What’s the ‘I’ for you ask? It’s Friday night. TGIF folks. I’d like to take this opportunity to discuss archival work because I’ve caught archive-fever, as it were. I recently read “Blue Years: An Ethnography of a Prison Archive” by Angela Garcia (Stanford University) published in Cultural Anthropology. Actually, I was fortunate enough to listen […]
February 22, 2019 by Alison K McConwell
What’s the ‘I’ for you may ask? It’s Friday. TGIF. This is the first post of what I hope to be a series tracking my access to archived work by Stephen Jay Gould at the Stanford Special Collections & University Archives. Up to this point my experience with archived and unpublished work in any special collections is limited. […]
December 31, 2018 by APT Editors
Comments Off on Top Posts from 2018
It has been over six and a half years since Justin Caouette founded A Philosopher’s Take. The blog surpassed 400,000 views and a quarter of a million visitors this year. Below we’ve highlighted then 10 most popular posts in 2018, as well as the five most popular posts published in 2018. But this is only […]
November 12, 2018 by Aaron Thomas-Bolduc
We often talk about the need for diversity in philosophy in general, but we also need diversity in our lives. (I know it sounds corny, hear me out.) What I mean is that it’s important to have friends and acquaintances from diverse backgrounds and with varying perspectives. This is important when doing research, thinking about […]
October 8, 2018 by Aaron Thomas-Bolduc
Comments Off on Grinworthy Quotes (16): Self-promotion Edition
I just had a co-authored (with Eamon Darnell) paper that’s based on a chapter of my dissertation (both titled “Is Hume’s Principle Analytic?” — link to preprint of the paper) accepted for publication (yay!). Near the end of the paper, we raise an issue that seems (to me at least) to have been under the surface […]
October 2, 2018 by Alison K McConwell
Bridgewater State University recently published a profile of our very own Dr. Justin Caouette outlining what many people close to him already know: Justin is currently making a difference in the lives of students attending BSU. Many of us (myself included) who are first generation college students–students with neither parent having attended college–are often faced […]
September 28, 2018 by Aaron Thomas-Bolduc
*Since drafting this post, I have moved to take a temporary job to be near my non-academic partner. I’ve decided to keep this post general, but hope to write about that experience once I’ve settled in properly. In this post, I’m going to talk about a couple of issues with the philosophy job market that […]
July 20, 2018 by Celso Neto
Comments Off on ‘Get Out’, ‘Black Lives Matter’, and the Different Dimensions of Racism: Some Parallels to Kate Manne’s Misogyny Concept
When a semester is in session I try to avoid reading philosophy outside of work hours. Usually, I prefer easy reads on topics related to science fiction, fantasy, and popular science. But recently I made an exception to this, as I started reading Kate Manne’s Down Girl (OUP 2018). I heard a lot about the […]
July 19, 2018 by Mike Steiner
Comments Off on Causes in Real Life – How Organizations Perform a Root Cause Analyses (RCA)
Having spent considerable time studying the vexing problems related to causation in philosophy, I was immediately intrigued when I learned that companies and other organizations routinely engage in or perform what they call root cause analyses (RCAs). I recently had the opportunity to take the courses and training in order to perform RCAs, and have […]
June 26, 2018 by James DiGiovanna
Charges of hypocrisy are popular in the current political landscape, and hypocrisy is certainly a vice, if a minor one. But much of what’s going on in these charges is an emphasis on form over content. To say any action is immoral requires an understanding of what it is in reaction to. Spitting in my […]
May 30, 2018 by Joshua Stein
Alternately titled: What we talk about when we talk about Jordan Peterson. I should begin by saying that all thoughts here are mine. They are not endorsed or shared by the University of Calgary, the Department of Philosophy, or any other group with which I’m affiliated, unless those folks choose to endorse or share them. […]
May 24, 2018 by janellabaxter
A common misconception about technological advancement is that they are ahistorical revolutions (Cook 1995). On this narrative, technological innovations emerge suddenly, without competition from other extant technologies, and are solely responsible for ushering in rapid, widespread social change. This misconception not only fails to account for the crucial social, political, and moral values that often […]
It was an honour to contribute to Justin Caouette and Carolyn Price’s book The Moral Psychology of Compassion. They did an excellent job of putting together such an interesting collection and I’m really happy to have been a part of it. I have also enjoyed the interesting recent exchange on this blog between David Boutland and […]
May 22, 2018 by oliverlean
Our research project team members here in Calgary have spent the last several months reading (and re-reading) Bas van Fraassen’s subtle and powerful work Scientific Representation (2008). As with any work of its scope and ambition, it’s open to a heavy dose of interpretation. What follows is my interpretation, and I’ll stress that it is particularly […]
May 10, 2018 by Alison K McConwell
Bertrand Russell (May 18th 1872-February 2nd 1970) writes in the prologue of his autobiography “What I Have Lived For”: Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and […]
March 9, 2019 by Alison K McConwell
Comments Off on The Gould (I) Files #2