June 7, 2016 by Alison K McConwell
Comments Off on CFP: WCPA submission deadline July 4th
The Department of Philosophy at the University of Alberta hosts the next Western Canadian Philosophical Association meeting on October 28-30th, 2016. It is in conjunction with The Canadian Society for Environmental Philosophy. Here is the original CFP. Papers submissions are to be a maximum of 4000 words and presentable in 25-30 minutes. Submissions should include […]
May 25, 2016 by Alison K McConwell
While thinking about how the month of May has zoomed by and engaging in a quasi-productive procrastination on the Daily Nous website, I conveniently stumbled upon a post concerning how to actually work during the summer. Here are some highlights from this hilarious, but scarily accurate article that truly resonated with my ‘summer self.’ Going […]
May 20, 2016 by Alison K McConwell
Over the last year I’ve been thinking about how to identify and present the transferable skills one gains from philosophy. Recently Mike Steiner, a UCalgary alumnus, gave a presentation to grads in our department concerning his experience with the non-academic job market. Mike demystified the process of applying for jobs in industry. Although many of […]
May 16, 2016 by Aaron Thomas-Bolduc
I was often told, especially earlier in my education, to avoid excessive use of jargon. More generally, we as philosophers are accused of writing articles that are difficult to understand, at least in part because of our use of jargon. I do think that we should be careful about the overuse of technical terminology, especially […]
May 15, 2016 by Alison K McConwell
Hi Everyone, As the new managing editor of this blog, I oversee blog activity for the foreseeable future. Business is as usual–we will continue sharing ideas with posts ranging from research that our contributors are interested in to topics concerning the profession. I also promise that Aaron’s Grinworthy quotes series will continue to be raw […]
March 7, 2016 by Gordon Hawkes
There is a straightforward objection to any denial of the law of noncontradiction: A denial of the law of noncontradiction is self-refuting because one must presuppose the truth of the law of noncontradiction in order to deny it. That is, to deny the law of noncontradiction is to allow that it is both true and […]
February 3, 2016 by Alison K McConwell
If you find questions of biological individuality peculiar, then this post is for you. Biological individuality is an area of special interest. Classic individuality principles lurk in the background—philosophers of biology are still concerned with how to carve up a particular domain into basic units and with how to tell those units apart. There may […]
November 16, 2015 by Aaron Thomas-Bolduc
Comments Off on Grinworthy Quotes (11)
Here are the final three sentences of Alberto Coffa’s “Kant, Bolzano, and the Emergence of Logicism” (Journal of Philosophy, 74, 1982, p. 689): When concepts were finally wedded to the word, a priori knowledge turned from true in virtue of concepts to true in virtue of meanings—as Carnap put it—or true ex vi terminorum—as Wilfred […]
November 5, 2015 by Aaron Thomas-Bolduc
Comments Off on Grinworthy Quotes (10)
Here’s other amusing line from Paul Benacerraf’s dissertation (Princeton, 1960, p. 182): It was in fact through [Cantor’s] interest in the infinite and in infinite numbers that he developed the theory of sets. The purpose was to make an honest woman of the infinite, a task held by most mathematicians of his time to be […]
October 8, 2015 by Aaron Thomas-Bolduc
Comments Off on Grinworthy Quotes (9)
I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted one of these — I’ve been reading some fairly dry material recently. The following quote is at the very beginning of Paul Benacerraf’s unpublished PhD dissertation (Princeton, 1960) which I’m reading as part of my dissertation research. The quote is attributed to an unnamed undergraduate student. […]
June 15, 2015 by Aaron Thomas-Bolduc
Comments Off on On Sustaining Life.
This past weekend, the philosophy department here at the University of Calgary hosted a conference on Sustainability with a focus on intergenerational justice. A topic of much debate was what exactly should be sustained/left for future generations. Now, I am very much an outsider to this debate, but one candidate of a necessary (but insufficient) […]
June 5, 2015 by Aaron Thomas-Bolduc
Comments Off on Grinworthy Quotes (8)
Here is another quote from John Burgess, this time from his book Fixing Frege (Princeton University Press: 2005). Anyone who reads logic/mathematics/philosophy of mathematics will have come across the phenomenon he’s talking about. Now it is a common mathematical practice, called “abuse of language,” to omit to distinguish notationally between items that are distinct notionally, […]
April 26, 2015 by Aaron Thomas-Bolduc
Comments Off on Hashtag_Octothorpe
A while back I was reading a paper by Bob Hale and Crispin Wright, first published in 2000 [1], in which they use the symbol “#” to denote an arbitrary matrix sentence. That was over half a decade before twitter went live. That symbol, variously known as the hash sign/symbol, the number sign, or octothorpe […]
March 24, 2015 by Justin Caouette
Adrian Currie has posted a very succinct and important post on how straight white males can help to make the discipline a bit more inclusive. It can be found here in it’s entirety, below is a snippet. Currie offers clear ways on how we could all do better. It is very much worth the read […]
March 18, 2015 by Aaron Thomas-Bolduc
Comments Off on APA/BPA Journal Survey
The APA and the BPA have just published the results of their joint philosophy journal survey here, and here (respectively). Data includes number of submissions, acceptance rates, time to publication, percent female authors, and a few other things. I have only had a quick look through the data, and I’m sure someone will do a […]
February 2, 2015 by Aaron Thomas-Bolduc
Anyone who has been following the Grinworthy Quotes series here on A Philosopher’s Take will likely have noticed that I’ve been reading a fair amount of medieval philosophy recently. Some readers may also be aware that I usually work on philosophy of mathematics, logic and metaphysics. In working on medieval philosophy, and in particular medieval […]
January 7, 2015 by Aaron Thomas-Bolduc
Here is a quote from Moses Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed (M. Friedlaender trans., 1923, p. 263) that is particularly appropriate for the holiday season: Wine may be treated as food, if taken as such, but to form parties for the purpose of drinking wine together must be considered more disgraceful than the unrestrained conduct […]
December 19, 2014 by Aaron Thomas-Bolduc
Comments Off on Philosophers from Poverty
I strongly encourage anyone with an interest in academic philosophy, and/or inequality issues to have a look at this discussion over at the Daily Nous.
June 11, 2016 by Aaron Thomas-Bolduc
Comments Off on Is the Universe Part of the World?