If memory serves, today is the day that the meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association draws to a close. That meeting, always conveniently scheduled to fall in the interstices between Christmas and New Year’s, and more often than not located in some East Coast city with nasty winter weather (this year, Philadelphia), is traditionally where philosophy departments from U.S. colleges and universities (as well as a few from elsewhere) conduct preliminary job interviews.
Except this year, apparently, a great many job searches have been frozen or canceled, owing to the fact that exploding economic markets have depleted endowments and state budgets and probably baskets of puppies and kitties and bunnies and chicks. There’s some higher-than-average probability that a lot of the people at the Eastern APA this year actually spent most of their time giving and listening to papers. I can’t even guess whether that would be more fun or less fun spending four days in the dance of presenting yourself as the ideal candidate (or, on the search committee side of the dance, of trying to discern from how those you are interviewing present themselves who might in fact be a good fit for your position and a good colleague in your department).
Since I’m not in Philadelphia but in sunny Los Angeles County at the moment, this is mostly idle speculation. However, during one of my infrequent sabbatical visits to my departmental mailbox a couple months ago, I retrieved a letter soliciting my application for a position in a philosophy department not my own.
Category Archives: Philosophy
What I’ve learned so far at the PSA.
This is not an exhaustive account of my experiences at the PSA so far, but rather what’s at the top of my Day-Quil-addled head:
Ask a philosopher why you should vote
… and, if that philosopher is Brian Weatherson, you’ll get a detailed consideration of cost, benefits, and rational strategies like this one:
Voting is a lot like playing an n-player Prisoners Dilemma with the other people who (loosely speaking) share the values that underlie your vote. I’m taking values to be defined loosely enough here that it includes most people who vote the same way you do. You’d prefer that all of you vote to all of you not voting. Given turnout rates in the U.S., that’s pretty much always the difference between winning and losing. But conditional on what the other people will almost certainly do, you’d prefer to not vote than to vote. And so would everyone else.
Of course, our electoral version of the game has more than one turn, which makes a difference to the winning strategy.
It’s a lovely post. I encourage you to print it out and tuck it in your pocket before you head out to the polling place. It will provide you with something worthwhile to read as you stand in line, and it may even be good fodder for conversation with your fellow prisoners there.
Scientific literacy: a comment on Revere’s rant.
Over at Effect Measure, Revere takes issue with a science educator’s hand-wringing over what science students (and scientists) don’t know. In a piece at The Scientist, James Williams (the science educator in question) writes:
Graduates, from a range of science disciplines and from a variety of universities in Britain and around the world, have a poor grasp of the meaning of simple terms and are unable to provide appropriate definitions of key scientific terminology. So how can these hopeful young trainees possibly teach science to children so that they become scientifically literate? How will school-kids learn to distinguish the questions and problems that science can answer from those that science cannot and, more importantly, the difference between science and pseudoscience?
Revere responds:
DonorsChoose Blogger Challenge 2008: fabulous prizes from Seed.
We’re nearly to the halfway mark (in terms of time) on Blogger Challenge 2008 and the mommy bloggers are still leaving us in their dust. We’ve told you about the school kids you could help by donating to our challenges, we’ve offered small incentives (and big incentives).
Today, the news comes from our benevolent overlords at Seed that they’d like to help us coax some donations from you by offering more prizes.
Argumentation: FAIL.
One of the big things philosopher-types like to do with their students is work on extracting arguments from a piece of text and reconstructing them. This can be useful in locating sources of disagreement, whether they be specific premises or inferences.
But some chunks of text that seem like they ought to have arguments that can be extracted and reconstructed end up being … opaque.
For example, this question and answer between Katie Couric and Sarah Palin (transcript by way of Shakesville):
What kind of impact do we really have?
There’s a question I’ve been thinking about intermittently (over the course of several years) that I thought I’d lay out here, on the theory that you all have a track record of sharing smart and insightful things (including related questions of your own) in the comments.
One of the things that potentially makes a human life good (at least, from the point of view of the person living it) is setting aims and directing one’s efforts toward meeting those aims. For many people, these aims run along the lines of making the world a better place for others in some particular way – by reducing suffering, increasing cooperation, building knowledge, etc.
Some people are in situations where they can work towards their goals as part of their day jobs. Other people may find themselves in circumstances where serious work towards their goals can only be conducted on their own time (assuming they can find the discretionary time in which to pursue these goals).
So here’s the question:
Book review: Ethics for the Real World.
Ronald A. Howard and Clinton D. Korver (with Bill Birchard), Ethics for the Real World: Creating a Personal Code to Guide Decisions in Work and Life. Harvard Business Press, 2008.
I fully embrace the idea that ethics should not just be a subject of esoteric inquiry in philosophy departments but rather a central feature of our lives as we live them.
Yet how exactly that’s supposed to happen in a world where lots of people have been able to avoid ethics classes altogether presents a bit of a puzzle. Sure, we are presented with lessons about ethics outside the classroom, by family, friends, novelists and news commentators. But does a pile of maxims and sound-bites give us a coherent sense of ethics? Does it give us enough internal guidance to live lives we can be happy about?
Seeing is believing.
Blogging has been a bit light lately, in part because I was persuaded to teach half of a graduate seminar during the summer session. The first half of the seminar looked at philosophical approaches to epistemology (basically, a set of issues around what counts as knowledge and what could count as reasonable ways to build knowledge). The second half, which I am teaching, shifts the focus to what scientists seem to be doing when they build knowledge (or knowledge claims, or theories, or tentative findings).
In the course of our reading for this week, I came upon a couple passages in a chapter by Karin Knorr Cetina [1] that I found really striking:
Why philosophy of chemistry?
Over at Philosopher’s Playground, Steve Gimbel asks why the philosophy of chemistry is such a recent discipline given how long there has been serious activity in the philosophy of biology and the philosophy of physics.
He floats a few possible answers — as it happens, the same options those of us who actually do philosophy of chemistry encounter fairly regularly. After responding briefly to these possible reasons for thinking that there shouldn’t be a distinct philosophy of chemistry, I’ll offer a brief sketch of what a philosophy of chemistry might be about.