Issues in the profession
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Some skepticism about AI enthusiasm among philosophers
MOVING TO FRONT FROM AUG. 24–A LIVELY AND INTERESTING DISCUSSION IN THE COMMENT THREAD (ADDITIONAL CONTRIBUTIONS WELCOME) Philosopher Dan Kaufman writes: Over the last year, philosophy social media has discussed a number of academic philosophers who are actively embracing AI in their research. Perusing these posts — and the comments that follow — reveals a…
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Anonymous person falsely accuses junior scholar of using generative AI in writing an article in the online, open access journal “Political Philosophy”
The journal responds, appropriately, here. Folks should be a lot more cautious before throwing these accusations around!
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Graduate admissions in the age of AI, redux
Last January, we had a thread about how to protect the integrity of philosophy graduate admissions given the possibility that applicants might be using LLMs to generate some or all of their writing samples. I thought it would be useful to have a follow-up thread to see what worked and what didn’t. For those new…
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The latest in scams targeting academics: Amy Bloom, the “art curator” in Monaco
The saga continues: philosopher Warren Goldfarb (emeritus, Harvard) shared the email below with me, suspecting it too was a scam: From: Amy Bloom <amybloom1254@gmail.com> Subject: Reflections on Logic, Philosophy, and Cultural Narratives Date: March 13, 2026 at 4:29:11 PM EDT To: [omitted] Dear Professor Goldfarb, I’m Amy, an art curator from Monaco. I work with collectors…
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Journal of Medical Ethics retracts article with fake AI-generated references
JME retraction notice is here: https://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2026/07/07/jme-2025-111085ret. And here is the Bioethics article that exposed the fraud: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bioe.70099. Johann Go, who flagged this for me, observes that, “The author submitted using a French Yahoo email address, and claimed to be affiliated with the French anti-doping agency (though apparently no evidence could be found on their website…
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Should you agree to let your books be used for LLM training?
Philosopher Daniel Wodak writes: I was wondering if you had any advice on the following issue, which might be a good topic for your blog. CUP asked me to sign an addendum authorizing them to in effect use the text of my Element in training LLMs, with the promise that I’d get 20% of unspecified…
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More on the difficult choices facing faculty at Exeter
A propos this, philosopher John Dupre writes with an update: The redundancy project is continuing at Exeter, with at least a heartening level of resistance from staff and the staff union. There is some hope that they will succeed: a lot about the process seems entirely unjustified and of debatable legality. Please everyone consider signing…
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New APA Job Market Mentoring Program accepting applications
Philosopher Amy Berg, Chair of the relevant APA Committee, kindly calls to my attention this new program (more details here), which should be helpful to philosophy job seekers this coming year. Kudos to Professor Berg and the APA for this initiative.
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An open letter calling for disclosures of conflicts of interest in publications by philosophers
I was pleased to be asked to sign this well-done letter by philosophers of science Craig Callender (UC San Diego) and Cailin O’Connor (UC Irvine), which is now public and taking signatures from any interested philosophers. From the letter: In recent years, philosophical writing on areas such as climate change, technology, misinformation, and artificial intelligence…
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An interview with philosopher Rebecca Tuvel at CHE
Here, almost a decade on from the defamatory harassment of her orchestrated by the “usual suspects” in academic philosophy (Alcoff, Trott, Winnubst, et al. [see] . We first wrote about this misconduct here, and quite a bit thereafter. An amusing bit from the interview: Goldstein: Two hallmarks of the Hypatia crisis strike me as relevant…
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UK higher education watch: Exeter threatening to cut 150 academic staff
So reports the BBC. I reached out to the well-known philosopher of science and biology, John Dupre, at Exter, who tells me he has received a possible redundancy notice, although he is already 80% retired. He adds: I expect I’ll go quietly to relieve the pressure slightly on people who need their jobs. I’m certainly…
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Philosophy at Dundee slated for elimination
There’s a petition in support of the program here. (Thanks to Don Sudduth for the pointer.)
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Philosopher Daniel Greco is training AI systems to replace him
He explains at CHE. An excerpt: [O]ne of my main takeaways from gig work [for AI companies] over the last few months is just how hard it is to catch the most sophisticated frontier LLMs in philosophical blunders. When ChatGPT first emerged, a common pastime among my philosopher friends was posting screenshots on social media of its…
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The “Boghossian Report” on the state of scholarship in the humanities and humanistic social sciences (UPDATED)
The full report is here, and there is a collection of choice excerpts here. Readers of Professor Boghossian’s Fear of Knowledge* will recognize themes from that book in the report. (Of course, it has to be open to scholars to defend relativism and constructivism, especially since relativism and constructivism in some domains are probably true!)…
These seem like sensible, measured comments. But I do have a question about (1). You ask: “Is the value of…