ProPhilosophy is looking to expand its authorship in order to provide more news, and to provide it in a more timely manner. The authors receive no money and, given their anonymity, no notoriety for contributing–it is solely a service to the profession. If you are interested in contributing to the blog (with, e.g., opinion pieces, questions to stimulate discussions, links to other blogs and articles), please email prophilosophy@gmail.com. Anonymity for contributors will be preserved, but we do ask that you initially email from a university email account. ProPhi welcomes contributors from groups that are underrepresented in philosophy.
I wish you luck, but it doesn’t look like things are going too well over here.
I interpret this message, followed by weeks of nothing new on this blog, as an admission that you are going out of business — that whoever was taking the trouble to keep prophil going has decided to quit. I used to put this blog on my desktop and consult it daily. I am now deleting it.
Thanks for nothing!!
Professor Wood, why don’t you volunteer to be a contributor? My guess is that many grad students and young faculty wouldn’t want to be involved in something like this for fear that it would hurt their career prospects, but that doesn’t apply to you.
Wow. This message seems completely inappropriate. Would you say “Thanks for nothing!!” to a person who had been running a local newspaper for free in her spare time but became busy? Prof. Wood, if you gained from this person’s efforts, you could at least thank her for that.
Thanks for what you’ve done. But if you want to quit, just say so.
Someone who runs a blog usually does so because they have something to say, and intend to go on saying it for a significant period of time. In that respect, your comparison with a newspaper is quite apt. To begin such a thing, I think, is to undertake a commitment. (That is one reason I do not choose to do it.) If you decide to stop, perhaps because you are too busy, you at least owe your readers a statement that you no longer have time to meet this commitment and to tell them up front that you are quitting. Instead, we got no admission that the blog was ending, or that the person running it had decided to stop, but rather an invitation to take over the commitment that this person has (as we are left to guess) decided to abandon. I think it is not inappropriate for someone who did appreciate some of the contributions on this blog to express annoyance at the way the person decided to end it.
Dear Sameanonymous:
I have contributed several comments to this blog. But I have never considered assuming major responsibility for it. I have been checking it in order to see what is there, but I have quite enough to do as it is in my role as IU professor, and even as Stanford emeritus, without also running a blog.
But I do not understand why you think running a blog of this kind would hurt anyone’s career prospects, except perhaps by taking valuable time away from teaching and research, which everyone regards as more important. If that is the argument, then it applies to me too, since I have responsibilities to my students and research commitments too. If running a blog is a worthwhile activity for someone, my hat is off to them. But it is not something I have time to do.
Or is your argument that once someone has tenure, they can afford to fritter away their time running blogs instead of preparing classes and writing papers and books, and that everyone regards these latter activities as more worthwhile? But that is not much of an argument why I (or anyone) should do this; at most it seems to be an argument that a tenured professor can, from the narrow standpoint of self interest, afford to engage in more time-wasting activities than graduate students or non-tenured faculty. And the argument so construed seems to be based on the premise (which I do not necessarily accept) that running a blog is a waste of time. I merely think it is not the best way for ME to spend my time.
I would hope that you can see why such an argument, so construed, might not be very persuasive. I can easily understand, however, why someone who offers such an argument might prefer to remain anonymous. Or if your argument is different from (perhaps more respectable and less absurd than) the ones I have suggested, perhaps you can explain it better.
I am an untenured faculty member, and I’ll tell you why I won’t contribute–I’m scared Brian Leiter would find out.
I am not sure how to respond. On the one hand, I think it is paranoid to believe Brian Leiter would do anything to harm you if he found out you contributed to this blog — Why? Because it competes with his blog? Or because he might disagree with what you say? Or because the only way to be sure Brian Leiter will not destroy your career is to be entirely invisible to him? On the other hand, it is probably true that paranoia is a rational state of mind for an untenured faculty member. So I can’t condemn you either.
Just to be clear, Anon 7:15 isn’t me. I’m the Anonymous from earlier in the thread (Anonymous and sameanonymous).
Prof. Wood, judging from the tone of your 3:54 comment, it looks like I should have been more careful in the way I worded my response to you. I wasn’t trying to make any assumptions about you or your projects or to imply that you should help instead of complaining or anything like that. I wasn’t even offering any kind of argument. I was merely noting that the blog doesn’t have many readers and that the younger people in the profession might have worries similar to those of Anon 7:15. (However, instead of saying that we’re scared, I’d say that us younger folks have more to lose from a flame war with you-know-who than someone who is already established.) These facts make it even more difficult for the blog’s owner to get worthy contributors, and I was merely hoping that you or someone like you would be willing to get involved.
I wouldn’t think of getting into a flame war with Brian Leiter. (Flame wars are not my shtick anyway. I prefer offbeat humor to hostility — unless, that is, I am engaging with Republicans on political subjects, but I tend to avoid their blogs, merely so as not waste my time reading idiocy and also so as not to lose my lunch.)
But I don’t see why commenting on this blog would get me into such a thing, anyway. Why would you suppose that contributing to the blog would get you into such a thing? (Well, Uh — perhaps you had better not answer that, given what you think — without being the least bit *afraid*, you understand — that you might have to *lose* by engaging in controversy with him.)
This blog has had me as a regular reader for some time, and I wish it would continue, but have no desire to be the person who makes sure that it continues. I merely fear, and regret, its apparent passing.
Why does asking for more contributors imply that the current ones are quitting? I just read that as saying they will–or might–continue doing what they’re doing and just want to do more. But yeah, this blog just doesn’t seem to be doing very well.