JOB: Lectureships at Stanford
By S. Matthew Liao

Stanford University is now accepting applications for lecturers to teach in the liberal arts curriculum required for freshmen. In 2012-13, Stanford will transform the Introduction to the Humanities (IHUM) program to include a broad range of disciplinary areas of study. Courses offered in this curriculum will span such diverse fields as American studies, physical chemistry, environmental studies, biological sciences, social psychology, and political philosophy as well as the traditional humanities disciplines. This is a one-year position.

It’s official! The Eastern APA is moving to early January starting in 2015. Based on the survey results, this should greatly improve the lives of many people in our profession. Certainly, it will improve mine and my family’s. A big thanks to everyone who completed the APA survey as well the surveys here and here on Ethics Etc!

Here’s the message from the APA:

Special issue of the Review of Philosophy and Psychology
Guest editors: Mark Phelan & Adam Waytz
Deadline for submissions: 31 March 2012

When people regard other entities as objects of ethical concern whose interests must be taken into account in moral deliberations, does the attribution of consciousness to these entities play an essential role in the process? In recent years, philosophers and psychologists have begun to sketch limited answers to this general question. However, much progress remains to be made. Contributions to a special issue of The Review of Philosophy and Psychology on the role of consciousness attribution in moral cognition from researchers working in fields including developmental, evolutionary, perceptual, and social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and philosophy are invited.

Matthew Noah Smith, an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Yale University and a Contributor here on Ethics Etc, has already collected over 1200 faculty signatures to the letter below.

Please consider adding yours by going to the following link, and please pass the link along to other academics you know.

We have witnessed, over the past two months, police departments using significant amounts of force against individuals peacefully participating in the Occupy movement. But during the week of November 13-19, there was an astonishing escalation of the violence used by municipal police departments against non-violent protesters.

PhilEvents
By S. Matthew Liao

David Bourget and Dave Chalmers, the team that has brought us PhilPapers and PhilJobs, have recently launched PhilEvents, a website devoted to upcoming events in philosophy.

As Dave describes it,

PhilEvents has a database of hundreds of forthcoming events. You can search it in many different ways: by subject, by location, and by various combinations of subject, location, and so on. You can use this to set up RSS feeds for searches on subjects and locations of interest.

Sometime ago, we ran two polls here on Ethics Etc regarding whether the dates for the APA Eastern Division Meeting should be changed. Overwhelmingly, 368 people out of 400 said that the dates should be changed, and 504 out of 600 people would favor moving the meeting to sometime in January.

The Eastern Division Executive Committee is now inviting APA members to complete an online survey. The survey is open until the Thanksgiving weekend, and is set up so that each member can answer only once.

Websites for Jobs in Philosophy
By S. Matthew Liao

The Philpapers team has just launched a new PhilJobs website (http://philjobs.org/) for jobs in philosophy.

And if you didn’t already know, Phylo Jobs also maintains a free listing of job openings for academic philosophers.

The NYU Center for Bioethics and the NYU Environmental Studies Program invite applications for the position of Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow, pending administrative and budgetary approval. The initial appointment will be for one year beginning September 1, 2012, renewable annually for a maximum of three years. An applicant should have a keen interest in and preferably have written and taught in areas bioethics and environmental studies. We also welcome candidates who have training in such areas as ethics, political philosophy, social and political theory, public policy, or environmental health, who have strong or emerging teaching and research interests in bioethics and environmental studies. Applicants must expect to receive their Ph.D by Fall 2012 or have completed it no more than three years before the start date. We especially urge minority and female candidates to apply.

Fellow philosophers will no doubt be familiar with the curious book, Nudge, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. The book defends “libertarian paternalism” and a view of behavioural economics. While I have not been convinced by its arguments, it is a good read and I’ve half expected Nudge to be the subject of at least a small wave of papers in ethics and political philosophy. I’m not the only one who thought its ideas would find traction: the British government has also commissioned research into how it might “nudge” the public into healthier lifestyles, for example.

This summer Crispin Wright (NIP Director and Professor at NYU) will walk The Pennine Way, 268 miles across the Pennine mountain tops.

The Aim: To raise money to support graduate students from elsewhere to visit the Northern Institute of Philosophy and to support Northern Institute of Philosophy graduate students to visit other institutions. This is in line with a general mission of the Institute to support early career philosophers to develop their interests and skills through collaboration and philosophical interactions. The costs of such visits and exchanges are seldom adequately provided for in the budgets of grant giving authorities, and philosophy departments, even when in principle willing to support research-related travel by graduate students, are less and less able to do so. The hope is to build a Trust Fund at NIP to enable NIP to provide such support as a part of the regular working routine of the Institute.

Robert Talisse and Carrie Figdor have new podcast called New Books in Philosophy. Each episode features an in-depth interview with an author of a newly-published philosophy book. Interviews will be posted on the 1st and 15th of each month. The inaugural interview, posted today, is with Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside), author of Perplexities of Consciousness (MIT Press). An interview with Jerry Gaus (Arizona), author of The Order of Public Reason (Cambridge University Press), will be posted on July 1st. Upcoming podcasts include interviews with Robert Pasnau, Sandy Goldberg, Carolyn Korsmeyer, Fabienne Peter, Jason Brennan, Allen Buchanan, Elizabeth Anderson, and others. You can go to the NBiP site and check out what they are doing.

The Study of Character Website
By S. Matthew Liao

The Character Project at Wake Forest University has launched a new website devoted to the academic study of character and related notions of virtue and vice. The website can be found here: http://www.studyofcharacter.com/

This site presents recent books, journal articles, and events pertaining to research on character, as well as faculty webpages, blogs, centers, encyclopedia entries, and other resources. The focus is on recent work in the fields of psychology, philosophy, and theology. It would certainly be appreciated it if people linked to this page. Also, updates and corrections are welcome; please send any such information to character (at) wfu.edu.

Experimental Month Initiative
By S. Matthew Liao

The Experimental Month Initiative hosts 17 different experimental philosophy studies designed by 29 philosophers, each working on illuminating a different philosophical question.

Please take a moment to help these philosophers out, either by stopping by the Experiment Month website to fill out a brief questionnaire or by spreading the word about these new studies.

The petition can be found here and I urge readers to consider signing it. It makes a point of principle, not politics: that the UK-based Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) — which funds research in areas such as law and philosophy — should remove mention of “The Big Society” in its details of strategic research funding priorities. “The Big Society” was a campaign slogan of the Conservative Party. The principled objection is that the policial campaign slogans of any party should not be included. This would be true if the then AHRB had included “The Third Way” after the 1997 election which saw Tony Blair become Prime Minister. This is not about which political party you prefer, but a statement of principle.

Keele University is considering closing its philosophy department and the Centre for Professional Ethics. Anyone concerned should join the following facebook groups for more details on how they can help fight it.

Save Philosophy at Keele:
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_200915196594313

Save the Centre for Professional Ethics at Keele:
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_200915196594313#!/home.php?s k=group_198239943531734

The Character Project at Wake Forest University is very excited to launch its funding competition entitled “New Frontiers in the Philosophy of Character.” This $300,000 RFP is aimed at work in philosophy on the topic of character, and proposals can request between $40,000 and $100,000 for projects not to exceed one year in duration. We hope to make between 5-6 awards. A residential incentive of $6,000 for one semester or $12,000 for an academic year will be offered to philosophy RFP winners who are willing to move to Wake Forest University during the award period, and this stipend would not count as part of the research funding request. A willingness to move will not be taken into account when evaluating proposals.

I am delighted to announce that the Journal of Moral Philosophy has launched our new online electronic submission system. Please either visit our online submission page to submit new work here.

The JMP normally reviews papers in 6-8 weeks or less. Our acceptance rate is under 8%. We are a quarterly journal of philosophy publishing volume 8 in 2011. For more information, visit our homepage.

Though by no means everyone, a significant of number people I have spoken with about whether the dates for the Eastern APA should be moved have suggested that a plausible alternative may be to move it to sometime in the first two weeks of January.

Liam Shield at Warwick University has compiled a bibliography on sufficientarianism, a position in distributive justice. Those interested in the area may find it to be a helpful resource. The bibliography can be found here.

Liam would be very grateful if anyone has any comments or could suggest any relevant articles, books or book chapters that he has missed. Email suggestions to l.p.shields [at] warwick.ac.uk

Readers are encouraged to visit this link where they can vote for their favourite philosophy journals. The choice is fairly comprehensive with nearly 130 journals listed and more added daily. There have been more than 10,000 votes registered and there will be preliminary results announced here when 50,000 votes is reached. So visit this link — and remember to vote early and often!

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