Daily Nous

“One of humanity’s oldest disciplines and one of its newest inventions feel distinctly made for each other.” That’s a line from an article published in the New York Times today about the demand for philosophers working on artificial intelligence. It continues: A.I. presents a fresh way for philosophers to ask ancient questions, and its own set of new ones that they are uniquely trained to engage with: of truth and belief and knowledge (epistemologists); of reasoning (logicians

New links… Despite skepticism about philosophy as a whole, specific philosophical research programs make progress. But probably not yours. — Still, “you might be contributing to, even if not helping to constitute, philosophical progress,” argues Lewis Ross. Feel better? “For the very first time, biologists packed nonliving components into a cell-like membrane, piece by piece, and witnessed the bag of molecules start to behave like life” — a new development in synt

The US Department of Education has issued a new rule that makes the availability of Federal financial aid for students conditional on whether the programs the students are enrolled in meet an “earnings premium” criteria. According to a press release from the Department of Education, the “Student Tuition and Transparency System (STATS) and Earnings Accountability rule” states that: undergraduate programs will be required to demonstrate that their graduates earn more than t

The philosophy journal Utilitas is temporarily halting submissions. An announcement posted on the journal’s website today states: “We would like to apologise for the current delays in reviewing and accepting new submissions. We are currently between editorial teams, and will be pausing submissions until we are able to manage the backlog that has occurred as a result of this.” One of the journal’s editors, Christopher Woodard (Nottingham), is stepping down. He informs me

Last December, all of the editors-in-chief and associate editors of Springer Nature’s Journal of Philosophical Logic resigned and formed Philosophical Logic, a new “diamond” open-access journal (details here). Earlier this month the journal published its first article, “Sequence and Consequence“, by Cian Dorr and Matthew Mandelkern (both of NYU). According to its website, “Philosophical Logic is an international scientific journal that provides a venue for research

The Executive Board of the University of Exeter has proposed cutting around 150 staff roles, reports the BBC, with with 115 of them in the Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, according to Times Higher Education. The Exeter University and College Union (EUCU) states that the situation actually puts “500 staff—14% of all academic staff—at risk of compulsory redundancy” and have launched a petition objecting to the plan, which they say represents an “exis

That was part of Rebecca Tuvel’s answer to a question from journalist Evan Goldstein about “the benefits of almost getting canceled.” [Annie Vought, “Demeter” (detail)]Professor Tuvel (Rhodes College) was interviewed recently by Goldstein for the Chronicle of Higher Education. It was nine years ago, readers may recall, that the publication of Tuvel’s “In Defense of Transracialism” in the journal Hypatia ignited a firestorm of online outrage. You can read all a

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 (SEP): New: David Hume by Hsueh Qu and Elizabeth S. Radcliffe. Revised: Positive and Negative Liberty by Ian Carter and Ilkin Huseynli. Moral Relativism by Chris Gowans. Mereology by Achille Varzi. The Meaning of Life by Thaddeus M

Graham Priest, currently Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center, will be moving to Tohoku University in Japan. Professor Priest is known for his work in logic, especially non-classical logic, as well as philosophy of math, metaphysics, Buddhist philosophy, and the history of philosophy. You can learn more about his writings here and here. He will be taking up his new position as Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School of Information Sc

Recent links… “Philosophical thinking will remain a source of human competitive advantage” — “philosophy is staging a royal comeback,” says The Economist. And from the same issue: “Why big AI labs are hiring so many philosophers“ A defense of Pyrrhonian skepticism about philosophy — from László Bernáth and János Tőzsér Missing shades: your screen cannot show you all of the colors you can see in the world. Here’s what you’re missing on your computer, ph

“I’m very fond of the take-home essay, as there’s something irreplaceable about the experience of articulating a theory over the course of multiple weeks—doing background research, letting the ideas marinate in one’s subconsciousness, and chiseling away at the draft until every word is perfectly placed.” That’s Tom Kaspers (University of Chicago), expressing a feeling many professors have about teaching in the early days of the AI era. Yet unlike many who have either ignored th

In April, Jonathan Pike, a professor of philosophy at Open University, submitted a formal complaint about the appointment of his colleague, professor of philosophy Sophie Grace Chappell, a trans woman, to the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2029 subpanel for philosophy. [Detail of cover of Transfigured by Sophie Grace Chappell]That complaint has now been dismissed, according to Professor Chappell, who, in an email and also on Facebook, wrote: “On June 15th… UKRI’s independent adj

“Publication differences by gender are small or statistically undetectable during graduate study, but become more pronounced by graduation and especially by the time of first permanent hire….  Teaching portfolios appear broadly similar across gender groups in terms of overall volume, though there are some suggestive differences in how teaching labor is distributed and repeated over time.” Those are two of the conclusions drawn from a study of data gleaned from a 2025 survey con

What happens to the articles published in an online-only journal when that journal not only ceases to publish, but ceases to exist? A screenshot of the Kant Studies Online homepage, via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine That question is raised by the case of Kant Studies Online, an online only, open-access philosophy journal that published articles between 2011 and 2016, the website of which is no longer accessible. The journal was founded by Gary Banham, who died in 2013. The journal publish

“The University of Dundee has announced it plans to cease offering Philosophy as a named degree from 2027. This news has come as a complete shock to students, staff and the wider Scottish community. We, the philosophy community of Dundee, are determined to fight this.” So begins a petition protesting an aspect of the University of Dundee’s administration plan to address a large financial deficit. According to the BBC, “Despite already cutting about 675 jobs through volunt

The American Philosophical Association (APA) has announced the winners of its Spring 2026 prizes. 2027 John Dewey Lectures Three annual lectures, one at each divisional meeting of the APA, given by a prominent and senior (typically retired) philosopher associated with that Division, who is invited to reflect broadly and in an autobiographical spirit on philosophy in America as seen from the perspective of a personal intellectual journey. ($1000.) Eastern: Eva Kittay (Stony Brook University) Ce

A slightly larger mini-heap of links than usual… How “claim[s] that someone was the inventor of modern logic or a particular branch of philosophy” come to be a part of philosophy’s story — more from Jens Lemanski on the case-study of Dummett’s assertion that Frege invented analytic philosophy and modern logic “Few of us now have much idea what online conferencing could become if given the chance to flourish” — Eric Schwitzgebel defends further experimentation with onlin

“The aim is not to keep everything exactly as it was before gen AI took off. That would be both impossible and undesirable. The aim is to preserve the parts of philosophical education that are still worth preserving while changing the surrounding infrastructure enough to make that possible.” That’s David Bourget, a philosophy professor at Western University and executive director of the PhilPapers Foundation, who has created a new tool to help professors—not just philosop

Governments and firms are turning to philosophers and other scholars more and more in regard to the ethics of developing and regulating technology. Yet this engagement with ethics may be superficial, careless, or even manipulative—and the ethicists involved may not even be in a position to realize this. “Ethics-washing” can take several forms. In the following guest post, the authors (in alphabetical order)—Lisa Herzog (Groningen), Marijn Hoijtink (Antwerp), Gijs van Maan

[Originally published on June 8th, 2026, 9:02am. Reposted by request.] “In our view there are several worrying tendencies in contemporary academic scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, all of which reflect, to varying degrees, a distinctive form of politicization in which the scholarly enterprise is taken to be subordinate to, or in the service of, political (social or moral) goals beyond the advancement of knowledge and understanding.” That is from a recently released &