New APPS

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    Category: Improving the philosophy profession

    • What information should prospective graduate students get?

      There have been lots of discussions on the PGR (e.g., here), especially on its leader, Brian Leiter, including a poll on whether the of 2014 should be produced. Regardless of the outcome of this, I think we can already start considering alternative ways, independent of the PGR, to provide information for prospective philosophy graduate students. …

    • A statement concerning the PGR

      A number of philosophers have signed the statement located here: https://sites.google.com/site/septemberstatement/ [Note that the Google site is currently down for 'a perceived violation of the Terms of Service'. There is an alternative, temporary site here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/421308/statement.html] Excerpt: It is up to each of us individually to decide what we will volunteer to do. The undersigned…

    • Maybe the Best Rankings Are No Rankings At All

      by Ed Kazarian   In the course of a discussion on Facebook begun by a colleague’s thoughtful and nuanced reflection on the kind of rankings we might want to have in the discipline, I was moved to offer an objection to the idea of ranking departments at all. I think it stands outside that particular discussion,…

    • Philosophy’s Western Bias and What Can Be Done About It

      Guest post by Christian Coseru One may be forgiven for thinking, on reading Brian Leiter's diatribe against identity politics and the danger it poses for academic philosophy, that there is a swell in 'consumer demand' for expanding the philosophy curriculum in questionable directions and for the wrong reasons. To clarify: the 'consumer' in this case is graduate students…

    • Normalizing Civility, Policing Critique, Enforcing Silence and Misunderstanding Collegiality

      By Leigh M. Johnson How we ought to understand the terms "civility" and "collegiality" and to what extent they can be enforced as professional norms are dominating discussions in academic journalism and the academic blogosphere right now.  (So much so, in fact, that it's practically impossible for me to select among the literally hundreds of…

    • Everyone Here Speaks for Themselves

      It seems apropos to introduce a small point of order: New APPS is a group blog, which means that there are many authors here and we all speak for ourselves–and only ourselves.  A case in point would be my strong disagreement with Jon Cogburn's post below. I find it to trade in a series of…

    • A ‘mathematical’ approach to the usefulness of blogs

      I expect many readers to be following the ongoing debate, prompted by a poll run by Leiter last week, on the (presumed) effects that blogs have had for professional philosophy, both at the level of content and at the level of ‘issues in the profession’. (Roberta Millistein weights in at NewAPPS, and I agree with…

    • Why philosophy blogs have been useful

      Here are some reasons I have found philosophy blogs to be beneficial; here I include New APPS (so my bias is obvious), but my comments here are not limited to New APPS, by any means. First, while I had heard stories here and there of sexism and exclusion of other underrepresented minorities, they seemed like…

    • Beyond the baby penalty: The lived experience of mothers and a father who are tenured academics

      Google the keywords “academic” and “mother” or “motherhood”, and you will find various websites with discussions about the baby penalty in academia for women. Representative for this literature is an influential Slate article by Mary Ann Mason, who writes “For men, having children is a career advantage; for women, it is a career killer. And…

    • On the APA’s method for anonymizing papers for review

      I'm not sure that the APA has this right. The APA guidelines for submitting papers state: All papers are anonymously reviewed. Author's name, institution, or references pertaining to the identity of the author must be removed from the paper, abstract, notes, and bibliography. Papers containing such identifying references may be rejected. There are at least…