Philosophy in the News
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More criticisms of the “Boghossian Report” on the state of the humanities
This time from philosopher Richard Moran (Harvard), who makes some interesting points. Those following the debates about the report should read this.
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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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Why AI companies are hiring philosophers
Amusing piece in The Economist. It would be nice if we had some actual figures on the number of philosophers being hired. Luciano Floridi “describes the scale of departures from philosophy departments as a ‘haemorrhaging,’” which is obviously nonsense: there are still far more philosophy PhDs than there are jobs, even if a handful are…
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First there was the “Boghossian Report,” now there is the “Spode Report”
And it doesn’t mince words. In this case, the task was assigned to EJ Spode, “who assembled the following crack team of elite scholars to work as a totally independent group to address the issues raised in the charge: Somerset Maugham, Edmund Burke Junior, Joseph de Maistre, and Thomas Carlyle. Fortuitously, at the time the…
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Major ERC Grant to philosopher Alyssa Ney (LMU-Munich) for a project on…
…“The Nature of Quantum Reality.”
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The demand for “philosophy of AI” in job ads is as huge as you thought it was
Based on this analysis by philosopher Charles Lassiter, more than 20% of job ads now mention AI. This is going to result in a lot of weak appointments, given how few philosophers really have expertise in this area.
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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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Boghossian Report, Appiah, and relativism, redux (UPDATED with reply by Boghossian, and responses from Leiter and Stanley)
A CHE editor asked me to redo this post as a “letter to the editor” which they have published here, and which I reprint below: To the Editor: In the interview with four authors of the “Report on the State of the Humanities and Humanistic Social Science” (hereafter “the Report”), New York University philosopher Paul…
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APA announces Spring prizes…
….including the Dewey Lecturers (Kittay, Sober), Rescher Prize (K. Fine), Romanell Lecture (Ismael), Sanders Lecture (G. Rosen), and Sosa Prize (Kornblith), among others.
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Don’t mess with philosophy professors!
“Car thief dies after philosophy professor puts him in headlock“
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Apparently Anthony Appiah has not read Carnap (or Thomas Nagel’s “The Last Word”)
Two editors at CHE have interviewed four of the authors of the “Boghossian Report” (including the NYU philosophers Paul Boghossian and Anthony Appiah). Professor Boghossian says in the interview, “We say how we are taking the term ‘relativism’ to mean the very narrow view that epistemic values are always relative to nonepistemic values, to moral…
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The Lukács archive and research center re-opens in Budapest…
…now that the authoritarian Orban is gone. (My own view is that no one did more philosophical damage to Marxism in the 20th-century than Lukács, but there should obviously be a Lukács archive in the city that was his home for so long.) (Thanks to J.P. Loo 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!)…
I first met Tom around 2002. I was a graduate student in Philosophy at UVA and dating someone who was…