I Had An Affair With My Hero, A Philosopher Who’s Famous For Being ‘Moral’

http://thoughtcatalog.com/anonymous/2014/04/i-had-an-affair-with-my-hero-a-philosopher-whos-famous-for-being-moral/

I should’ve never met my hero. Because I found out that his modus operandi is to befriend pretty young women in various cities, young women who admire his work, young female scholars who, like me, he meets at conferences. I falsely assumed that the man who calls affluent westerners human rights violators would treat women with dignity. I was naïve to believe that he’d be different.

He will continue giving his lectures about justice around the world, pretending not to eat meat for moral reasons, inviting young women to his hotel room for philosophical discussions, and I’m just among the other young women scorned by the moral philosopher, who devotes his life to justice. There can be no moral condemnation. I brought this upon myself, and I deserve to live with the consequences of my free, voluntary action.

Philosophy Poems

Philosophy Poems

Cultivating Collegiality as a Graduate Student

Cultivating Collegiality as a Graduate Student

…when you attend conferences, colloquiums, workshops, or other group activities and events, there are many unwritten rules that apply, ones that I see broken with alarming frequency by students who otherwise seem perfectly fine, even kind and generous–heck, some of them ones that I have broken myself, in my own early days. Because, you see, nobody really explains them to you–you’re just expected to know them intrinsically, or to pick them up along the way as growing pains, part of the unwritten curriculum of professionalizing. Unfortunately, the simple truth is that if you don’t curb these behaviors early on, they become habit-forming and can lead to your being known as “that grad student who…” and then, “that job candidate who.….”, and then, perhaps, “that professor at x who.….” [fill in the blank with a not-great behavior] Which, in turn, can color your career in all sorts of ways you might never have foreseen or intended when you originally made that choice or set of choices.

The Philosophy and Theology of Intellectual Humility

Ian Church (SLU) writes with news of a new project at SLU.

Saint Louis University has received a generous grant from the The John Templeton Foundation to explore the subject of intellectual humility. The Templeton Foundation will contribute over $2.7 million to the project, with contributions by SLU bringing the total grant to over $3 million. The Philosophy and Theology of Intellectual Humility project will focus on a variety of philosophical and theological issues relevant to the topic of intellectual humility. The project is being led by John Greco and Eleonore Stump. And the project has recently awarded 19 research grants, 10 visiting scholars, and 4 cluster groups.

The list of projects we are funding can be found here: http://humility.slu.edu/grants.html

The names of the visiting scholars we will be hosting can be found here: http://humility.slu.edu/fellowships.html

And the cluster groups we are funding can be found here: http://humility.slu.edu/clustergroups.html

Are Junior Faculty Required to do too Much Service?

Are Junior Faculty Required to do too Much Service?

Discuss at the Daily Nous.

Three Tenured Hires

Three Tenured Hires

Berit Brogaard (philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of psychology) will be moving to University of Miami as full professor, starting in Fall 2014, from the University of Missouri-St Louis.

Douglas Lavin (ethics, practical reasoning, action) will become a permanent lecturer in philosophy at University College London, starting Fall 2014, from Harvard.

Sigrún Svavarsdóttir (metaethics, ethics, moral psychology) will become an associate professor at Tufts, starting Fall 2014, from Ohio State.

Inclusiveness at UNC

Inclusiveness at UNC

Nussbaum on Various Types of Anger at Brown

Nussbaum on Various Types of Anger at Brown

Exploring the traditional association of anger with revenge, Martha Nussbaum, University of Chicago Law School professor and former Brown professor, cited the “Transition” anger utilized by political reformers such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi as its more productive counterpart during a lecture Monday afternoon.

Nussbaum’s lecture, entitled “Injustice and the Dubious Value of Anger,” was sponsored by the program for Ethical Inquiry and is part of a weeklong series of lectures and workshops.

 

Philosophy is Dead White, and Dead Wrong

Philosophy is Dead White, and Dead Wrong

1841, For Solomon Northup, it marked the beginning of “12 Years a Slave”, but for Frederick Douglass, it marked the beginning of 50 years a public speaker. Reflecting on that beginning, Douglass tells us – in the second of his three autobiographies, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) – that “[d]uring the first three or four months, my speeches were almost exclusively made up of narrations of my own personal experience as a slave. ‘Let us have the facts,’ said the people. So also said Friend George Foster, who always wished to pin me down to my simple narrative. ‘Give us the facts,’ said [John A.] Collins [of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society], ‘we will take care of the philosophy’.”

Let’s reflect critically on this notion of “taking care of the philosophy”, by considering, on the one hand, who gets to do philosophy and, on the other, what gets done in philosophy.

 

Why the ‘customer service’ lingo in academe is bad for students

Why the ‘customer service’ lingo in academe is bad for students

For years now, corporate language and thinking has invaded academe, correlating with many other trends—the decline of public funding from states, the rising price of tuition, the amenities arms-race in student housing, the administrative bloat, the demands of assessment culture, and, most of all, the general saturation of corporate-speak into academic life. Institutions, especially branch campuses of public university systems and small private colleges, feel perpetually strapped for cash and desperate for tuition revenue.

In that context, the attempt to shift the world of higher education into the business paradigm seems rational to administrators: Without customers—i.e., students—faculty jobs will be cut, programs shuttered, and staff members “downsized.”

 

The Ethics of Community Intervention

The Ethics of Community Intervention

A reader (who is not the author) sends along this post by Dan Hicks (Western Ontario) on how to discuss issues like those that have come up recently.

What I am interested in here is the general social practice of mass criticism — “calling out,” shaming, ostracizing, or ridiculing a (perceived) wrongdoer — especially when it takes place outside of established formal institutions and uses emerging media (blogs, Twitter). One of the issues raised by the two controversies is whether this practice is ethical. Calling the practice “vigilante justice” or “toxic” implies that it is not. But it seems clear to me that in some cases it can be — civil rights marches, union picket lines, and petition campaigns are the same kind of practice, just done without early twenty-first century media.

Claremont-McKenna hires Adrienne Martin from UPenn

Claremont-McKenna hires Adrienne Martin from UPenn

According to the Daily Nous, Adrienne Martin (moral psychology, normative ethics, applied ethics) will be moving to Claremont-McKenna to take up the Shankar Professorship of Philosophy, Politics & Economics.

 

Should I Just Quit Academia?

Should I Just Quit Academia?

The year 2011 was, for me, one of celebration. I finished a Ph.D. in history at the University of Chicago, with a dissertation on the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the cultural Cold War in Latin America. My dissertation was awarded distinction, a denomination I had not even known was possible prior to my defense. A couple of months later, my wife gave birth to a healthy baby boy, our first child. Soon after that I started a prestigious two-year postdoc in the humanities: one of six candidates from a thousand or so applicants. The salary there was in line with a beginning professor’s salary, and I felt, for the first time in my life, that I had reached the middle class. Optimism was easy to come by.

Yet of all the machines that humanity has created, few seem more precisely calibrated to the destruction of hope than the academic job market.

What Should Students Call Their (Adjunct) Professors?

What Should Students Call Their (Adjunct) Professors?

The fact is, the vast majority of college students often call their professors by the “wrong” name or title because the conventions for this are massively, overwhelmingly confusing.

Here’s why. First off, at large research universities, a lot of “professors” aren’t professors at all—they’re graduate TAs. Many are a year or two older than their students, and as such most go by their first names. However, they are almost always listed as “Instructor,” which leads to absurd misnomers—I laugh so much about being called “Instructor Schuman” that my husband had it embroidered on a bathrobe for me.

In addition to grad students, a lot of professors are adjuncts, like me (for eight more weeks!), and though you can technically call us “Professor,” on the roster we’re usually just listed as “Staff.” We may even ask that you not call us “Professor” so that you recognize that the school treats us differently. But many of us have doctorates, so we like to be called “Doctor.” But some of us don’t!

It gets worse: Many full-time professors don’t have doctorates (MFAs, for example)—so they can’t be “Doctor” either. But they’re tenured professors, so you’d best call them “Professor.” And worse yet, at some institutions, such as Mr. Jefferson’s Universitah, there has long been a tradition of professors with doctorates going by “Mr.” and “Ms.”

Columbia Fires Two Public Intellectuals

Columbia Fires Two Public Intellectuals

About a month ago, The New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof wrote a much-discussed columncalling for academics to take on a greater role in public life. Most professors, he lamented, “just don’t matter in today’s great debates,” having instead burrowed into rabbit holes of hyper-specialization. PhD programs, he wrote, “have fostered a culture that glorifies arcane unintelligibility while disdaining impact and audience.” Professors, Kristof pleaded, “don’t cloister yourselves like medieval monks—we need you!”

Shortly before his column came out, Carole Vance and Kim Hopper, longtime professors at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, learned that they were losing their jobs because they hadn’t brought in enough grant money. Both, ironically, are models for the sort of publicly engaged intellectual Kristof wants to see more of. Vance has done pioneering work on the intersection of gender, health and human rights. “She has been a mentor and a leading influence on generations of scholars as well as activists and practitioners,” says Rebecca Schleifer, the former advocacy director for the health and human rights division at Human Rights Watch. Hopper, who divides his time between Columbia and the Nathan S. Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research, is both an advocate for the homeless and one of the nation’s foremost scholars on homelessness. Last year, American Anthropologist ran a piece highlighting his work beyond academia, noting that Hopper “has long urged anthropologists to take part in public debates, to translate ethnographic findings into policy proposals.”

His termination, along with Vance’s, suggests that scholars have good reason not to take this advice. Kristof is right that universities have become inhospitable places for public intellectuals, but he misses the ultimate cause. The real problem isn’t culture. It’s money.

Logic and the Linguistic Turn

Logic and the Linguistic Turn

Michael Potter (Cambridge) answers these questions:

Can you start by explaining what we mean when we talk about the linguistic turn in philosophy?

Why do you think that Wittgenstein thought that all philosophical questions could be answered by language?

And where do you think they are mistaken in this?

You’ve spoken previously about the development of modern logic, and its impact on the linguistic turn in 20th century philosophy. Could you perhaps elaborate on that?

You’ve described how the study of language was seen as the sole role of philosophy only for a brief period in the inter-war years. Subsequently, what do you think the contribution of the linguistic turn has been for 20th century philosophy, through to today

To conclude, then, the way that the linguistic turn was previously seen as a brave and bold new way of doing philosophy, is there anything we’re looking at now, any new methodologies or ways of thinking about doing philosophy that we can look forward to for having such a radical effect on the field?

Should Biotech Make Life Hellish for Criminals?

Should Biotech Make Life Hellish for Criminals?

A 2800-word interview with Rebecca Roache (Oxford).

Roache: When I began researching this topic, I was thinking a lot about Daniel Pelka, a four-year-old boy who was starved and beaten to death [in 2012] by his mother and stepfather here in the UK. I had wondered whether the best way to achieve justice in cases like that was to prolong death as long as possible. Some crimes are so bad they require a really long period of punishment, and a lot of people seem to get out of that punishment by dying. And so I thought, why not make prison sentences for particularly odious criminals worse by extending their lives?

But I soon realised it’s not that simple. In the US, for instance, the vast majority of people on death row appeal to have their sentences reduced to life imprisonment. That suggests that a quick stint in prison followed by death is seen as a worse fate than a long prison sentence. And so, if you extend the life of a prisoner to give them a longer sentence, you might end up giving them a more lenient punishment.

The Huffington Post has a summary, too.

60 protest Northwestern’s $3.75 billion fundraising campaign

60 protest Northwestern’s $3.75 billion fundraising campaign

The group, composed mostly of students, gathered to ask administrators for greater transparency in cases involving sexual assault and harassment. Their requests also include a termination clause applicable to any faculty member found in violation of NU’s sexual misconduct policy, which explicitly prohibits sexual and romantic relationships between faculty and students. It is the second protest on campus since a Medill junior filed a Title IX lawsuit against NU in February…

 

Advice to Prospective Graduate Students

Prospective graduate students are beginning to make their campus visits, and Meghan Sullivan (Notre Dame) writes to share some advice for those graduate students. Please feel free to add more or to disagree with Professor Sullivan in the comments.

 It is Prospective Visit season at PhD programs, and I know many prospective students are a bit unclear about how they ought to approach these visits.  There are also, unfortunately, lots of rumors floating around about different departments that can have an undue influence on one’s decisions.  I thought it might be nice to open a thread on particular pieces of advice for students going on these visits.  Here are my five, for what they are worth:

(1) Be sure to talk to a broad sample of faculty, graduate students, and even spouses and partners of faculty and graduate students.  Get a very broad sample of data.  Don’t be afraid to email faculty or graduate students to get answers to your questions.

 (2) Ask them how they like being a member of the department and how they view social aspects of departmental life.  But ALSO be sure to ask them somewhat specific and probing questions about the department and the graduate training it provides.

For faculty some questions like this might be: How much time do they spend advising PhD students on a given week?  What is the typical structure of dissertation advising with that faculty member?  How do they typically get matched with advisees?  What graduate courses have they recently taught and what are they planning to teach?  What do they see as strengths and weaknesses of the graduate program?  How do faculty spend their time when they are not working with graduate students?  (What you should look for: faculty who are highly active in the field, but still able to meet regularly with students, provide advice on research topics, and—for dissertation students—provide useful feedback on written work.)

For graduate students the questions might be: How much time do they spend on coursework in a given week?  (I think it should, in a good department, closely resemble the workload of a fulltime job).  How far does their funding stretch in the city where the grad program is located?  If they are at qualifying exam or dissertation phase: how did they pick their advisors/committee?  How often do they meet with their advisors/committee?  What typically happens at a meeting?

(3) Ask about placement.  And be a little bit near-biased.  In the past five years, how many students have been placed in tenure track jobs or long-term postdocs?  Where were those jobs?  What were the areas of specialty of students placed in those jobs?  Who was on their committee?  How long did it take them to finish the PhD?  What is the department’s placement process like?  What is the department’s long-term strategy for making sure their PhDs are successful at finding employment?  (You should be looking for a program that has a clear plan for getting students through the PhD and good recent track record of placement in the areas of philosophy you anticipate working in. )

 (4) Look closely at current and past course offerings in the department.  Will this program support and nurture the areas of philosophy that interest you?  (Realizing that your interests might change quite a bit in the course of your PhD, and that can be a good thing!)

 (5) Be kind, polite, and professional to everyone in the department, but especially the admin assistants, director of graduate studies and the graduate students working to coordinate your visit.  These people have put a lot of work into the admissions and recruitment process. And one way or another, all of these men and women are going to be your colleagues now that you are entering this field. Treat this visit like your first professional activity.

Philosophers call for profession-wide code of conduct

Philosophers call for profession-wide code of conduct

[Eleonore Stump (Saint Louis)] added that in an ideal world, the American Association of University Professors’ code of ethics would be enough for philosophy. But other disciplines have specific documents that outline, in detail, what’s appropriate or inappropriate within the profession.

“A code of ethics is not only what you don’t accept, it says what you aspire to,” Stump said. “It also helps to say, ‘As a profession, we find these kinds of things unacceptable.’ That detail covers many cases which you wish we wouldn’t have to think about, but obviously we do.”

Amy Ferrer, executive director of the American Philosophical Association, said the association’s officers will discuss the idea of creating a code of conduct at one of its next three meetings.

The association has talked about producing a code of ethics in the past, Ferrer said, adding that the group always welcomes suggestions and recommendations from its members.

“It’s true of any profession that setting community expectations allows the profession to function better,” she said.

UW philosophers help small children ponder life’s big questions

UW philosophers help small children ponder life’s big questions

Most people think of philosophy as a subject for college, not kindergarten. But University of Washington philosopher Jana Mohr Lone believes young children benefit just as much from discussing big questions about life. In 1996, she founded the Center for Philosophy for Children at the UW, which has grown steadily and this year is working in 18 public and private schools in the Seattle area. Last month, the center hosted Washington state’s first high school ethics bowl. Lone also teaches a UW class on how to discuss philosophy with children, has written a book on the subject, and will lead an upcoming webinar for teachers on how to lead philosophical discussions about literature.

Lone also has a video on raising a philosophical child.

Czech priest, philosopher, former dissident wins Templeton Prize

Czech priest, philosopher, former dissident wins Templeton Prize

Monsignor Professor Tomáš Halík, a philosopher and theologian, has been named as winner of the £1.1 million Templeton Prize for 2014. He follows in the footsteps of Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama, both recent recipients of the award which recognises efforts to affirm “life’s spiritual dimension”.

Offer from Nazareth College Rescinded after an Attempt at Negotiation

From Inside Higher Ed. The text of the email that lost her the job:

As you know, I am very enthusiastic about the possibility of coming to Nazareth. Granting some of the following provisions would make my decision easier[:]

1) An increase of my starting salary to $65,000, which is more in line with what assistant professors in philosophy have been getting in the last few years.

2) An official semester of maternity leave.

3) A pre-tenure sabbatical at some point during the bottom half of my tenure clock.

4) No more than three new class preps per year for the first three years.

5) A start date of academic year 2015 so I can complete my postdoc.

I know that some of these might be easier to grant than others. Let me know what you think.”

 

The response:

“It was determined that on the whole these provisions indicate an interest in teaching at a research university and not at a college, like ours, that is both teaching and student centered,” the email continues. “Thus, the institution has decided to withdraw its offer of employment to you.” The search committee ended by thanking the candidate for her “interest” and wishing her “the best in finding a suitable position.”

Tenure-Track Hires, 2013-2014

Each of the past two years, ProPhilosophy has accumulated hiring data for Ph.D.-granting departments, which has then been analyzed by Carolyn Dicey Jennings (UC-Merced). This data has outstripped that collected by the Leiter Reports hiring thread by over 100 jobs. This is not surprising, because whereas all Leiter has to do to collect data is open a comment thread, we had to send emails to the placement director and department chair of every Ph.D.-granting department we could think of, and then send a couple of follow-ups to those who didn’t respond. This was a lot of work, but we think it’s worth it.

This year, we would like more help. Please encourage your placement director and department chair to email a list of people who got TT jobs or postdocs to prophilosophy@gmail.com. Please also go over to the 2013-2014 TT hires page and follow the link to the Google form, filling it out for any TT hires not on there that you are certain of. At the end of the hiring season, the data will be published on the 2013-2014 TT hires page, organized by Ph.D.-granting department, and analyzed again by Prof Jennings.

UNC hires Gillian Russell from WashU-St Louis

Gillian Russell (philosophy of language and logic) has been hired as a full professor by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she will start in July 2015. According to facebook.

The Truth is, Philosophy Rules Your World

The Truth is, Philosophy Rules Your World

NPR takes on Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s new book Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away.

How to Reject a Job Candidate

How to Reject a Job Candidate

The Daily Nous asks for your input, as well as offering some suggestions.

Oslo hires Franco Trivigno from Marquette

According to Leiter Reports, Trivigno does ancient philosophy and ethics.

New Philosophy News Site — DailyNous.com

DailyNous is run by Justin Weinberg (South Carolina). Here’s a description:

Daily Nous is a source for information about the philosophy profession. If you have news you would like to share, send it to dailynouseditor at gmail. The site is maintained by me, Justin Weinberg, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina. If you would like to share information confidentially, please say so in your correspondence and I will not reveal you as a source. I am disinclined to publish information provided anonymously, but if you think you have a good reason for not revealing your identity to me, and your information can be independently confirmed, I may publish it. If you spot an error on the site, please contact me.

Is Alvin Plantinga for Real?

Is Alvin Plantinga for Real?

The argument boils down to the fact that Plantinga, as a Christian, finds the Christian story “magnificent,” that is, aesthetically pleasing, and that’s enough to establish that this is the best of all possible worlds. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t find a world with so much natural and human imposed suffering “magnificent” at all, and it seems to me that if an all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good god were responsible for said world he ought to be resisted at all costs as being by far the greatest villain in the history of the universe. But that’s just me.

 

A Review of Bernard Williams: “Essays and Reviews 1959-2002”

In The Telegraph.

Reading these essays was a wonderful journey back across the years of my own intellectual formation, revisiting the philosophical monuments of our time in the company of their acutest critic. Many of the significant post-war figures are called into the witness box: J L Austin, A J Ayer, John Rawls, Robert Nozick, Thomas Nagel, Richard Rorty, Noam Chomsky, Derek Parfit, B F Skinner and many more, there to be cross-examined with consummate skill. Williams’s aim is not to score points, but to discover what these people are saying, why they are saying it and whether we should be saying it too. For readers without a philosophical training some of the essays will be uphill work. But they are never more difficult than the subject requires, and are written with a lightness of touch and a lack of solemnity that are a joy in themselves.

Interview with Simon Blackburn: The People’s Philosopher

Interview with Simon Blackburn: The People’s Philosopher

He may not like the label ‘populariser’, but he nonetheless talks with some excitement about philosophy getting more popular. When I ask him whether he thinks he and his peers have had any success in bringing this about, he allows himself a little cautious optimism. “Statistically, there’s evidence that it’s working,” he says – but this was not always so. “I remember the first time I ever spoke at a literary festival, there was this huge queue and I thought: ‘Good Lord; there’s so much interest in philosophy from the general public!’ It turns out the huge queue was actually for Norman Mailer who was speaking in the next tent, and the queue for me was rather small”. Suspecting that many in his audience had got lost on the way to Mailer’s talk, he quips that he had to break the news to a modest crowd of disappointed festival-goers that that he had “never slept with Ernest Hemingway or bought ten rounds with Marilyn Monroe”. (He has evidently had some pretty intimate chats with Norman Mailer though).

Petition to the APA for a code of conduct

Written by Eleonore Stump and Helen de Cruz. Available here. Full text:

A Petition to the APA through its Board of Officers

As teachers, mentors and colleagues, we, professional philosophers, take our tasks of teaching, research, and service to the profession very seriously. We want to create a supportive environment where fellow faculty members and students feel safe and where their concerns are heard and addressed.

In light of recent events at more than one university, we the undersigned hereby petition the Board of Officers of the American Philosophical Association to produce, by one means or another, a code of conduct and a statement of professional ethics for the academic discipline of philosophy. We particularly urge past presidents of each division of the APA to sign this petition.

Philosophy Majors are Changing the World of Business

In the Huffington Post.

Despite a growing media interest in the study of philosophy and dramatically increasing enrollment in philosophy programs at some universities, the subject is still frequently dismissed as outmoded and impractical, removed from the everyday world and relegated to the loftiest of ivory towers.

That doesn’t fit with the realities of both the business and tech worlds, where philosophy has proved itself to be not only relevant but often the cornerstone of great innovation. Philosophy and entrepreneurship are a surprisingly good fit. Some of the most successful tech entrepreneurs and innovators come from a philosophy background and put the critical thinking skills they developed to good use launching new digital services to fill needs in various domains of society. Atlantic contributor Edward Tenner even went so far as to call philosophy the “most practical major.”

 

CU-Boulder Professor Placed on Leave

Article in The Chronicle. ProPhilosophy has been told (not by the CU professor) that this has nothing to do with the recent APA site visit.

Philosophical Quarterly Essay Prize

The winner is Mahrad Almotahari (University of Illinois at Chicago) for his essay entitled “The Identity of a Material Thing and its Matter”. The announcement can be found here, and the paper downloaded from here.

Why Study Philosophy?

The Atlantic interviews Rebecca Goldstein (New College of the Humanities).

In your new book, you respond to the criticism that philosophy isn’t progressing the way other fields are. For example: In philosophy, unlike in other areas of study, an ancient historical figure like Plato is just as relevant today.

There’s the claim that the only progress made is in posing problems that scientists can answer. That philosophy never has the means to answer problems—it’s just biding its time till the scientists arrive on the scene. You hear this quite often. There is, among some scientists, a real anti-philosophical bias. The sense that philosophy will eventually disappear. But there’s a lot of philosophical progress, it’s just a progress that’s very hard to see. It’s very hard to see because we see with it. We incorporate philosophical progress into our own way of viewing the world.

The APA is seeking to raise funds for the Committee on the Status of Women

It is International Women’s Day, and the APA is seeking to raise $10,000 to help the committee. You can donate here.

Up and Running

Recent events (and several emails) have convinced the administrators that there is a need for this blog. On Monday we will resume posting news of interest to philosophers, and occasionally excerpts from those news stories. There is never any commentary. Comments are always open.

The SEP has a new look

Check it out: http://plato.stanford.edu

Tenure-track hiring analysis, 2012-2013

The data used for the analysis can be found on this page. In the interest of completeness, some additional data that was reported after the analysis was carried out has been added.

The analysis by Dr Carolyn Dicey Jennings can be found on this spreadsheet.

A post detailing some of the findings, open for comments, can be found at NewAPPS.

Tenure-Track Hires and Postdocs, 2013

Once again ProPhi is collecting data on tenure-track hiring and postdocs for 2012-2013. An email has been sent to placement directors and department chairs. Early responses (17 so far) can be found here. Please help by encouraging your placement director, department chair, or graduate director to email prophilosophy@gmail.com.

When the data has been collected, it will once again be analyzed by Dr Carolyn Dicey Jennings (Antwerp). For last year’s analysis, see this post.

Update: ProPhi now has at least some data for 80 departments. Please look at your department and make sure nothing is missing.

UConn and USC expand their philosophy departments

“The philosophy department at the University of Connecticut at Storrs has added eight new faculty members in the past two years, and it is now about twice as large as it was a few years ago. Meanwhile, the department at the University of Southern California has hired almost a dozen new professors in the last decade.”

At Inside Higher Ed.

On whether it is rational to decide to have a child

Laurie Paul (UNC) has a paper on this topic that has garnered quite a bit of attention–from NPR, Psychology Today, and Crooked Timber.

The paper is part of a special issue of Res Philosophica on transformative experiences. The call for papers for the issue is here. (Thanks to Laurie Paul  for the links.)

South Florida hires Lee Braver from Hiram College

Braver (19th- and 20th-century Continental philosophy, history of philosophy, connections between analytic and continental philosophy) is currently the department chair and an associate professor at Hiram College.

H/T: Leiter Reports

Calgary hires C Kenneth Waters from Minnesota

Waters (philosophy of biology, epistemology) will begin in July of 2014, according to Leiter Reports.

A Comparison of Postgraduate Philosophy Degrees in the UK

At the Guardian. It measures the number of full-time and part-time students, student expenditure, student:staff ratio, completion %, and tuition.

The Eastern APA has a new website

Here. The blog suggests that it’s thanks to Andrew Cullison (SUNY-Fredonia).

UConn hires Mitch Green from Virginia

Green (philosophy of language and mind), is currently the NEH/Horace Goldsmith Distinguished Teaching Professor of Philosophy at the University of Virginia. He will begin at the University of Connecticut in the fall.

H/T: Leiter Reports.

The Unwritten Rules of the Game

40+ comments on the unwritten rules of philosophy over at Feminist Philosophers. Examples include:

• It is not acceptable to change your comments in any nontrivial way after you have given them to the author. If it is unclear whether a change that you’re thinking of making is trivial, count it as nontrivial.
• It’s perfectly normal to base your course on someone else’s syllabus, and doesn’t count as plagiarism.
• It is OK to send your book proposal to multiple publishers, but not OK to send your full manuscript to several publishers (assuming more than one publisher reacted favorably to the proposal).
• Although some journals promise referee reports in as little as 8 weeks, you need to wait at least 4 months, and probably more something like 6 months to send a gentle inquiry to the editor to ask them about a decision on your manuscript.