Daily Nous

Russian Philosopher Svetlana Mesyats is under house arrest and the offices and homes of several other employees of the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences were searched, according to social media postings from a pro-Russian government account and other media sources. Meduza reports: 10 researchers were taken to the Investigative Committee of Russia and interrogated until la…

New virtual writing groups for people working on dissertations in philosophy are forming now. Joshua Smart (St. Bonaventure University), once again, is organizing them. He writes in with the following information: Virtual Dissertation Groups (VDG) will be running again this June – August. The VDG sign-up form is open for this summer’s groups through Saturday, June 6th. What it is: Virtual Dissert…

Recent links… “A lot of kid stuff involves situations where the risk of something bad happening is very low, but if it does happen, then it’s really terrible.” How should a parent approach these decisions? — perhaps the concept of moral luck could be helpful What is a woman? — a discussion between Talia Mae Bettcher and Tomas Bogardus, moderated by Miles Donahue “Liberal learning” is “a kind of l…

This is the weekly report on new and revised entries at online philosophy resources, new reviews of philosophy books, new podcast episodes, recently published open access philosophy books, and more. (If we missed anything, please let us know.) SEP New: Susanne Langer by Juliet Floyd. The Liar Paradox in Arabic and Islamic Philosophy by Ahmed Alwishah and David Sanson. Descartes’ Ethics by Denis K…

Richard Pettigrew, currently professor of philosophy at the University of Bristol, will be moving to the University of Oxford, where he will be the new Wykeham Chair of Logic. Professor Pettigrew works on questions across a range of philosophical subfields, including epistemology, formal epistemology, decision theory, logic, philosophy of math, and ethics. He is the author of several books, inclu…

The administration of the University of Nottingham is planning on reducing its full-time faculty by 600 beginning next January, using layoffs (redundancies) if need be. In response, the local university and college union began a “marking and assessment boycott” on Wednesday and are striking today. They may undertake a longer strike beginning in June. According to the Nottingham Post: Nottingham’s…

Where in the world should you buy philosophy books? Sure, there’s the convenience of large online retailers, but there can be more to buying a book than just getting a good price on it. Do you want books and reading to be a live part of your city’s culture or the places you visit? Do you want to live in a place where people are attending book-related events at a bookstore nearby? Do you want to p…

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has bestowed its Berkson Courageous Colleague Award on two philosophers. Those two philosophers are Mike Gregory and Charlie Kurth, both of Clemson University. After two faculty and a staff member at Clemson were fired for social media posts in the wake of the killing of rightwing activist Charlie Kirk, Professors Gregory and Kurth “spran…

The Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation has announced the winners of its 2026 Doctoral Dissertation Fellowships. The fellowship program provides support to PhD candidates in the humanities and social sciences writing dissertations on questions of religion, ethics, morals, or values. Twenty new fellows were announced, and two are based in philosophy departments. They are: Ross Edwards (The New School…

This is the weekly report on new and revised entries at online philosophy resources, new reviews of philosophy books, new podcast episodes, recently published open access philosophy books, and more. (If we missed anything, please let us know.) SEP New: Plato’s Laws by Chris Bobonich and Katherine Meadows. Economic Democracy by Lisa Herzog. Revised: Martin Buber by Michael Zank and Zachary Braiter…

A study by The Economist looked at how the employment prospects of college graduates have changed over the past few years as AI use by potential employers has increased. The concern is that firms will hire fewer people if they can use AI to complete the tasks that otherwise would have been handled by entry-level workers. Data about this has been mixed, so The Economist conducted its own study bas…

The Australian Political Studies Association has created a new prize in political theory and philosophy in memory of Peter Balint, a political theorist at the University of New South Wales, Canberra, who died in January, 2025. Professor Balint’s research concerned toleration, diversity, multiculturalism, and social cohesion. His books include Debating Multiculturalism: Should There be Minority Ri…

Economist Alex Tabarrok (GMU) recently wrote of “ideas behind their time”. He explains: We are all familiar with ideas said to be ahead of their time, Babbage’s analytical engine and da Vinci’s helicopter are classic examples. We are also familiar with ideas “of their time,” ideas that were “in the air” and thus were often simultaneously discovered such as the telephone, calculus, evolution, and …

Philosopher David Boonin (University of Colorado Boulder) is inviting other Jewish philosophers to contribute to a collection of writings he’s putting together. The idea is to ask philosophers who are Jewish, regardless of whether they consider themselves practicing or observant Jews, to reflect on the ways their Jewish background may have influenced their lives as philosophers. Professor Boonin …

The University at Buffalo Department of Philosophy is launching what will be the first PhD program in applied ontology. . It will be a fully online, asynchronous program, and it will enroll students starting this fall. A press release from the University contextualizes applied ontology in terms of its importance for the development and use of artificial intelligence: How artificial intelligence (…

The latest links… A tendency to move from “disruptive innovation” to “novelty through recombining existing insights into new connective ideas” — a study of work by millions of scientists over six decades on the relationship between researcher age and creativity “If you can… have philosophy and creativity and, let’s say, moral goodness penetrate every aspect of your life, then yeah, that seems an …

Administrators at the University of Hertfordshire are eliminating not just philosophy (as reported last week) from the school, but also undergraduate programs in English Language and Linguistics, English Literature, Creative Writing, and History. The reason given for these cuts is that the programmes are ‘no longer financially viable’. We have been given no other information about the courses, re…

Why should a department hire some fresh PhD when it could instead hire Derek Parfit, Daniel Dennett, Judy Thomson, Hilary Putnam, Ruth Barcan Marcus, or David Lewis? You might say: “How could a department hire these people? They’re dead!” True. But it is only a matter of time before AI-based “replicas” of them exist. Imagine a sophisticated, well-trained language model paired with some video or h…

A federal court judge ruled today that Texas State University must reinstate philosopher Idris Robinson, whom the university fired from his assistant professorship over a talk he gave about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Robinson had sued the university in March. A press release from Texas State Employees Union CWA Local 6186 states: U.S. District Court Judge Alan Albright granted a preliminar…

The number of students earning an undergraduate degree in philosophy in the United States declined for the third year in a row. According to new data from Humanities Indicators, a project of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, US universities and colleges issued 5,763 bachelor’s degrees in philosophy in 2024, compared with 5,998 in 2023, 6380 in 2022, and 6,757 in 2021. Though the changes ha…