Mini-Heap

New links… To say that something is indescribable is to describe it. What should we think about this “paradox of ineffability”? — best to dissolve it, argues Peter van Elswyk “Moving through time also means moving through space” — this makes time travel “a very bad idea”, explains Douglas Giles (via the Browser) Two new sermons by St Augustine discovered — about the Old Testament story of the Witch of Endor and its implications “The highbrow has its defenders (snobs) and the lowbrow its defenders (hipsters), but it is not easy to find defenders of the middlebrow” — Until now. Aaron Meskin & Jonathan Weinberg explain and defend the possibility of good middlebrow art “I’m certainly as prone as the next academic to bemoaning the trials and tribulations of contemporary university life—but when I [compare it to my] pre-academic world of work and education… my good fortune smacks me in the face” — Nigel Pleasants on his path into academic philosophy “It would be the largest protected class in society. Even if it existed, would it be a class that people wanted to join?” — Joshua Rothman on lookism and the epistemic injustices faced by those deemed ugly “Our students [have] compelling and deeply felt moral objections to using generative AI in their university work. We think educators should respect this” — Carla Fehr & Jenny Saul think we should stop assuming all students are tempted by the technology Mini-Heap posts usually appear when several new items accumulate in the Heap of Links, a collection of items from around the web that may be of interest to philosophers. The Heap of Links consists partly of suggestions from readers; if you find something online that you think would be of interest to the philosophical community, please send it in for consideration for the Heap. Thank you.Previous edition. The post Mini-Heap first appeared on Daily Nous.

dailynous.com

Kershnar Case Moving to Trial Phase

In 2022, Stephen Kershnar, distinguished teaching professor of philosophy at SUNY Fredonia, was told by his university president, Stephen H. Kolison, Jr., that he was no longer allowed to be on campus or have any contact with anyone on campus except a few administrators and university police. Why? It seems to have been the initially knee-jerk reaction of a university president, apparently unconcerned with academic freedom and freedom of speech, to a viral social media post from a conservative activist account that included selectively edited podcast footage in which Professor Kershnar is discussing the the strengths and weaknesses of different arguments concerning the ethics of sexual relations between adults and children. The details are recounted here. Despite his clear violations of Kershnar’s academic freedom and freedom of speech, Kolison has dug in over the past four years, not budging from his insistence that Kershnar be exiled from the university. Ultimately, Kolison shut down the entire philosophy program at Fredonia. Meanwhile, Kershnar’s lawsuit against Kolison and others at the university has been making its way through the legal system, and just last week included a motion requesting a jury trial. It will be entering its trial phase soon. The lawsuit, reprinted below, recounts in detail how Kolison and others mistreated Kershnar, and is worth looking at.  The post Kershnar Case Moving to Trial Phase first appeared on Daily Nous.

dailynous.com

International Students & Conservative Students: How Are They Doing In Academic Philosophy? (guest post)

“Conservative and international students face different challenges: one feels forced to self-censor while the other reports fewer job opportunities. No significant impact on employment is found for either but conservative respondents report higher rates of satisfaction in philosophy.” That’s a brief summary of findings about conservative graduate students and international graduate students currently or recently enrolled in philosophy PhD programs, based on data collected by Academic Philosophy Data and Analysis (APDA) in its 2025 survey. In the following guest post, APDA founder and co-director Carolyn Dicey Jennings shares the details. [A version of this post also appears at the APDA blog.] International Students & Conservative Students: How Are They Doing In Academic Philosophy? by Carolyn Dicey Jennings In this, the final summer post on the 2025 survey, we highlight two populations of survey participants: those who are or were international students and those with conservative political leanings. (See previous posts here.) We chose these populations for a straightforward reason: both groups show signs of underrepresentation while also seeming to report higher satisfaction in prior surveys. That is, according to an analysis of the 2023 survey results, international students were less likely than local students to find permanent academic employment, while according to an analysis of the 2021 survey results, conservative students are underrepresented in philosophy PhD programs relative to both the U.S. population and doctoral recipients. Yet, in past surveys we have noted that both of these groups appear to report higher satisfaction than local or non-conservative participants (not tested for statistical significance). We thus wanted to better understand the experiences of both populations and the challenges they face in the discipline. To explore this we added two text-based questions to the 2025 survey with a parallel structure. These questions appeared on the final, demographic page of the survey for a subset of participants. The first followed a question on international status: “Are you or were you an international student during your PhD studies?” If the participant answered “yes” (n=383) then they were provided a follow-up prompt: “Please describe the impact of your status as an international student on your academic career (i.e. as a student and in employment or the search for employment, if relevant).” The second followed a question on.. The post International Students & Conservative Students: How Are They Doing In Academic Philosophy? (guest post) first appeared on Daily Nous.

dailynous.com

New: Journal of Mathematical Philosophy

The Journal of Mathematical Philosophy is a new open-access journal. According to an announcement from its editors, the journal is “the first open access journal that is devoted to mathematical philosophy.” It is now open to submissions in subject areas such as as formal epistemology, philosophical logic, philosophy of science, decision theory, philosophy of mathematics, formal metaphysics, philosophy of language, formal ethics, and philosophy of AI. Published by LMU Munich, the Journal of Mathematical Philosophy is a “diamond” open-access journal, meaning that there are no author fees nor reader fees. The journal will make use of double-anonymous reviewing. The journal is led by co-editors-in-chief Jürgen Landes and Lennart Ackermans, both of LMU Munich. The inaugural associate editors are Francesca Zaffora Blando, Thomas Boyer-Kassem, Justin Bruner, Lorenzo Casini, Gustavo Cevolani, Kenny Easwaran, Ben Eva, Branden Fitelson, Sam Fletcher, Alexander Gebharter, Conrad Heilmann, Bennet Holman, Ekaterina Kubyshkina, Stephan Leuenberger, Conor Mayo-Wilson, Mattia Petrolo, Giuseppe Primero, Saeed Salehi, Jonah Schupbach, Dunja Šešelja, Ted Shear, Eric Snyder, Reuben Stern, Rush Stewart, Christian Strasser, David Teira, Brout Trpin, Olav Vassend, and Sylvia Wenmakers. The inaugural advisory board consists of Michael Glanzberg, Stephan Hartmann, Jan-Willem Romeijn, Jacob Stegenga, and Edward Zalta. You can learn more about the journal at its website. The post New: Journal of Mathematical Philosophy first appeared on Daily Nous.

dailynous.com

David Berman (1942-2026)

David Berman, Fellow Emeritus of Trinity College Dublin, has died. Professor Berman was known for his work on the philosophy of George Berkeley, Irish philosophy, and philosophy of religion. He is the author of A History of Atheism in Britain: From Hobbes to Russell (1988), George Berkeley: Idealism and the Man (1994), Berkeley (1997), Berkeley and Irish Philosophy (2005), Consciousness from Descartes to Ayer (2021), and Whately’s Historic Doubts about Napoleon’s Existence and the Preliminary Question (2025), among other works. You can learn more about his writing here. Berman starting teaching at Trinity College Dublin in 1968 while earning his PhD in philosophy there. He earned an MA in philosophy from the University of Colorado at Denver, and his BA at the New School for Social Research. He was originally from Brooklyn. He died on July 28th. The TCD Department of Philosophy has posted its own memorial notice here. The post David Berman (1942-2026) first appeared on Daily Nous.

dailynous.com

Mini Heap

Items of interest elsewhere… “Du Bois is read as the Black Hegel, and Fanon as a Black Sartre… [but] turning non-Western thinkers into tame versions of ourselves is a kind of intellectual colonialism that we need to get beyond” — Takeshi Morisato on the risks of comparative philosophy “The very same bits of nature can lead to the best life and its greatest corruption” — Eric Schliesser discusses Socrates, Smith, inquiry, and equality in one of a series of posts about Agnes Callard’s “Open Socrates” “When there was some… topic that seemed intriguing, it was dismissed with condescending authority by the question, ‘Yes, but is it philosophy?’ It took me years to see the bullying in such questions” — Eleonore Stump’s 2023 Dewey Lecture Recent work in the epistemology of inquiry — a useful survey by Pablo Hubacher Haerle “The goal would be to make available, to students of all ages everywhere, a truly comprehensive record of documented human civilizations and ideas in all their variety” — a benefit of AI humanists should appreciate is the access it gives us to the past, argues Bob Pasnau “Einstein echoes Wittgenstein, who emphasised in his later work that his aim was to provide ‘the understanding that consists in seeing connections’ – literally, a new way of looking” — Ray Monk on the scientific and philosophical ideas of Einstein The philosophy of waiting in line — conceptual and normative work on queuing from Johann Go Mini-Heap posts usually appear when several new items accumulate in the Heap of Links, a collection of items from around the web that may be of interest to philosophers. The Heap of Links consists partly of suggestions from readers; if you find something online that you think would be of interest to the philosophical community, please send it in for consideration for the Heap. Thank you.Previous edition. The post Mini Heap first appeared on Daily Nous.

dailynous.com

How to Flirt at a Conference: a Harm Reduction Post (guest post)

A year ago today, I put up a guest post by a philosophy professor writing under the pseudonym “Alex Rails”. Rails’ post was about the ethics of sexual relationships among people in academic philosophy, couched in terms of advice for how people could virtuously navigate this tricky terrain, or, as they put it, how to be “a strong player.” It was a controversial but widely discussed entry in a series of guest posts last summer. Some people really appreciated it. Some absolutely hated it. It generated some offense, some reflection, and some amusing social media commentary. Rails recently got in touch with me again about a follow-up post on flirting at conferences. The problem it takes up is this: If the optimal amount of flirting at a conference is not zero, but flirting at a conference is morally risky (with possible hazards for the flirter, the flirtee, and third parties), how should flirting at conferences happen? Their post is below. As I said with Rails’ last post, discussion is welcome, but, given the subject matter, I ask you to exercise a bit of care with your comments. The comments section is not the place to out named individuals, either for flirting well or badly, or to otherwise remark on specific people’s personal relationships. Note that if you wish to comment using a pseudonym but you’ve commented here previously under your real name, be sure to enter both a new name and a new email address when you comment, so your identity is not inadvertently revealed (email addresses are not made public but are recorded by the commenting system). If you want to reach out to Rails personally, you can do so by email to alexrails313@proton.me. How to Flirt at a Conference: a Harm Reduction Post by “Alex Rails” There are so many sweet philosopher couples, some of whom even work in the same department or write papers together. My last post here drew some outraged comments because I talked about being a philosopher who likes to seduce other philosophers. If flirting in a professional setting is not done, as some of the comments suggested, where do all these sweet couples come from? Did they all meet outside of work? Not every fling becomes a relationship,.. The post How to Flirt at a Conference: a Harm Reduction Post (guest post) first appeared on Daily Nous.

dailynous.com

Graduate Admissions in the AI Era

Are applicants to your graduate program using AI to create their admissions materials? Do you know? How? And what, if anything, should your department do about it? The topic is suggested to me by Alex Guerrero (Rutgers), who, commenting on a social media post by L.A. Paul, writes: “What are people doing about AI and grad admissions? Writing samples, personal statements. Other fields use interviews; are any philosophy departments considering those as a check on AI assistance?” Does your department (or college or university) have a policy or set of practices about this? Do you have thoughts about what such policies or practices should be? Discussion welcome. See also: “Does Your Department Have an AI Policy? Here’s Edinburgh’s“ The post Graduate Admissions in the AI Era first appeared on Daily Nous.

dailynous.com

Does Your Department Have an AI Policy? Here’s Edinburgh’s

[Originally published on May 27, 2026. Reposted by request.] Has your department instituted an AI policy? If so, whom does it govern, and what does it say? What should such a policy say? Has your department considered an AI policy but held off on writing or implementing it? If so, what issues, disputes, or questions have contributed to the delay? Does your department even have the institutional authority to have such a policy? Would it be better to not have a policy? These and other questions are prompted today by word that the Department of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh recently adopted a policy for the use of AI by students in philosophy courses. It’s the default policy, which means it can be superseded by policies developed by individual instructors for their courses or approved disability accommodations. Here it is: Policy on the use of AI in Philosophy Courses Summary: Edinburgh philosophy is human made! The use of AI is prohibited when completing assessed work in philosophy. Definition: AI includes but is not limited to Generative AI systems capable of producing essays, summaries, explanations, or arguments AI systems that use Large Language Models (LLM) Automated paraphrasing or rewriting tools AI systems that generate images, audio, or video AI systems that answer questions or provide explanations in natural language This definition includes all models of ChatGPT, all models of Gemini, all models of Claude, similar tools such as Midjourney, Microsoft Co-Pilot, and Grammarly, as well as all tools hosted on the ELM platform of the University of Edinburgh. Note: Standard spell-checking software (e.g. in Microsoft Word), citation management software, and grammar checkers that conform to the university’s Proofreading Policy are excluded from the definition of AI. Statement of policy: Philosophy courses aim to foster careful original thought, improve persuasive academic writing skills, and enhance students’ abilities to understand complex topics. Using generative AI tools to produce assessed work is almost always detrimental to this aim, which is why the use of AI is prohibited in writing, revising, and editing of academic work that is submitted for assessment in Philosophy. This includes undergraduate and postgraduate essays, undergraduate and postgraduate dissertations, take-home exams, or any other form of assessment. Violations of the.. The post Does Your Department Have an AI Policy? Here’s Edinburgh’s first appeared on Daily Nous.

dailynous.com

AI & Philosophy Readings for Undergraduate Courses

Artificial intelligence is relevant to so many philosophical subfields, and its increased presence in our lives makes it a ripe topic to cover in philosophy courses. Philosophical writing on AI is at that stage where there has been an explosion of it, yet not enough time for the kind of assessment and filtering of it that could result in the establishment of a canon (or subdisciplinary canons). So I thought it would be useful to solicit your suggestions about good readings, focusing on works it might be reasonable to assign undergraduates. The readings need not be academic works. It may be that some pieces published in popular media are especially pedagogically valuable. Nor must the pieces be written by philosophers to be appropriate for philosophy courses. In sharing your suggestion, please provide the title and author, and let us know what kind of course you think the reading would be appropriate for (e.g., “contemporary moral problems,” or “for a unit on mind in an intro course”). If you have a link to the piece handy, please include it. Thanks! (And yes, I acknowledge there is an irony in soliciting readings about a technology that tempts students to not do the reading.) The post AI & Philosophy Readings for Undergraduate Courses first appeared on Daily Nous.

dailynous.com

Online Philosophy Resources Monthly Update

Here’s (usually weekly, but during the summer, monthly) report on new and revised entries at online philosophy resources, new reviews of philosophy books, and new podcast episodes. (If we’ve missed anything, please let us know.) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy New: Model Organisms by Michael Dietrich and Nedah Nemati. Innateness and Contemporary Theories of Cognition by Mark Cain. Feminist Perspectives on Sex Markets by Lori Watson. Philosophy of Psychotherapy by Megan Delehanty and Anya Plutynski. Wisdom in Contemporary Analytic Philosophy by Shane Ryan and Sharon Ryan. Innateness and Language by Gabe Dupre. Revised: Susan Stebbing by Michael Beaney and Siobhan Chapman. Origen by Mark J. Edwards. Aesthetics and Cognitive Science by Jon Robson and Gregory Currie. Boundary by Achille Varzi. Intergenerational Justice by Lukas Meyer. Bolzano’s Logic by Paul Rusnock and Jan Šebestík. Scottish Philosophy in the 18th Century by Alexander Broadie and Craig Smith. Jean-Paul Sartre by Jack Reynolds and Pierre-Jean Renaudie. Philosophy of Technology by Maarten Franssen, Ibo van de Poel, Michael Klenk, and Filippo Santoni de Sio. The Definition of Death by Adam Omelianchuk and David DeGrazia. The Kyoto School by Bret W. Davis. Rudolf Carnap by Hannes Leitgeb and André Carus. Optimality-Theoretic and Game-Theoretic Approaches to Implicature by Robert van Rooij and Michael Franke. Supervenience in Ethics by Tristram McPherson. 18th Century German Philosophy Prior to Kant by Corey Dyck and Brigitte Sassen. Cosmological Argument by Bruce Reichenbach. Defaults in Semantics and Pragmatics by Katarzyna M. Jaszczolt. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy Nietzsche: Philosophical Psychology by Brian Lightbody. Leibniz: Law and Justice by Joshua Horn. Philosophy of Mathematical Practice by Jessica Carter. The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Argument and the Bell Inequalities by László E. Szabó. 1000-Word Philosophy Vegetarianism and Veganism: The Ethics of Eating Animals by Zach Ferguson. BJPS Short Reads ∅ Philosophy Podcasts and Other Media Philosophy Podcast Hub (via Jason Chen) Recently Published Open Access Philosophy Books The Philosophy of Julia Wedgwood: Imperfect Antithesis by Alison Stone (Open Book Publishers, 2026). Book Symposia (Open Access) The Space Between by Heidi Maibom at Journal of Philosophy of Emotion Book Reviews* Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality by Danielle Allen is reviewed by Jeffrey C. Isaac at Los Angeles Review of Books. Kantian Dignity and Its.. The post Online Philosophy Resources Monthly Update first appeared on Daily Nous.

dailynous.com

If You Think You’re Refereeing an AI-Written Submission, What Should You Do?

You’re refereeing a paper and you come to suspect it was substantially and/or illicily written by an LLM. What should you do? My suggestion: Keep in mind the possibility that you are mistaken as well as the possibility that the AI use falls within the journal’s rules and was disclosed during the submission process. Pause your work refereeing the piece, as your suspicions of illicit AI use may unduly negatively influence your assessment of the submission. Gather a few examples of passages that strike you as AI-written, briefly explaining why. (Do not feed the manuscript into an AI-detector, for two reasons: first, doing so may violate the norms of confidentiality referees are expected to abide by, and second, such detectors appear to currently be of questionable accuracy.) Write to the journal’s editor or managing editor expressing your concerns and sharing the evidence you’ve gathered. With luck, the editor will look into the matter and either agree with you and relieve you of refereeing the piece, or the editor will convince you that you are mistaken and you can proceed to finish refereeing the paper. But what if you aren’t so lucky? One associate professor of philosophy wrote in with the following: I recently accepted a referee invitation for a good generalist journal. I was completely convinced after about 20 minutes with the submission that it was mostly (if not entirely) written using AI tools of some sort. The paper was in my areas of research. The editor disagreed (or at least did not share my level of confidence), and so I was left with the awkward task of writing (brief) comments for the “author” to go along with my rejection. For obvious reasons, this seemed to me to be an obvious waste of everyone’s time. Nothing like this has happened to me before, and I referee fairly regularly. The professor is curious about the frequency with which reviewers are finding themselves in disagreement with journal editors and/or other reviewers on particular cases. Has this happened to you? What did you end up doing? How should referees and editors navigate disagreement on this? The post If You Think You’re Refereeing an AI-Written Submission, What Should You Do? first appeared on Daily Nous.

dailynous.com

University of Wyoming to Drop Philosophy Major

As for Fall 2027, incoming students at the University of Wyoming will no longer be allowed to major in philosophy. The news was shared by philosophy professor Bradley Rettler in posts on social media. He says that students will be able to major in “philosophy and religion” but not “philosophy” nor “religious studies”. Rettler points out just how unusual this is: Wyoming will become the first state in the US where you cannot receive a B.A. in Philosophy. The University of Wyoming will be the only R1 institution, the only state flagship university, and one of two land-grant universities that do not offer a B.A. in Philosophy. It is unclear what the justification for this decision is. The university administration has led the institution to a situation in which it is facing a $15 million budget shortfall. Yet philosophy faculty at Wyoming are already part of a joint Philosophy and Religious Studies department. It is unclear how much additional revenue could be saved, if any, by depriving students of the opportunity to major in philosophy. It is not known at this time whether the program cut is a prelude to layoffs of philosophy faculty at Wyoming. The post University of Wyoming to Drop Philosophy Major first appeared on Daily Nous.

dailynous.com

Thomas E. Hill, Jr. (1937-2026)

Thomas E. Hill, Jr., professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, has died. Professor Hill was well-known for his work in ethics, the history of ethics, and political philosophy, and especially for his scholarship on Kantian moral and political philosophy. He is the author of Beyond Duty: Kantian Ideals of Respect, Beneficence, and Appreciation (2022), Virtue, Rules, and Justice: Kantian Aspirations (2012), Human Welfare and Moral Worth: Kantian Perspectives (2002), Respect, Pluralism and Justice: Kantian Perspectives (2000), Dignity and Practical Reason in Kant’s Moral Theory (1992), and Autonomy and Self-Respect (1991), among other works. You can learn more about his writings here and here. Professor Hill joined the Department of Philosophy at UNC Chapel Hill in 1984. From 1968 to 1984 he taught at the University of California, Los Angeles. Prior to that, he held positions at Pomona College and Johns Hopkins University. He died this week. The post Thomas E. Hill, Jr. (1937-2026) first appeared on Daily Nous.

dailynous.com

Mini-Heap

New links… “It may well be that the models were loose for about a week before OpenAI realized that they were the ones attacking” — an autonomous AI’s recent escape from its sandbox to hack another site shows the need for better AI guardrails “Every month, we’ll read a work of classic fashion philosophy and talk about how it applies to what we wear today” — Derek Guy, a popular, witty, and knowledgeable menswear writer, has started a philosophy podcast with radio producer Avery Trufelman “They made an exact replica of my wife…” — “Exact Replica”, by Joshua Seigal, poet and former philosophy student “A company named Word Unscrambler… recently released the list of the most searched word definitions by state“ — one state had “philosophy” as its most-searched word. Can you guess which? “Of greatest concern is… constitutive de-skilling, the erosion of the capacities that make us human in the first place” — Kwame Anthony Appiah on Mill, autonomy, and AI, in the first issue of The Humanist Review of AI Philosophy, the journal, celebrates its 100 years of publication with a special issue on Bernard Williams’s “Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline”, which it published 25 years ago — several of the pieces are open-access “You don’t know jack diddly doo-doo about what red really is” — tough talk about color perception, from Pete Mandik Mini-Heap posts usually appear when several new items accumulate in the Heap of Links, a collection of items from around the web that may be of interest to philosophers. The Heap of Links consists partly of suggestions from readers; if you find something online that you think would be of interest to the philosophical community, please send it in for consideration for the Heap. Thank you.Previous edition. The post Mini-Heap first appeared on Daily Nous.

dailynous.com

Summer Fiction Reading

I don’t know about you, but I read more novels during the summer than any other time of year. I probably can fit in a few more before the school year begins. What have you read lately that you like? As for me, two recent fiction reads stand out as being of particular interest to philosophers: The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt. I finally got around to reading this book, which was published in 2000. No, it’s not about samurais. Rather, it’s the story of an extremely bright young boy living in late 20th century London with his eccentric mother, a woman of idiosyncratic high standards and low tolerance for idiocy, no matter how common. The book explores learning, freedom, art, courage, and relationships in a way that’s explicitly informed by John Stuart Mill’s autobiography and, implicitly, his On Liberty. It’s smart, funny, and very well-written. It also regularly references the 1954 movie Seven Samurai. I had never seen the film, but about halfway through reading the book, I decided I should watch it. It holds up, and I recommend watching it at some point during your reading of the book. On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle. This is actually a series of seven short novels, four of which have so far been translated from Danish into English. The first book was published in 2020. (I’ve read the first four.) This is the story of a woman, Tara, who keeps waking up on November 18th. You may be thinking, “oh, like Groundhog Day.” Not really. Groundhog Day is an amusing movie. On the Calculation of Volume is a rather remarkable and patient exploration of what life would be like if you kept waking up to the same day, surrounded by people who, unlike you, are experiencing the passage of days as we normally do. It’s a story of confinement, of the challenges of living under certain kinds of constraints, of how one should live under these unusual circumstances. And of course there is the question of whether the lessons of this odd form of life hold for our own. It’s very much a story about paying attention, in more ways than one. Your recommendations welcome. The post Summer Fiction Reading first appeared on Daily Nous.

dailynous.com

A Scene from the AI Flooding of Academic Journals

“We recently received a double-digit number of submissions from authors in the Far East… where we had strong evidence of machine generated content. Nothing made much sense in these papers, the authors, with their yahoo and aol type email addresses, frequently supplied false university affiliations, among other glaring problems. I suspected that these submissions were a test of our detection systems more so than anything else.” That is Udo Schuklenk, professor of philosophy at Queen’s University, writing in his capacity as one of the editors of the journal, Bioethics. His editorial was prompted by his journal’s publication of a critique of an article in the Journal of Medical Ethics (JME) for, among other things, multiple citations to “bibliographic fictions” (seemingly the result of unacknowledged AI use), which led to the latter article’s retraction. The now-retracted JME article is “Panem, corticoids and circenses: the ethical fallout of Enhanced Games,” by Alexis Demas (who, Schuklenk notes, used a yahoo email address and whose stated institutional affiliation could not be verified). The critique of the JME article, published (open access) in Bioethics, is by Ognjen Arandjelović (University of St. Andrews), and is titled “Against Moral Panic and Citation Fiction: A Critique of “Panem, Corticoids and Circenses” and a Proposal for Editorial Gatekeeping on Reference Integrity“. Arandjelović discusses the reference failures and what to do about them in section 4 of his article, and I recommend people look at it. Here’s the introduction to that section: It is tempting to treat reference failures as a mechanistic problem that could be addressed through technology and bureaucracy by installing more automated checks, tightening and enforcing checklists, reminding authors of their obligations. Not only banal, that response misdiagnoses the failure mode. In a publication culture where fast-turnaround commentaries are rewarded, reviewers often treat references as decorative rather than load-bearing, and journals rarely suffer meaningful consequences for bibliographic unreliability, low-grade fabrication, and high-grade sloppiness become rational strategies. The core issue, then, is not attempting to help authors avoid mistakes. Authors know this. Rather, the challenge is in making it costly (in probability and consequence) to submit work with citations that do not exist or do not support what they are cited for. In other words, what is needed is deterrence, not assistance;.. The post A Scene from the AI Flooding of Academic Journals first appeared on Daily Nous.

dailynous.com

George Graham (1945-2026)

George Graham, professor of philosophy at Georgia State University, has died. The following obituary has been provided by the Department of Philosophy at Georgia State University. George Graham (1945-2026) After a long illness, George Graham died at his home in Birmingham, Alabama on July 2, 2026. After earning his BA in philosophy from Fordham in 1967, George went on to earn his MA from Western Ontario in 1969 and his PhD at Brandeis in 1975 under the supervision of J. Van Heijenoort. During his career of over 40 years as a philosophy professor, he taught at University of Alabama-Birmingham (serving as chair for 17 years), at Wake Forest University as the A.C. Reid Professor of Philosophy, and at Georgia State University for 10 years as Professor of Philosophy and Neuroscience. During his time at UAB, George became the first President of the Faculty Senate and helped start UAB’s Center for the Study of Ethics and Values in the Sciences. He also won the President’s Excellence in Teaching Award and Outstanding Teaching Award in the Honors College. George became President of Alabama Philosophy Society in 1986 and served as President of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology (1994-1995), where had won the Griffith Memorial Award for early-career philosophers in 1976. He also served on the Executive Committee and as President of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology in 2005. George was widely noted for his work in philosophy of mind, especially in philosophy of psychiatry and philosophical psychopathology. Among his publications were The Abraham Dilemma: A Divine Delusion, The Disordered Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Mental Illness (multiple editions), and Philosophy of Mind: An Introduction. George co-authored numerous books, including When Self-Consciousness Breaks: Alien Voices and Inserted Thoughts. He co-edited eight seminal anthologies about schizophrenia, addiction, and cognitive science, including A Companion to Cognitive Science, which won a Choice award as Outstanding Academic Title for 1999. George also wrote or co-authored dozens of essays in leading venues about mental disorders, consciousness, and folk psychology. He served on ten leading editorial or advisory boards. He taught over fifty different kinds of courses to thousands of students in a remarkable teaching career, including mentoring many undergraduate and graduate students... The post George Graham (1945-2026) first appeared on Daily Nous.

dailynous.com

Four Philosophy Professors Among New British Academy Fellows

The British Academy has announced the selection of 92 new fellows, and four philosophy professors are among them. They are: Béatrice Longuenesse (New York University) Richard Pettigrew (University of Bristol; University of Oxford as of October 2026) Nicholas Shea (Institute of Philosophy, University of London) James Warren (University of Cambridge) Fellows are selected “in recognition of their outstanding contributions to the humanities and social sciences.” You can see the full list of new fellows here. The post Four Philosophy Professors Among New British Academy Fellows first appeared on Daily Nous.

dailynous.com

Mini-Heap

Recent links… Aphantasia, Hume, and empiricism — some people seem to lack mental imagery, and this has philosophical implications, argue Uku Tooming & Roomet Jakapi Are philosophers who work for AI firms “arsonists who moonlight as firefighters”? — Hollis Robbins on humanity, “My Fair Lady”, and why “neither the world nor the AIs will become more moral” from the work of AI’s philosophers “For most of human history, contexts were local and multiple. If you wanted to know how you should act, you would look around… Am I inside my home? Am I in the church? Am I in a bar?” — now, we live in “uni-context,” which explains a lot, argues Agnes Callard “AI systems [probably] possess at least local analytical moral competence comprehensively. I suspect there is no fundamental obstacle to extending local competence to global competence, or to extending analytical competence to practical competence” — Seth Lazar on recent experiments on the moral reasoning of AIs “When caterpillars are in their chrysalises, their brains physically dissolve… and are rebuilt as butterfly brains. Yet experiments show that memories from their caterpillar days survive” — one of several examples from the animal kingdom that may raise problems for the idea that the mind is the brain “Are you a recliner or a refrainer?” — The New Yorker’s Joshua Rothman on airplane passenger ethics “There’s a kind of epistemic transparency to our work in that everything you need to assess it is right there on the page” — Richard Chappell on whether external funding corrupts philosophy Mini-Heap posts usually appear when several new items accumulate in the Heap of Links, a collection of items from around the web that may be of interest to philosophers. The Heap of Links consists partly of suggestions from readers; if you find something online that you think would be of interest to the philosophical community, please send it in for consideration for the Heap. Thank you.Previous edition. The post Mini-Heap first appeared on Daily Nous.

dailynous.com

A Meta-Epistemological Reason for Rejecting AI-Written Philosophy

“The fact that you, an expert human, generated the text is evidence that the view is worth thinking about—more so than if the text were generated by an LLM.” That’s Eric Schwitzgebel (UCR), writing at The Splintered Mind about why he doesn’t want to receive AI-written emails about philosophy, and why philosophy journals should reject AI-written submissions. Here’s more context: I’m talking about evidence about evidence: meta-epistemology. Your email or your article presents evidence for a particular philosophical view (alternatively, evidence that you support a particular philosophical view). In a simple world, I could evaluate this evidence entirely on its face: How good is the proposed view? But in the actual, complex world, it helps to have evidence about the quality of the evidence. The fact that you, an expert human, generated the text is evidence that the view is worth thinking about—more so than if the text were generated by an LLM. This holds even if the text is exactly the same, which of course it wouldn’t be. An increasingly large part of the function of journals is to provide evidence about evidence—the value of their imprimatur. The fact that an article appears in Nous or Ethics is evidence that it has been through rigorous review and was judged worthy by several expert humans applying unusually demanding standards of quality and importance. Its appearance in those journals is thus evidence (imperfect of course!) that the reasoning is of high quality and the arguments worth taking seriously. Similarly, if I know that an email or an article was written by a respected colleague, reflecting their positive creative exertion in trying to choose the right words, guided by their intuitive expertise in how to phrase things, I have better reason to take it seriously than if I know that it was generated by an LLM and reflects only their passive after-the-fact assent. Philosophers sometimes suggest that we shouldn’t care if an argument was human-generated or AI-generated—that insisting on human-generated prose is fetishizing personal human interaction rather than facts and argument quality. In a way, that’s true: A sound argument is a sound argument. Similarly, we shouldn’t care if an article was written by David Chalmers and published in Philosophical Review or whether it was written by.. The post A Meta-Epistemological Reason for Rejecting AI-Written Philosophy first appeared on Daily Nous.

dailynous.com

How to Give a Killer Job Talk (guest post)

“Talks are not merely communication: they are also a performance… So many talks that could have been successful end up flopping because they’re not serious performances.” That’s one observation about job talks from Daniel Muñoz. Dr. Muñoz is a senior lecturer at the Australian National University. Before that, he was associate professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. In the following guest post, he shares various tips about crafting and delivering job talk. Others are, of course, welcome to add their own advice in the comments. (A version of this post first appeared at Dr. Muñoz’s newsletter, Big Iff True.) How to Give a Killer Job Talk by Daniel Muñoz The job talk—typically on campus, sometimes on Zoom—is the final boss of the academic job market. Don’t underestimate the challenge. You can’t just coast on the rest of your materials: unless you’re already world famous, you probably need a strong job talk. You can’t rely on the weakness of the competition, either: you have to convince people to vote for you, not just against the others, which means turning in a solid performance in your talk and Q&A. My sense is that PhD students aren’t getting enough advice about job talks. And what advice they do get tends to come too late, which leaves them scrambling. The good news: Anyone can learn to give a killer talk. Once you can do that, you’re 90% of the way to a killer job talk. So here is my advice for (1) giving great talks, and (2) preparing a job talk in particular. This advice is mostly aimed at PhD students in philosophy, but there are also some tips about public speaking in general. Good Talks There are two points everyone should internalize about talks. The first is that they are a kind of communication—note the prefix—which means that they are bilateral, not “one way streets.” You have to fit your talk to your audience. What do they like? What do they already know? What, to them, would count as an interesting destination? What kinds of arguments and evidence do they find persuasive? What issues will they let you bracket? Would kind of tone would they see as appropriate? Years ago I gave a talk on.. The post How to Give a Killer Job Talk (guest post) first appeared on Daily Nous.

dailynous.com

The Demise of Reading?

“Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. What has changed is what they read, and how. People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information. ” That’s a bit from “The End of Reading Is Here” by Rose Horowitch, recently published in The Atlantic. The article chronicles the general decrease in reading (of books, articles), the general decrease in sophistication of what people are reading, and the general decrease in literacy skills. People are “losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis” and in her view, “things are about to get worse, and fast.” Kids watch more and more videos, and read less and less. While “video contains more information than text,” watching videos is “a more passive form of engagement than reading” and generally “does not stimulate deeper thinking.” Student reading and writing scores on standardized tests are “at their lowest level in more than three decades.” What does that mean for instruction at the college level? One avenue is remedial: “When these students get to college, their professors find that they have to teach them how to comprehend a text.” But remedial education for reading skills makes sense only if students need those reading skills in order to graduate, and I worry that increasingly, they won’t. The consumer model of higher education paired with a highly instrumentalist picture of the value of education points to a further relaxation of literacy demands on students, not greater student preparation to meet existing or more stringent demands. Along those lines, here is one of the more striking passages of Horowitch’s article: Reading has come to seem extraneous even to some of the best-educated members of society. Margaret Rennix, Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social-sciences support, told me she’d spoken with a student who was struggling to read a book written in Old English. The culprit: Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. (The student used ChatGPT to “translate” the book into easier language.) Not long ago, a Harvard sociology professor, troubled by course evaluations in which students said they resented the amount of.. The post The Demise of Reading? first appeared on Daily Nous.

dailynous.com

Free Web-Based Logic Software (guest post)

Interested in completely free, browser-based, instructional logic software? Brian Rabern spent a decade at the University of Edinburgh working in logic, formal semantics, and other areas of philosophy before moving into the tech world. Unable to find logic software that met his needs, he and a former student created Elogic. Initially developed for his courses, it has since been used at several universities. He is now making the software freely available to anyone who wants to use it. He describes it below. Elogic: Free Web-Based Logic Software by Brian Rabern I taught introductory logic to large classes (400-500 students) for over a decade. The desktop software I inherited worked, but supporting it was a headache: install conflicts, only supported on certain devices, students fighting IT on shared machines. In 2014 a student in my class and I started building a web-based replacement. That became Elogic. It’s a browser-based environment for logic exercises with immediate, automated feedback. There’s nothing to install, and it works on anything with a browser. The guiding design idea was to make something genuinely intuitive for first-year philosophy students, the students who are there for epistemology or ethics or Nietzsche and encountering formal notation for the first time. The interface should get out of the way, not add a learning curve on top of the logic itself. 1. What it does Four core exercise types: Symbolizations. Translate English into propositional or first-order logic. Answers are checked for logical equivalence (using an SMT solver), not exact match to one official answer. Feedback distinguishes syntax errors from meaning errors. Derivations. Natural deduction proofs in a Fitch-style layout. Guided feedback on rule use, scope, and variable capture. Supports rule-locking: derived rules are withheld until prerequisite theorems are proved. Truth tables. Row-by-row feedback on missing or wrong values. Countermodels. Build an interpretation that makes the premises true and the conclusion false. Checked automatically via SMT solver. 2. Scope and limitations Elogic is opinionated. The natural deduction system is Kalish-Montague style in Fitch format, aligned specifically with Parsons’s An Exposition of Symbolic Logic. The notation, rule names, and proof conventions match that presentation. This is designed for courses using that text or something close to it, not as a general-purpose tool configurable.. The post Free Web-Based Logic Software (guest post) first appeared on Daily Nous.

dailynous.com

Mini-Heap

The latest links… Can life—all life—be defined in terms of agency? — well what do we mean by agency? From Newton’s few laws to Alphafold’s 93 million parameters: how should we understand the scientific virtue of simplicity today? — Eric Winsberg on science, simplicity, and prediction This digital bibliography for consciousness studies has over 1,300 entries across 9 themes and 63 subtopics — created by philosophy PhD student Melinda Gülsüm Esen with “the aim of making the literature more navigable for students and researchers working in or entering the field” “We can exercise some control over our beliefs” if we run different “modes of operation” and “recruit additional beliefs and heuristics” — Joshua Mugg begins a discussion of his book, “From Human Reasoning to Belief,” at the Brains Blog Has the word “racist” been diluted through “conceptual inflation”? — two philosophers, Nat Hansen & Shen-yi Liao, investigated this using the “apparent time method” “What is the ideal that America should aspire to? I think the person who best articulated an answer is the philosopher John Rawls” — for July 4th, the New Yorker asked a range of luminaries who their “favorite American” is A philosophy of science reading group invites others to join — it was begun by philosophy PhD students at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Bhopal Mini-Heap posts usually appear when several new items accumulate in the Heap of Links, a collection of items from around the web that may be of interest to philosophers. The Heap of Links consists partly of suggestions from readers; if you find something online that you think would be of interest to the philosophical community, please send it in for consideration for the Heap. Thank you.Previous edition. The post Mini-Heap first appeared on Daily Nous.

dailynous.com

Philosophy, Brain Studies, and the Value of Curiosity

An op-ed about curiosity published in the New York Times yesterday will resonate with many philosophers. Written by Anne-Laure Le Cunff, a neuroscientist at King’s College London, it uses the example of AI-generated answers to internet search queries as a launch point to discuss how we learn in the time between when we form a question and find an answer to it. Google’s AI answers are fast, even if they are often wanting in quality. But suppose its answers were better. Le Cunff asks, “Could there be anything wrong with getting a reliable answer more quickly?” She answers: “There is. By shortening the time between asking a question and getting an answer, these tools are actually undermining curiosity—and paradoxically threatening our ability to understand the world.” She writes: “Our technology is increasingly treating the territory between the query and the answer as dead space to be eliminated, when that territory is where most of the learning actually happens.” Researchers have found that people in a state of curiosity, while waiting for an answer to an intriguing question, remember unrelated information they encounter during that time far better than they otherwise would. In that same study, the researchers also placed those people in brain scanners. They found that waiting for an answer activates reward circuits in the brain and readies the hippocampus to help form new memories. Similar findings have been reported by other researchers in studies involving infants, older children and adults. In short, curiosity puts the entire brain into a mode of heightened receptivity—not just for the specific thing you want to know, but also for everything around it. Curiosity opens a window, and while the window is open, learning deepens across the board. But the window stays open only as long as the question remains unanswered… Scientific breakthroughs, artistic leaps, technological innovation—these rarely emerge from efficient retrieval of known information. They emerge from periods of undirected exploration, when people follow questions further than they need to and find things they weren’t expecting. There is, of course, an academic discipline that focuses on what could be described as “the territory between the query and the answer”: philosophy. Its specialty may indeed be in lengthening, rather than shortening, “the time between asking a question and.. The post Philosophy, Brain Studies, and the Value of Curiosity first appeared on Daily Nous.

dailynous.com

New Mentoring Program Focuses on Philosophers from the Global South

The Centre for Ethics, Law and Public Affairs (CELPA) at the University of Warwick has announced a mentorship program that “aims to support academics from groups underrepresented in moral, legal, and political philosophy, particularly researchers without established connections to elite institutions and scholars from the Global South.” Led by Warwick’s Victor Tadros and Sameer Bajaj, the program will “support early career researchers (ECRs) in developing their research in order to help improve their career development and prospects. Established academics in moral, legal, and political philosophy will provide guidance to ECRs about how to improve a submitted essay to make it more likely to be accepted for publication.” The program will have successive rounds, with the first focused on early career researchers in India. Here’s how the mentoring scheme works: Use of the scheme by eligible ECRs is completely free. Those who are accepted onto the scheme will be paired with a senior academic from our team. The team will be drawn from senior academics across the globe who are willing to participate. The ECR will prepare some work for the academic to read, as well as a CV. The work will often be a draft paper, but it might also be a book proposal, or an ECR may just pitch an idea for an essay. The academic and the ECR will meet online to discuss how to improve the work and its prospects for publication, as well as other opportunities to present the work to help improve it. Each mentor will normally be paired with one ECR per year and will be expected to read and offer feedback on one piece of work of up to 12,000 words. Normally the feedback will be given through an online meeting. Mentors may also provide written comments, career advice, and other support at their discretion. However, mentees should have no expectation of an ongoing mentoring relationship with their mentor. The scheme aims at offering feedback only on a single piece of work. The current list of the program’s mentors is here. The program will begin accepting applications on September 1st. You can learn more about the mentoring program here. Questions about it should be directed to Ignacio Peña. The post New Mentoring Program Focuses on Philosophers from the Global South first appeared on Daily Nous.

dailynous.com

The Philosophy Job Market Deepfake (guest post)

Have you heard? AI companies are hiring philosophers! Sort of. News about jobs for philosophers is the kind of thing you might expect to read about at Daily Nous—for example, here is a post about which philosophers are working for which AI-related firms and organizations—yet articles about the topic have been cropping up lately in a surprising number of mainstream media outlets. The picture such articles have tended to paint is that the development of artificial intelligence has brought with it a new career path for people trained in philosophy. But how accurate is that picture? In reality, things are more complicated and less clear, as Aaron Kagan explains in the following guest post. Kagan is the founder of GraspingAI, an AI research and strategy organization. He holds a PhD in philosophy and has worked at Google Search, X / Loon, Meta Reality Labs, and other technology firms. He is also co-author of An Introduction to Embodied Mind: Thinking Outside the Head and serves as Chair of the American Philosophical Association’s Committee on Non-Academic Careers. UPDATE: Dr. Kagan says that he used AI as an editorial aid during the drafting and revising of this post, but that “the argument, research, job-posting analysis, and conclusions are my own.” The Philosophy Job Market Deepfake by Aaron Kagan AI has produced a strange new fantasy about the humanities: maybe philosophy was the practical major all along. In the past few weeks, the story has been hard to miss. Wired told readers that to land a job in AI, they might try reading Kant. The Atlantic announced that someone finally wants to hire philosophers. Business Insider argued that AI is opening doors for philosophy majors. The Economist asked why big AI labs are hiring so many philosophers. International Business Times said AI companies were “recruiting philosophers.” And now The New York Times has given the story its biggest platform yet, under the headline “The Revenge of the Philosophy Majors.” The message is irresistible, especially at a moment when students, parents, universities, and laid-off workers are all trying to make sense of a brutal job market. AI may be destroying some jobs, but perhaps it is creating a new home for people trained to think about values, meaning,.. The post The Philosophy Job Market Deepfake (guest post) first appeared on Daily Nous.

dailynous.com

Luke Fenton-Glynn (1982-2026)

Luke Fenton-Glynn, a philosopher at Monash University, and before that, University College London, has died. Dr. Fenton-Glynn worked in philosophy of science, metaphysics, and epistemology, with a focus on causation, probability, and peer disagreement. He is the author of Causation (Cambridge, 2021) and various articles, which you can learn more about here. He moved to Monash University in 2023 after ten years at University College London. Prior to that, he held postdoctoral positions at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, California Institute of Technology, and the University of Konstanz. He earned his D.Phil. and B.Phil. in philosophy, and a B.A. in philosophy, politics, and economics, at the University of Oxford. Luke Fenton-Glynn died in June of cancer. He was 43. The post Luke Fenton-Glynn (1982-2026) first appeared on Daily Nous.

dailynous.com

Prestige, Career Paths, and Job Satisfaction Among Recent Philosophy PhDs (guest post)

Philosophy PhDs whose family backgrounds are higher in socioeconomic status are more likely to earn their doctorates from more prestigious programs. The graduates of more prestigious PhD programs are more likely to prefer academic employment to non-academic employment, and to obtain it. Those are among the several findings shared in this guest post by Kino Zhao, assistant professor of philosophy at Simon Fraser University and one of the co-directors of the Academic Philosophy Data & Analysis (APDA) project. The analysis is based on information in the APDA database and responses to its 2025 survey. (A version of this post appears at The APDA Blog.) Prestige, Career Paths, and Job Satisfaction Among Recent Philosophy PhDs by Kino Zhao In an earlier post, Carolyn Dicey Jennings reported some findings concerning career paths of philosophy PhDs that was based on data collected from program websites and other online sources. In this post, I discuss some findings on academic vs non-academic career paths that are based on both the APDA database and the 2025 survey. Description of Data I draw on two different data sources for this analysis. The first, I will call Coded Data, is a dataset we maintain by manually tracking down placement data on graduates from 150 English-speaking philosophy PhD programs (using a combination of department placement pages and internet searches, and input from program representatives and the individuals themselves). This dataset is not anonymous to APDA personnel or program representatives (names are removed for the broader public), but it only contains what is publicly available such as one’s employing institution and job title, alongside names and basic contact information (email). Everyone from this dataset for whom we can find contact information is invited to participate in the survey we conduct every two years, resulting in what I will call Survey Data. The survey data is anonymous. It asks respondents to report things like whether they are satisfied with their current employment without providing us a way of knowing who their employers are (for obvious reasons). For a more comprehensive overview of the methodology behind these two datasets, see this methodology paper. For this analysis, I am only looking at people who graduated in the year 2015 or after. All incomplete entries are dropped. Table 1. Coded Data: Facts.. The post Prestige, Career Paths, and Job Satisfaction Among Recent Philosophy PhDs (guest post) first appeared on Daily Nous.

dailynous.com