Daily Nous

Items of interest elsewhere…   A survey of Kant’s relationships with women, including the “catastrophically underrated” Caroline von Keyserlingk — Daniel Andreas dishes on Kant’s love life. Don’t miss the sexy letter from Maria Charlotta Jacobi “You applied to a PhD program in philosophy in the U.S. You haven’t been admitted. You haven’t been rejected. You’re in limbo.” — some explanation and advice from Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) “Williams was seeking

Charles E. Scott, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Research Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Vanderbilt University and Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Penn State University, known for his work in continental philosophy, has died. The following obituary is by Nancy Tuana. Charles E. Scott (1935-2026) Charles E. Scott, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Research Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Vanderbilt University and Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Penn State Uni

“In the early 1970s, fewer than 10% of articles cited any empirical sources. However, by the 2020s, this grew to over 50%.” That finding is from a new study by Michael Prinzing (Wake Forest University), “The Role of Empirical Evidence in Philosophy,” forthcoming in Synthese. Prinzing used a GPT model to examine the citations in 38,442 articles published across 21 highly-regarded philosophy journals between 1970 and 2024, and then manually classified the most frequently-ci

Jonathan Pike, a professor of philosophy at Open University who defends trans-exclusionary (aka “gender critical”) views has 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, according to a report in Times Higher Ed. [SoiL Thornton, “Resting Halt”]The REF exercise aims to assess the quality of research in the UK’s

It’s April Fools Day—a day of jokey trickery, of practical jokes. Unlike in year’s past (2025, 2024, 2023, 2022…) I have no jokey post. Depending on how you feel about that I’d like to say either “I’m sorry” or “You’re welcome.” I thought about soliciting examples of great practical jokes in philosophy, but of course that raised the question: “What is a practical joke?” or “What is it to make a practical joke?&#8

The 2026 “QS World University Rankings” have been published. These contain rankings by subject matter, including philosophy.   The rankings are conducted by the London-based education data firm Quacquarelli Symonds. As I noted in a post about an earlier version of these rankings: In the QS rankings, a school’s overall score for a particular subject is determined by a weighted formula that varies by area. In the arts and humanities, for the 2023 results, the formula used is: 60% academic r

Linda Radzik, professor of philosophy at Texas A&M University, will be moving to Binghamton University (SUNY). Radzik works mainly in ethics and philosophy of law, writing about “moral issues that arise in the aftermath of wrongdoing, including the ethics of forgiveness, reconciliation, criminal punishment, tort law, collective moral responsibility, and the roles third parties play in enforcing and promulgating moral norms.” Her books include Making Amends: Atonement in Moralit

Alan Musgrave, professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Otago, died this past January. The following obituary is by Charles Pigden, professor of philosophy at the University of Otago. Alan Musgrave: Life and Work by Charles Pigden We mourn the death of Emeritus Professor Alan Musgrave (1940-2026) who will be remembered as a dominating presence at the University of Otago for over forty years. Alan was only 29 when he was appointed as Professor and Head the Department of Philosophy

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: Moritz Schlick by Thomas Oberdan and Friedrich Stadler. Ethics of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics by Vincent C. Müller. Molecular Genetics by Ken Waters and Marcel Weber. Gilbert Ryle by Julia Tanney. Ernst Mally by Alexander Hie

2000 pages of Leibniz, much of it previously untranslated or unpublished, will be published next month. A page from one of Leibniz’s philosophical manuscripts (“The Place of Others”), showing revisions, deletions, marginalia, and binary notation as he developed his ideas. They’ll appear in a new three-volume edition of Leibniz’s Philosophical Papers (1677–1686), edited by Lloyd Strickland and published by Oxford University Press. According to Dr. Strickland, the volumes include

Recent additions to the Heap of Links… Fallacies as “memetic mimicry” — Steven Hales borrows from nature to describe fallacies and their significance “How do we balance the creativity needed to discover new mathematical connections with the rigor needed to ensure that every logical step is undeniable?” — debates over formalization and technology in mathematics evoke questions that may apply to philosophy, too “After holding only one virtual conference… the APA decided to pull

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 off-campus in another state where a fight broke out,” reports The Guardian. The Guardian reports: Robinson gave the talk, titled Strategic Lessons from the Pales

Who and what was covered in philosophy courses at UK universities in the 1950s and 1960s? . [Barbara Hepworth, “Group III (Evocation)”]That question comes from Brice Ezell, an independent scholar working on a book “about Tom Stoppard’s dramatizations of core questions in analytic philosophy.” He says: I’m currently writing a chapter on a radio drama of Stoppard’s called Albert’s Bridge, whose principal character is a young man fresh out of a philos

Four philosophers are leading an interdisciplinary team spanning the Universities of Glasgow and Oxford that has received a £1 million grant from the United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI) to study the philosophy of neurotechnology. The project, “Navigating the Neural Frontier: Embedding Ethics and Epistemology in Neurotech,” is a collaboration between philosophers J. Adam Carter, Emma Gordon, and Christoph Kelp (Cogito, University of Glasgow) and Mona Simion (Oxford), and n

“It’s not just the problem of brazen cheating. In some ways, the more insidious threat LLMs pose to undergraduate learning is the promise of instant shortcuts.” . That’s Paul Sagar, Reader in Political Theory at King’s College London, writing at Unherd. He continues: Why struggle through that difficult article, why read that complicated book, why force yourself through the problem set, when the internet can just summarize it for you? The answer to which is: because it is

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: The Epistemic Basing Relation by Keith Allen Korcz. Carl Hempel by James Fetzer. Margaret Fuller  by Daniel Howe and Sonia Di Loreto. IEP ∅ 1000-Word Philosophy Pragmatic Encroachment: Do Our Practical Interests Affect What We Know?

An edition of On Liberty published this month is the first to officially name Harriet Taylor Mill as a co-author alongside John Stuart Mill. The new volume is edited by Piers Norris Turner (Ohio State), Jo Ellen Jacobs (Millikin), Helen McCabe (Nottingham), Lilly Osburg (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology), Michael Schefczyk (KIT), and Christoph Schmidt-Petri (KIT), and is published by Hackett.  Many know that John Stuart Mill said that his wife, Harriet Taylor Mill, “was the inspirer, and

L i n k s . . . “It asks us to dig into ourselves, and cultivate emotions of love and reciprocity” — Martha Nussbaum discusses opera’s relevance to political freedom, on WNYC Sometimes you learn that you actually have no duty to perform some task that you had thought you had a duty to perform — “I am interested in morally evaluating the feeling of relief I then often have,” says Alex Pruss “Habermas… wrote the most powerful modern account of why this particular ci

Wilbur Dyre Hart III, professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Illinois, Chicago, has died. Professor Hart, known to all as Bill, worked in philosophical logic, philosophy of mathematics, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and epistemology. He is the author of The Engines of the Soul (Cambridge, 1988) and The Evolution of Logic (Cambridge, 2010), along with many articles. He joined the Department of Philosophy at the University of Illinois, Chicago (UIC) in 1993, eventually becoming

Elizabeth Hannon, deputy editor of the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (BJPS), has a query about other philosophy journals. She says, “What I’d like to know is how much time journals give referees to return their reports.” She adds that “the BJPS gives one month, though of course plenty of people are far quicker than this and we’re happy to offer deadline extensions to those who need them.” Editorial teams at philosophy journals, please let us know in the c