The Future of ‘A Philosopher’s Take’

As readers are aware the posting here at ‘A Philosopher’s Take’ has been sparse. I’m hoping to remedy that situation over the next few months. The aim of this post is to keep readers and others in the loop for what’s in store moving forward and why things have been slow as of late.

First, I’ll recap why things have been slower and then I’ll discuss why things will be picking up sooner than later. I’m in the final phases of my PhD program at the University of Calgary. I began this blog in May of 2012 (at the end of my first year in the program) to lay out some ideas related to my research and I was very pleased with the results. This blog provided (and continues to provide) a nice venue to practice doing public philosophy and thinking through the issues that are dear to me. So, it is here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future. That said, in order for a blog to run successfully it needs regular content and I have dropped the ball in making sure it gets up there. Between teaching, publishing, editing, conferences, and parenting, I’ve been having a hard time freeing up extra time. Aaron was helping out on this front for a while but since August of 2015 (when I took a position as an editor of the oddly named but content rich ‘Blog of the APA’) we have both put the blog on the back burner.  To remedy this situation I pitched to one of our contributors, Alison McConwell, the idea of her taking the reigns as a contributing editor. She agreed and will take over as contributing editor in April. Aaron will also stay on but Alison will be running much of the show from that point moving forward. I’ll stay on as well but only to help Alison get consistent content for the blog.

One idea we’ve been discussing is using this forum as an unofficial blog for the  University of Calgary graduate students and alumni of the philosophy department, both undergraduate and graduate. I think we will go through with this policy and will reach out to some alumni in the near future to put together some future content. Given that all of our contributors have been graduate students at the UofC anyway, this is more of an explicit statement of what the blog ‘s aims are rather than any pertinent change to business as usual.

So, I am looking forward to Alison’s reign as editor and stay tuned for updates and new features to be rolled out under her tenure.