Daily Nous

Christy Mag Uidhir will be giving up his position as professor of philosophy at the University of Houston. Readers may recall that the administration at the University of Houston had adopted the “indoctrination narrative”, a pretext for violating the academic freedom of professors to teach what and how they judge they ought to. Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, Daniel P. O’…

Some philosophy professors, realizing that many of their students are unfamiliar with writing philosophy papers, provide them with “how-to” guides to the task. [Originally posted on January 15, 2019. Reposted by reader request.] I thought it might be useful to collect examples of these. If you know of any already online, please mention them in the comments and include links. If you have a PDF of …

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: Types and Tokens by David Liebesman. Revised: Friedrich Albert Lange by Nadeem J. Z. Hussain, Lydia Patton, and Elisabeth Widmer. Russell’s Moral …

Interesting stuff elsewhere… “There are lots of decisions that, in an ideal world, would be made in a flexible, holistic, discretionary way, but which cannot be made that way by institutions that have lost the public’s trust” — Daniel Greco on public trust in higher education The Splintered Mind turns 20 — Eric Schwitzgebel takes the occasion to reflect on the benefits of philosophy blogging Is a…

“I wonder if these people have ever seen a student’s face when they finally understand something for the first time.” Jane Sloan Peters, a professor of religious studies and historical theologian at the University of Mount Saint Vincent, was talking with her students about changes she has made to her teaching so as to safeguard student learning from artificial intelligence when “a wave of sadness…

William J. Prior, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Santa Clara University, has died. The following obituary is by Elizabeth Radcliffe. William J. Prior (1946-2026) William J. Prior, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Santa Clara University, died on April 23rd, 2026, a few weeks short of his 80th birthday. Professor Prior is best known for his work on Socrates and Plato. Over the course of his…

About a year ago, the UK government’s Office for Students (OfS) (whose “free speech czar” is philosopher Arif Ahmed) levied a fine of  £585,000 on the University of Sussex after investigating how the university handled the case of philosopher Kathleen Stock, who resigned after students protested her views and called for her to be fired. That fine has now been overturned by the UK’s high court, re…

In 2024, a study found that “7–17% of the sentences in the reviews [of computer science manuscripts] were written by LLMs”. It was only a matter of time before this spread, and now it appears to have reached philosophy. Last year, a philosophy PhD student in the US submitted a paper to a well-known philosophy journal. They write: The paper was rejected a few months ago; the first reviewer left ve…

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: ∅ Revised: Realism by Alexander Miller. Inheritance Systems by Ehud Lamm. Plato  by Richard Kraut. Spinoza’s Epistemology and Philosophy of Mind b…

Faculty at Arizona State University are developing a new philosophy major program with a focus on artificial intelligence, consciousness, and ethics. ASU’s School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies already offers philosophy bachelors degrees with concentrations in Morality, Politics, and Law and Science, Nature, and Mind. The new AI-focused degree is currently undergoing administr…

New links… Which button should you press? — Richard Chappell on a recent viral poll “It is somewhat puzzling that… so few universities have found ways to make the case [for] independent education and the advancement and preservation of knowledge” — Eric Schliesser on cynicism in the academy “Qualia are not puzzles that can be solved by increasingly elegant syntax” — an argument that purports to “…

The Marc Sanders Foundation has announced that its 2026 Prize in Political Philosophy has been awarded to Adam Kern (University of San Diego) and Jacob Nebel (Princeton University). They received the prize for their piece, “Migration and Social Population Ethics“. Here’s the abstract: This paper explores how societies should evaluate choices that affect the size or the composition of their popula…

Plenty of philosophers have tattoos, but how many philosophers have philosophy tattoos? And what are they of? A graduate student in philosophy is considering getting a “philosophy related tattoo” and expressed curiosity about their prevalence in the profession. So, tattoo lovers, here’s your chance to show us your philosophy tattoos. You should be able to include a photo in the comments if you’d …

Some philosophy journals seem friendlier to work in experimental philosophy (x-phi) than others. You may have a sense about this when it comes to some journals, but with others it can be hit-or-miss. Would it be useful to you to have more information handy about whether particular journals tend to publish x-phi? If so, then you can thank Sinéad Cleary (Oxford), Joanna Demaree-Cotton (Oxford), and…

The American Academy of Arts & Sciences has announced its latest class of members, and several philosophers are a part of it. They are: Julia Driver,  University of Texas at Austin Melissa S. Lane,  Princeton University Jane Maienschein, Arizona State University Paolo Mancosu,  University of California, Berkeley James Owen Weatherall,  University of California, Irvine David B. Wong,  Duke Univers…

Last month it was reported that Idris Robinson, a tenure-track assistant professor of philosophy at Texas State University, is suing several university officials for violating his constitutional rights after they told him he would have his contract terminated in May, because of complaints about a talk he gave last year on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. See this post for details. Now, an effort…

The Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy (SAAP) has established the Bhimrao Ambedkar Prize in Global Pragmatism. It is the first prize from an American scholarly organization named in honor of Bhimrao (B.R.) Ambedkar. Bhimrao Ambedkar (1891-1956) was a well-known and highly respected political figure, philosopher, and civil rights leader in India. He studied economics at Columbia (f…

A professor writes in with some questions that arose during the recent season of graduate admissions. They write: How are departments putting up their prospective graduate students during visits? Are they housing them with current grad students? In a hotel? In a hotel with other prospective students? An AirBnB? With faculty? Making them figure it out themselves? To these questions we might add re…

The Journal of Natural Law is a new peer-reviewed journal “committed to publishing the best interdisciplinary research on natural law in philosophy, theology, and legal theory.” The journal is edited by Brian Besong (St. Francis University). He authors a surprisingly polemical introduction to the journal in its first issue. Here’s an excerpt: Ours is an age marked by profound intellectual losses …

Latest links… “Humans now are just having the right tools and desire to be able to look at whale voices in this way to see the complexity that has been there all along” — new analyses shows that whale vocalizations are “highly complex” and similar to human ones When colleges treat degrees like job credentials and students like customers, the result is “degree hacking” or “college speed runs” — ye…