Top News, Articles, and Interviews in Philosophy

Coming in 2020: Gallery of Art and Philosophy

20. November 2019 Philosophy News News
New Philosopher, a popular philosophy magazine based in Australia, is in the process of creating a new art space “devoted to the representation of philosophical ideas.” The magazine acquired a former Victorian Gothic church that housed an existing art gallery in Hobart, the capital city of Tasmania, Australia, and will be converting it into the Gallery of Art and Philosophy (GAAP). The gallery will be accepting submissions from artists “whose works fulfil the philosophical requirements of GAAP, which include such aspects as the study of reality, existence, and the search for wisdom,” according to New Philosopher. It will also display art by the artists featured in New Philosopher and its sister magazine, Womankind. GAAP will open sometime in 2020. More information here. The post Coming in 2020: Gallery of Art and Philosophy appeared first on Daily [More]
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2504/1119C - Lecturer in Mathematical Philosophy

20. November 2019 Philosophy News News
Job List:  Asia/Africa/Australasia Name of institution:  The University of Sydney Town:  Sydney Country:  Australia Job Description:  Lecturer in Mathematical Philosophy School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Reference no. 2504/1119C • Work alongside internationally renowned experts in the field • Located at Camperdown Campus • Full-time, continuing position, remuneration package $125,848 – 149,441p.a which includes leave loading and up to 17% superannuation About the [More]
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Jean-Baptiste Du Bos

19. November 2019 Philosophy News News
[New Entry by James O. Young and Margaret Cameron on November 19, 2019.] Jean-Baptiste Du Bos (b. 1670, d. 1742) was a French antiquarian, historian, diplomat, polymath, and aesthetician. He participated in the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, wrote on numismatics, delved into a variety of historical questions, and had an enduring love of the fine arts. Today he is primarily known as the author of Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting (1719) and as one of the founders of modern aesthetics. Deeply influenced by [More]
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Structuralism in the Philosophy of Mathematics

19. November 2019 Philosophy News News
Just to note the arrival at the Stanford Encyclopedia of a new entry ‘Structuralism in the Philosophy of Mathematics’ by Erich Reck and Georg Schiemer. Two features of this entry are potentially particularly useful. First, there is an attempt to provide … Continue reading → The post Structuralism in the Philosophy of Mathematics appeared first on Logic [More]
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The Case Against Righteous Anger

19. November 2019 Philosophy News News
There is a lot of anger in the world right now. You hear it people’s voices; you feel it in the air. Turn on a TV and what will you see? Journalists snapping questions at politicians; politicians snapping back with indignation. Dip your toe into social media and what will you read? People seething and roiling in rage. Anyone who disagrees with them is a ‘fucking idiot’, ‘garbage’, ‘worthless’. The time for quiet reflection and dialogue is over. We are at war. Anger is our fuel.As someone raised to view anger as a bad thing, but who falls prey to it all the time, I find this to be unwelcome development. There are, however, some who believe that anger is a good thing. There are moral philosophers, for example, argue that anger is an essential foundation for our moral beliefs and practices — that it is an appropriate response to injustice. Amia Srinivasan, for instance, has argued that even if anger can be counterproductive it is, for victims of injustice, often ‘apt’ and we need to factor that into our understanding of injustice. Similarly, the philosopher Sally Haslanger has said that being angry is important because it helps her to care about certain political issues. Indeed, she cites the need for some anger as one reason why she quit doing certain Eastern meditative practices such as yoga:Eventually I quit doing yoga because I found it left me too cut off from the world, especially from the political engagement that I cared so much about. I didn't want to be serene. I [More]
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Understanding Perspectivism: Scientific Challenges and Methodological Prospects

19. November 2019 Philosophy News News
2019.11.11 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews Michela Massimi and Casey D. McCoy (eds.), Understanding Perspectivism: Scientific Challenges and Methodological Prospects, Routledge, 2019, 200pp., $140.00 (hbk), ISBN 9781138503069. Reviewed by Lucas J. Matthews, Columbia University/The Hastings Center At this point it's entirely uncontroversial that science comprises a variety of different approaches, methods, models, explanations, technologies, and perspectives. I might go so far as to say that most science is pluralistic, through and through. Complex phenomena abound in the universe, so it shouldn't be a surprise that scientific perspectives abound too. Perhaps just slightly more controversial, however, is the case when there are many different scientific perspectives on the same phenomenon. The human brain, for example, is modeled and investigated with a troop of different approaches from numerous scientific disciplines from computational neuroscience to neurobiology, and plenty in between. Given that the brain is -- arguably -- one of the most complex systems in the universe, spanning many levels of analysis,... Read [More]
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Velleman from NYU to Johns Hopkins (updated)

18. November 2019 Philosophy News News
J. David Velleman, currently professor of philosophy at New York University, has accepted an offer from the Department of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University (JHU).  Professor Velleman will hold the Miller Research Professorship in Philosophy at JHU. He is known for his work in moral philosophy. Links to many of his papers and books can be found here. The Miller Professorship is named for William H. “Bill” Miller III, who last year donated $75 million to the JHU Department of Philosophy. Professor Velleman takes up his new position January 1st, 2020. (See updated, below.) (via Steven Gross) UPDATE: Professor Velleman wrote in with a clarification: “I am retiring from NYU at the end of this academic year, and Hopkins is appointing me as a Research Professor, which is not a regular faculty position…  I am retiring and in retirement I will be a Research Professor at Hopkins.”   The post Velleman from NYU to Johns Hopkins (updated) appeared first on Daily [More]
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The Inefficiencies of Traditional Academic Writing

18. November 2019 Philosophy News News
Most of the words in an average, considered-well-written paper are in some sense superfluous: for the right audience, you can usually boil it down to a few statements. That’s David Bourget, associate professor in philosophy, director of the Centre for Digital Philosophy at Western University, and one of the founders of PhilPapers and its related enterprises. Professor Bourget was recently interviewed by Eric Piper at Wiley Humanities about his career combining philosophy and computing. In a discussion of the potential of the PhilPapers Philosophical Survey (“PhilSurvey”) and similar projects, he notes philosophers’ ignorance about the prevalence of various philosophical views: [T]he mere publication of the data collected by PhilSurvey (without any fancy analysis) will by itself help move debates forward and improve the quality of communications. Right now philosophers are largely in the dark regarding where others stand on philosophical questions. This is something that Dave [Chalemers] and I showed with a pilot survey and an accompanying “meta-survey”, in which we asked respondents to guess the results of the main survey. We found that on average professional philosophers are off by 15% on philosophical claims. For a view that boils down to an answer to a yes/no question this could mean, for example, that the community on average believes the distribution of views is 50/50 when in fact it’s 35/65.  For many issues the discrepancy between the [More]
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