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The Gould (I) Files #2

March 9, 2019 by Alison K McConwell

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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 […]

Grieving a Life That is Not

December 9, 2018 by Adam Hayden

While completing the requirements for my terminal MA, I imagined the future prospects for a successful junior researcher. Years before, I left a decade-long career to return to school. As a graduate student, I earned money in the service industry, working late into early morning hours to contribute financially to our growing family. Daytime activities […]

Discovery and Invention Part I: Distinctions and Notations

December 6, 2018 by Aaron Thomas-Bolduc

In this three part (probably) series, I’m going to look at the notions of invention and discovery as they relate to how we think about mathematics and logic. In this first post, I’m going to set up the distinction between discovery and invention as I see it, and then talk about whether systems of notation for […]

Meet ‘Most People’

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 […]

Grinworthy Quotes (16): Self-promotion Edition

October 8, 2018 by Aaron Thomas-Bolduc

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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 […]

Congratulations to our Founding Editor: Dr. Justin Caouette

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 […]

Frege and Hume at Thanksgiving

October 2, 2018 by Aaron Thomas-Bolduc

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It’s almost Thanksgiving here in Canada, so here’s a thanksgiving themed post about concepts from Frege and Neo-logicism. In his Grundlagen (1884), Frege proposes that the number that belongs to two concepts is the same just in case the objects falling under those concepts can be correlated one-to-one (i.e. they’re equinumerous). The formalization of that claim is […]

Job Market Problems

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 […]

Talking to (other) Grad Students

August 7, 2018 by Aaron Thomas-Bolduc

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Thanks to Justin Caouette, I’ve been on Twitter for a little over a year and there’s something I’ve noticed about the way we talk to other early career researchers/teachers or the way advice is given to early career people: everyone assumes the structures and terminology are roughly the same as they are in their own […]

A Quick Update From Aaron

July 24, 2018 by Aaron Thomas-Bolduc

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Some of you may have noticed that I haven’t published a blog post in quite a while. There’s a good reason for that: I successfully defended my dissertation last month, and handed in my revisions a couple of weeks ago. That’s right, the whole editorial team here at APT are Doctors of Philosophy in philosophy! […]

‘Get Out’, ‘Black Lives Matter’, and the Different Dimensions of Racism: Some Parallels to Kate Manne’s Misogyny Concept

July 20, 2018 by Celso Neto

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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 […]

Causes in Real Life – How Organizations Perform a Root Cause Analyses (RCA)

July 19, 2018 by Mike Steiner

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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 […]

Truth and meaning in the age of Trump

July 18, 2018 by Joshua Stein

I learned philosophy of language in the dogmatic antiquity of a couple of years ago. Many of my colleagues and senior philosophers seem still to cling to these dogmas, like “a sentence is made true by its disquotation.” In the now-times, though, it seems especially important to show where we went wrong in developing our […]

Form-Over-Content Morality: Denying Service

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 […]

Turning Bad Rubbish into Good Lessons

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. […]

The Technological Progress of CRISPR-Cas9

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 […]

New Contributor: Janella Baxter

May 24, 2018 by Justin Caouette

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I’m happy to announce yet another solid philosopher to the fold here at A Philosopher’s Take. I had the pleasure of meeting Janella Baxter a few years back at one of our grad conferences here at the University of Calgary. Dr. Baxter is a pleasure to be around and talk philosophy with; here is a […]

The Moral Value of Compassion

May 23, 2018 by alfarcher

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 […]

Science, Reality, and Objectivity

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 […]