philosophers complete the overall faculty quality surveys, a record (and well over 300 participated in the surveys when you factor in the specialty rankings, but we still don't have a precise tally on the total participation).  We're now in the process of transcribing all the results, and I'll post about some bits and pieces over the next few weeks.  But let me start with some interesting "overall" quality results.

Here are the departments that had the biggest upward "jumps" in the overall rankings in the U.S.:

University of Southern California has jumped from #17 in the 2008-09 survey to #11, in a three-way tie with Columbia and UCLA.  This is partly attributable to the recent lateral additions of two distinguished philosophers from Oxford (Uzquiano and Wedgwood) as well as Robin Jeshion from UC Riverside, but surely also to the increasing prominence of their excellent young ethics/metaethics group (Stephen Finlay, Jacob Ross, Mark Schroeder).   And USC has also had two distinguished senior faculty elected to the American Academy since the last survey:  James Higginbotham and Scott Soames.

Northwestern University has jumped from #41 in the 2008-09 survey to #31 this year, in a multi-way tie with several other departments.   They had a major senior appointment with Michael Glanzberg from UC Davis, but also have several younger faculty whose stars have been rising, including Fabrizio Cariani (philosophy of language) (appointed since the last survey), Jennifer Lackey (epistemology), and Rachel Zuckert (Kant, 19th-century Continental).

Many other U.S. departments had smaller, but still noticeable, improvements in their overall rank.

In the UK, the really big mover was the University of Leeds, which went from #12 to #6, in a tie with Birkbeck.  This seems to be a case of a traditionally strong department making high-quality appointments of younger philosophers whose reputations are steadily rising.

In Canada, the most notable change was that there is now a three-way tie for #2 among McGill, British Columbia, and Western Ontario (Toronto remains #1 by a wide margin).

In Australasia, Melbourne made a big recovery, now solidly in the top five once again, tied with Monash.

More previews of the results over the next few weeks.  Many thanks to the hundreds of philosophers whose conscientious efforts have made the latest PGR possible.

Occupy Chicago: The Teach-Ins

Here.

PhD Admissions and Undergraduate Pedigree

This is striking.

The Fight for Collective Bargaining Rights in Ohio

An update.

Intro to Logic Teachers Misbehaving...

...at Smith College.

(Thanks to James Klagge for the pointer.)

When philosophical arguments fail, bowl!

At least this way we get clear answers.  Among the results so far:  humans have souls, and beauty is in the eye of the beholder!

How to write a cover letter for the U.S. job market?

A grad student in Europe writes:

Now that I'm sitting down to put together some applications for philosophy job positions, it occurs to me that I don't know how to write a cover letter for the American job market. For example, for PhD positions it was natural to state the people I'd like to work with. But now that I have a PhD, is this still the norm? Because while I really would like to work with, and learn from, AAA and YYY, since I'm applying for a tenure track position, aren't I supposed to be something approximating to a finished article - ready to stand on my own and complement my colleagues? In this case, would it not be better just to state why my research would complement the research profile of the department? And if so, would I benefit or harm my case by observing that my research would fill a gap in the department's teaching profile? What would be the right combination of flattery and self-confidence?

Thoughts from readers?

Harman v. Hauser on Plagiarism from the Work of John Mikhail

Gilbert Harman has posted a revised version of his earlier remarks, along with a reply by Marc Hauser.   It seems to me that "theft of ideas" clearly constitutes plagiarism and academic dishonesty (see the discussion in Harman's piece on this subject), though many egregious cases go unpunished and unnoted because the ideas in question were only in oral form prior to the theft.  But that is not the case in this instance.   In any case, see the detailed analysis by Harman and the rejoinder from Hauser.

"Academic Jobs Online"

The mathematicians set it up, but why don't the philosophers use it?

CHANGE: PGR Surveys Extended *36* Hours: Closing on Thursday, Oct. 27 at Noon Central Time

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY:  NOTE SLIGHTLY LONGER EXTENSION

It looks like we're up to around 250 evaluators in the overall and/or specialty rankings, but I've had various requests for some extra time from folks who still want to participate, so I'm extending the survey for 24 hours, to 5 pm Wednesday, October 26--that's Chicago time , so I'm exteding the survey for about 36 hours, until noon on Thursday, October 27--that's Chicago time, so it would be 1 pm in New York or Toronto, 6 pm in London, but 10 am in Los Angeles or Vancouver, and around 5 am or so in Sydney on Friday!  (I'm afraid we can't extend much longer consistent with processing the results and getting the Report on-line by early December, so that it can be of use to the current crop of grad school applicants.)

Some of the specialty areas have had lower turnouts relative to the numbers invited so far, so any evaluators in those areas, please note:  your votes will be especially important!  These include philosophy of mathematics, Kant, medieval philosophy, philosophy of biology, Chinese philosophy, and philosophy of race.

Let me add that evaluators are well-advised not to wait until the last minute to complete the surveys, lest the server slow down to a crawl!

More on the alleged musical structure of Plato's works

Two musicologists in Apeiron:

J. B. Kennedy recently proposed a radical new interpretation of the Platonic dialogues, arguing that their stichometric structure is based in a Greek twelve-tone musical scale. We explore to what extent such an interpretation might be borne out historically by Greek music-theoretical traditions: the concept of scale, the significance of number 12 (on which Kennedy's theory is anchored), conceptual differences between Harmonicists and Pythagoreans, and the applicability of Kennedy's scale within the context of Plato's thought. While the statistical correlations Kennedy notes are intriguing, their foundation in Greek music-theoretical traditions proves problematic.

Earlier discussion here.

Plutocracy Watch: Joseph Stiglitz Edition

Here.

Warm thanks to Rebecca Kukla...

...for a great ten days of blogging, which stimualted some fine comment threads as well; you can review her contributions at this link in case you missed any of it.  I hope to have more guest bloggers in the future, and will hopefully be able to persuade Rebecca to come back.

I sometimes get asked where I find the guest-bloggers, some of whom (including Rebecca) I've never even met in person!  Generally, I invite folks with whom I've corresponded and/or who post sensible comments frequently, and who seem to be just generally interesting philosophers with useful perspsectives and insight on issues in philosophy and the profession that I think the regular readership will enjoy.

Implicit Bias: A Pessimistic Reminder (Kukla)

Implicit bias is a hot topic in philosophy these days; for instance, there are awesomely interesting-looking upcoming conferences advertised here and here. (Incidentally, this strikes me as a little corner of the discipline in which those with explicitly feminist training and interests and those without are working together and learning from one another beautifully.)

As job market season enters full swing, many of us - job candidates and search committee members both - are concerned about how to mitigate the effects of implicit biases. Voluminous empirical research shows that impressions of candidates can be impacted not only by coarse identity features such as their apparent gender and race, but by minutiae from the way they sit to how much they weigh to what they wear. Research also suggests that no matter how well-intentioned and diligent we are, those of us assessing candidates cannot just think or will ourselves out of the problem. Insisting to yourself that you will assess candidates impartially and ignore irrelevant features does little to help, and may even backfire. When we actively suppress our biases, they re-emerge with a vengance once we become less vigilant or when we are under stress. Our lizard brains are remarkably insouciant when it comes to listening to and taking directions from our mister-bossy-pants conscious, reflective minds, it turns out. Furthermore, we just don’t have enough data to know how to minimize the effects of implicit bias by brute force; we may have various intuitions about whether bias kicks in more during APA interviews than skype interviews, or whatever, but there isn’t enough science out there to say, and the phenomenon has turned out to function counterintuitively many times before. (For a bibliography of psychological and philosophical literature on implicit bias, see here.)

What is to be done?  Well, I don’t think any of us really has a sufficient answer, although there are some concrete tools out there that help to focus our attention on relevant rather than irrelevant traits. (There are some nice resources here, although I can't get the links to the online tool links to work, unfortunately.)  But recognizing that good intentions are not a solution is surely important, at least in fostering necessary epistemic humility.  It seems to me that people are persistently and dramatically over-confident both about their ability to consciously compensate for bias, and in their intuitions about how to avoid it in the first place. See, for example, this recent thread, in which several people simply asserted that they had various techniques that enabled them to filter out noise and bias. Many of us have already played around with this, but taking some of the online tests bouncing around the web can be a useful eye-opener. (Thanks once again to Bryce Huebner for helpful discussions.)

Thus ends my stint as guest-blogger. Many thanks to all who participated in what I think were some excellent discussions over the last week and a half, and many thanks again to Brian for inviting me to do this.  And good luck to all job candidates!  

In Memoriam: Peter Goldie (1946-2011)

I am very sad to report that Professor Goldie, a leading writer on the philosophy of the emotions and moral psychology, has passed away.  There is a brief memorial notice from his former colleagues at King's College, London here.   I first met Peter when he came to seminars I was giving on Nietzsche at University College London about a decade ago, where he was an invaluable participant.  I subsequently saw him at Manchester, where he took up the Chair in Philosophy in 2005, in order to rebuild the faculty.  His book on The Emotions is one of the two or three best in a vast literature.  His remarkable philosophical career is all the more notable in that it was his second career, after one in business.  A great loss for the field of philosophy.

Note on My Comments Policy (Kukla)

I've mentioned that I do not publish nasty or ad hominem comments, or comments that are anonymous unless I can tell that there is a good reason for the anonymity. If your only reason for wanting anoynmity is that you want to say things that are nastier than you are willing to take the consequences for saying, this doesn't count as a good reason; rather, you're an example of why many people think that allowing anonymous comments is a bad idea. I should have added: If your comment is anonymous AND you provide an intentionally invalid email address, I will not publish your comment; neither will I be able to contact you to discuss your reasons for desiring anonymity and/or ways to make your comment more productive and less nasty.

Searle Podcast...

...with Chicago grad students Jaime Edwards and Matt Teichman.

Occupy Chicago Petition Letter (Kukla) UPDATED

Readers at the University of Chicago may be interested in this petition that the university is submitting in support of the Occupy Chicago movement.  Thanks to Jacob Swenson for the pointer.  Jacob also suggests that those at other universities should consider drafting similar petition letters.

UPDATE: Here is a similar petition for those at Northwestern University.  Thanks to Seth Green for letting me know.

SECOND UPDATE: David Velleman (NYU) comments: "I note that although the university petitions mention several important grievances of the protesters, they omit a central grievance that hits closer to home - namely, the crushing debt with which today's students graduate from college. (For examples, flip through the "We Are the 99 Percent" tumblr at wearethe99percent.tumblr.com). We academics bear some responsibility for the costs of higher education. It is all very well to cheer on the protests from the sidelines -- or to join them in the streets -- but we should not pretend that we are entirely on the side of the angels." 

What They're Doing About What We're Doing About What It's Like (Kukla)

As the discussion about the climate for women in the subdisciplines heats up (thanks all!), it seems a good time to provide a pointer to a growing resource, the What We're Doing About What It's Like blog, an initiative of the Women in Philosophy Task Force, where people write in with concrete examples of steps they have taken or witnessed that aim to improve the climate for women in philosophy (at the individual, departmental, or any other level).  There's lots of interesting stuff up there, including for instance a departmental climate survey tool devised by social scientists and submitted by Ruth Chang and used at Michigan. Take a look!  And, help build the resource by submitting something if you can.

SPEP Proposes Resolution In Support of "Pluralist's Guide" (Kukla) UPDATED

BREAKING NEWS 10/21: Cathy Kemp writes: Informal report of results for SPEP resolution in support of "'Pluralist' Guide": 118 yes 24 no 5 abstentions.

(In other news: eminent philosopher Jon Cogburn forced to eat hat.)

*   *   *   *   *

I firmly intended not to guest-blog about the "Pluralist's Guide", as I considered the issue sooooo July 2011, but the Flying Spaghetti Monster seems to have different plans for me.  It was just brought to my attention that SPEP members will be voting on a proposed resolution in support of the guide at their annual meeting this coming weekend.  Here is the full text of the resolution:

I  The membership of the Society of Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy supports the independent efforts of the new Pluralist’s Guide to Philosophy to:

1) provide new sources of information on areas of philosophy that remain underrepresented in most doctoral programs in the discipline and 

2) provide information on the conditions for women and minorities in graduate philosophy programs. The membership of SPEP has long championed pluralistic approaches to philosophy, as well as increased diversity in a field that continues to have the lowest representation by women and people of color compared to all other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.  

II.  We commend those committed to providing enhanced information about doctoral programs in philosophy in the US, as well as those working to promote diversity in the profession. While we appreciate those who have engaged in constructive dialogue about the Guide and its production, we condemn the incivility that has marked some criticisms, especially ad hominem attacks on the Guide’s organizers and contributors as well as on SPEP and its membership despite the latter's independence from the construction of the Guide.  We are grateful to the authors of and contributors to the Pluralist’s Guide for their work. Philosophy currently faces unprecedented marginalization within the academy; we support efforts to move past archaic divisions and find common ground.

Comments welcome; same groundrules as before.

The Climate for Women in the Subdisciplines (Kukla)

 A few months back, pretty much every philosophy blog was ablaze with discussion of how and whether to evaluate and compare the climate for female students in different philosophy departments. The issue was discussed ad nauseum (and yes, I realize I was surely a major contributor to the nausea). Lately I’ve been reflecting on a slightly different issue, namely the climate for women in different subdisciplines within philosophy. After all, departments are not the only ‘natural’ social groupings in the discipline.

My reflections were triggered by my going to back-to-back major conferences in philosophy of science (EPSA) and bioethics (ASBH)- two subdisciplines of philosophy that feel to me to be ‘healthier’ than most other parts of philosophy when it comes to gender issues.  I tried hard to articulate what I meant by ‘healthier’ to my friend Eric Winsberg, who, as so often happens, convinced me that I had no clear idea yet what I was trying to say, and helped me notice several important distinctions that needed to be drawn. I’m still not confident I know exactly what I think, but here are some ground-clearing thoughts.  

The question of how hospitable a subdiscipline is to women has to be separated clearly from the question of how hospitable it is to feminist work. I think that much damage has been done by not separating these questions.  Indeed, I think that support, recognition, and full social and intellectual inclusion for women who do not work on feminist philosophy, regardless of their personal politics, is one of the most pressing climate issues in the discipline.  Such women risk devaluation and rejection from both the male-dominated discipline at large and from their colleagues who identify as feminist philosophers. Nonetheless the questions are not completely independent, for at least two reasons. (a) A subdiscipline that refuses to recognize the validity of feminist work basically tells women that some of their most pervasive and formative experiences are not appropriate topics for philosophical reflection, and cannot interestingly condition their philosophical responses and insights. This is probably true for a few select subdisciplines, such as logic and philosophy of math, but they are exceptions. (b) As a matter of unsurprising though contingent empirical fact, many women in philosophy, regardless of subdiscipline, do have feminist interests. So hospitability to feminist work is conducive to but not sufficient for hospitability to women. Furthermore, there are at least two different ways in which a subdiscipline x might acknowledge feminist approaches: ‘feminist philosophy of x’ might be a thriving sub-subdiscipline, or feminist approaches and insights may be frequently incorporated into and recognized by the mainstream of the subdiscipline.  When a subdiscipline has the former but not the latter, there’s a high risk that feminist philosophy - and with it, many women - will be ghettoized.   

Tentatively, I think that for a subdiscipline of philosophy to be truly woman-friendly, it needs all of the following to be true. (1) There are a sizable number of leaders and up-and-coming stars in the field who are women, regardless of whether they take up feminist issues, and (2) it has a culture of taking women seriously, treating them respectfully, and including them in social networks and professional opportunities. If feminist approaches to the field are helpful, then also (3) there is a thriving community of feminist scholars who have the means to network with one another and exchange ideas and support, and (4) feminist insights and approaches are not relegated to a ghetto but incorporated, as appropriate, into the mainstream - anyone can draw upon feminist insights and approaches without having to join a dedicated ‘feminist philosopher of x camp’, and these insights and approaches are recognized as (sometimes) helpful and philosophically legitimate. Furthermore, (5) the subdiscipline as a whole does not presume that all of its female members do feminist philosophy, and (6) the women in the field who do feminist work and those who do not are friendly towards and in solidarity with one another. My totally anecdotal, soft sense, for what it is worth, is that both philosophy of science and bioethics score above average on all six measures. (NOTE my original post here contained some musings about particular subdisciplines, but David Chalmers convinced me (with comment #3 below) that this was a bad idea.)

Many thanks to Eric Winsberg and Bryce Huebner for helping me think through these issues. Comments very welcome, although I will not post anything nasty or ad hominem, nor will I allow any anonymous posts without a really compelling reason to do so.

Tenure and Teaching in Texas (Kukla)

A few days ago I blogged about the potential assault on tenure and liberal arts funding in Florida, and mentioned that Florida is looking to Texas, where proposed changes to the tenure system are also afoot.  I've now done some looking into the Texas situation, which strikes me as quite chilling. (Brian pointed out several months ago that these changes were afoot in this post.) As in the Florida case, I don't feel qualified to judge how likely it is that the proposed reforms will go through or what exactly their long-term effect will be, but (1) it is worrisome that Republican legislators are becoming so interested in micromanaging academia, and (2) the general tenor of the assault is telling.

The Texas Public Policy Foundation has put together a '7-step plan' for 'strengthening' higher education in the state, at governor Rick Perry's request. Perry has urged the regents of the state universities - all of whom have been appointed by him - to adopt the plan.  This plan urges adopting a 'business model' for running universities, in which students are the 'customers'.

Part of the plan is to make 75% of tenure decisions depend pretty much entirely on teaching, evaluated by objective, state-defined measures, while 25% of the faculty positions would be set aside as pure research positions.  Along with the obvious downsides to judging most faculty solely by their teaching, I am deeply disturbed by the assumption that there is no symbiotic relationship between teaching and research - that students need no access to strong researchers, that being a researcher is in no way an important condition for certain kinds of high-quality teaching, and that our teaching does not enhance or help develop or direct our research.  Indeed, somewhat ironically, the report refers to teaching as a 'burden' from which researchers could be freed according to the plan. (I couldn't find anything about how graduate advising would fit into this - does anyone know?) The details of how teaching would be evaluated are particularly troubling: Teaching professors could only receive tenure "by having taught an average of three classes per semester and thirty students per class for ... seven or more years" and "average teaching ratings must be a minimum of 4.5 on a 5.0 scale" (my emphasis - see here).  I think it would be condescending of me to spell out on this blog why these are terrible ideas, in light of the effect on the kind of topics that could be taught, the need to pander to students, and so on.  The writers of the report do have the chutzpah to claim that this would not turn tenure into a 'popularity contest'. This has been brewing for a while, and the Chronicle of Higher Education did a story on the Texas situation a year ago; here is the link, although you'll need access to the Chronicle to read it.

I am curious how worried philosophers at state universities in Texas and Florida actually are about all of this; although I have some Florida ties, I don't really know how things feel on the ground.  I am opening comments, and particularly encourage signed comments from folks who are working in one of those two states. I'm also curious if anyone knows if there are other states jumping on this bandwagon.

PGR Survey Reminder

We're a little more than half way through the survey period; evaluators have another eight day to complete the surveys.  Many thanks to the 150+ who already have submitted their evaluations!   I hope the remaining evaluators will make time to participate during the next week.

Best Abstract Ever (Kukla)

Can apparent superluminal neutrino speeds be explained as a quantum weak measurement?

H/t to Luca Baptista by way of Bryce Huebner.

"Occupy Philosophy"

A place for philosophers to get involved with ideas and philosophical perspectives on the growing populist movement against the plutocracy.

Philosophers Putnam, Taylor Among Those Protesting Iran's Treatment of the Bahai

Details here. 

(Thanks to Ben Schewel for the pointer.)

Florida Goes Substantially More Nuts than Brian Leiter Indicated (Kukla)

 

Hi all! This is my first guest post. I am grateful to Brian Leiter for giving me this exciting opportunity. I am starting with something informational as a warm-up. I plan to post something more chewy and discussion-worthy shortly.

In his October 12th post Florida Goes Nuts, Brian noted that Florida’s ‘brain-dead’ governor Rick Scott is calling for cuts to specific disciplines, but claimed that philosophy is not among them. This is not true: Scott has specifically targeted philosophy, although anthropology is his favorite target (for instance see here).  

Since cutting public university and especially liberal arts budgets is a state pastime in Florida, this is all less notable than the fact that Scott has made it clear that he intends to ‘raise questions’ about the tenure system at state universities, with an eye to perhaps eliminating it. This, I suspect, is no idle threat. He has already eliminated tenure protection for K-12 teachers and he has said that it is one of the priorities on his 2012 legislative agenda to challenge it at the university level. Plus, Florida already has a young state university (Florida Gulf Coast University) that has no tenure system, and state Republicans apparently think it’s splendid. The Director of Public Affairs at New College of Florida, which is a state school, issued a letter to the faculty yesterday, basically telling them not to panic yet. I suspect that this person never took a class that covered Grice.

I’m fond of this highly literate quotation from Scott: “If there’s a logical reason to do tenure, I’m fine. But my first reaction to things is the rest of society we don’t get these guarantees.” (See here.)

I’ve been unable to find much information about his proposed alternatives; I doubt there are any. I did find some scary gibberish from some local Republican lawmaker about replacing the tenure system with a set of salary incentives for people who ‘do well’, defined as having large classes and things like that. Florida is apparently following in the footsteps of Texas, where lawmakers are also seriously interested in eliminating tenure. I of course have little sense of how real this threat is or what its consequences would be.  In the mean time, I guess that job candidates lucky enough to be considering multiple offers should keep their eye on legislative developments in Florida and Texas.

 

Slight Improvement in October JFP...

...but still nothing like the pre-economic catastrophe numbers. 

Two Major New Volumes in the "Routledge Philosophers" Series

They are Russell by Gregory Landini (Iowa) and Wittgenstein by William Child (Oxford).  These new introductions to two of the major philosophers of the twentieth-century will be invaluable both to students and scholars.

Still to come in the Routledge Philosophers series:  John Richardson (NYU) on Heidegger, Don Garrett (NYU) on Hume, and Constance Meinwald (Illinois/Chicago) on Plato, among many others.

Florida Goes Nuts

Leading politicians are now calling for cuts to specific disciplines (not philosophy, at least not yet).  Anthropologists respond to the brain-dead governor.

If you're ever in Kingston, Ontario...

...this place is a really good French Bistro.  C'est vrai!

Flanagan and Rosenberg on Naturalism...

...on Philosophy TV.

(Thanks to Rob Sica for the pointer.)

Last Round of PGR Invites Have Gone Out

The several dozen e-mail errors from last week have been fixed, and evaluators should have received their invitations today.  If you've been an evaluator in the past, and did not receive the invitation today or last week, please contact me.

Where to go to college to get rich

Putting to one side the mistaken use of "guarantee" in the headline, this is a revealing list.

The "Nobel Prize" in Economics

Eric Schliesser (Ghent) has interesting comments (and a link) regarding the latest winner of the fake Nobel Prize in Economics.

New Philosophers' Carnival is...

...here.

Welcome Guest Blogger Rebecca Kukla

I am very pleased to announce that philosopher Rebecca Kukla will be guest-blogging here starting October 14 and continuing through October 23.   Professor Kukla has wide-ranging philosophical interests ranging across bioethics, epistemology, philosophy of language, feminist philosophy, and the history of eighteenth-century philosophy.  I will be doing some posting during that time period as well, but mainly I'll be reading Professor Kukla!

It's nice to see the correct word for the U.S. political system--"plutocracy"--is starting to make its way...

...into the mainstream media.

Another Philosophy Jobs On-Line Resource

Courtesy of David Bourget and David Chalmers--details and links here.

[Moving to front from Saturday, Oct. 8, to make sure interested readers don't miss it]

Departmental Placement Officer Seeks Advice

A young philosopher writes:

I’m the newly-appointed placement officer for my department, and I was hoping to get some feedback on a couple of questions. 

(1) I know well enough what our students need to do in order to look attractive to ranked research universities, but I’m wondering what I can do to help our students look attractive to “teaching schools”:  small liberal arts colleges and universities with large teaching loads. I’d be grateful for feedback both about “do’s” and “don’ts” in their job applications, as well as anything I could be doing earlier on, with our first- and second-year grads, to help prepare them for such jobs.

(2) What, if anything, should I be doing on behalf of my students at the Eastern APA? My fear is that if I approach the schools that interviewed them at the smoker, it may do more harm than good (by annoying them!).

Comments are open.

"Occupy Wall Street"

MOVING TO FRONT FROM OCTOBER 4 TO ENCOURAGE MORE DISCUSSION.

Everything you need to know here.

ADDENDUM:  And Chicago too!

ANOTHER:  Roy Blumenfeld, a former philosophy PhD student at CUNY and now a documentary filmmaker in NYC, writes:

Thank you for posting about the Wall Street protests. If you'd like to link to a video, consider the following inside look I've uploaded covering the lead-up to the bridge arrests: http://vimeo.com/29943384 . I couldn't film the arrests because I was one of the first to be arrested, and didn't want to risk dropping my camera while getting cuffed.

Also, I think it's worth mentioning to your readers that journalists were arrested along with protesters (most prominently Natasha Lennard of the NYTimes). In New York, journalists are required to obtain official press passes from the police, not their employers (a phenomenon unique among democracies, as far as I know). As freelancers, neither Ms. Lennard nor I qualified, and were thus kettled along with protesters.

Finally, you might want to consider an endeavor like the one pursued by Nicholas Kristof on Sunday, or Richard D. Wolff here which is to offer some education and guidance to the protesters. One way to do this is to solicit specific, intelligent talking points from your readership to submit to the protesters. An even better way is to solicit suggestions for good sources of information protesters could read and share. Despite attracting a lot of attention, this movement still has a serious image problem. In part this is natural -- protesters have a wide variety of concerns, which may or may not coalesce as the movement progresses. But often one gets the feeling that these young men and women just aren't sure what exactly to advocate for, and could use intelligent voices on the left offering policy guidance. Robert Paul Wolff writes "aside from saying 'Amen,' there doesn't seem to be much I can do to support it." This is one thing you could all do.

Per Mr. Blumenfeld's suggestion, I'm opening comments for input and advice from readers.

Two Philosophers Elected Fellows of the Cognitive Science Society

They are:  Ned Block (NYU) and Patricia Smith Churchland (emerita, UC San Diego).

3 Quarks Prizes for Philosophy Blogging

Here.

Gertrude Stein during WWII

I had no idea.