Blogosphere

I’m looking for one or two graduate students to take over the technical nuts and bolts administration of the website, i.e., sign up new members, keep the site WordPress and theme up-to-date, fix broken links, keep a lookout for new plugins and capabilities that we could incorporate into the website, and the like. Such a person or persons should have the following qualities:

• Relatively advanced technical competence regarding WordPress, blogging, the ability to write/fix code, etc.
• Commitment to academic political philosophy/theory.
• General togetherness, punctuality, reliability, etc.

There is little prospect of any meaningful remuneration, but it should provide the opportunity to become more involved in the political philosophy community and play an important role in interesting new initiatives. Since the website is international, you needn’t be located in the US. I’d be especially interested if some graduate students located at a single institution were to work together to keep things ticking along smoothly, although it shouldn’t be an onerous responsibility for a single person.

If you’re interested, please send me a CV, some evidence regarding your technical expertise, and any feasible ideas/thoughts you may have about how the website could be improved. Ideally, I’d like to sort this out by the end of the month.

Tim Scanlon has an essay up at Boston Review on libertarianism and liberty:

“Libertarianism presents itself as a simple, clear, and principled view. It appears to provide a moral basis, in the value of individual liberty, for a specific political program of limited government and low taxes. The moral significance of liberty seems obvious even to those who believe it is not the only thing that matters. But the claim of the libertarian political program to be founded on this value is illusory. Three lines of thought lead to conclusions that might be seen as libertarian. But none of these shows that respect for the value of individual liberty should lead one to support the political program of low taxes and limited government that libertarians are supposed to favor.”

Replies by Will Wilkinson and Brad DeLong are forthcoming tomorrow, with a response from Scanlon.

Hello Public Reasoners!

I write to announce a new podcast, New Books in Philosophy. Carrie Figdor (U of Iowa) and I co-host the podcast, and 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. Please click over to the NBiP site, and check out what we’re doing.

Here’s a link to the interview with Eric Schwitzgebel.

Cheers,
–Robert Talisse

This summer, the Association for Political Theory will host its first virtual reading group (VRG). The purpose of the virtual reading group is to create a space for a profession-wide discussion on topics of shared interest to political theorists and philosophers, a discussion that will culminate in a round-table discussion during the meeting itself.  All members of APT are invited to participate, including those who will not be able to participate in the conference this year.  Part of the purpose of the virtual reading group is to expand the reach of the high quality conversations among APT members beyond the physical space of the conference.

The 2011 APT Program Committee has selected Martha Nussbaum’s Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities as the subject of discussion.  We believe that the themes of the book connect to the professional, pedagogical, and political concerns that are of interest to many members of the organization, and we hope that Not for Profit will serve as a launching pad for a broader discussion in the profession.

APT members can participate in the VRG at http://aptvrg2011.blogspot.com/ , by submitting comments to the blog (please note that comments cannot be anonymous). Each week, from June 6-August 5, 2011, participants will discuss a new chapter of the book.  All members of APT are invited to participate in virtual discussion.  The VRG will culminate in a round-table session at the annual conference in October featuring Fred Dallmayr (University of Notre Dame) and Arlene Saxonhouse (University of Michigan).  Both the virtual reading group and the round-table session will be co-chaired by Lisa Ellis and Peyton Wofford of Texas A&M University.

Our conversations will get started each week by a guest commentator who will post some reflections and provocations about the chapter.  Then, APT members are invited to participate in the reading group by reading the relevant chapters and posting on the blog.

[APT membership is free; to join, please click this link.]

The schedule is below the fold:

Read the rest of this entry »

A quick note that What Is It Like to Be a Woman in Philosophy? is back in business, along with a new site: What We’re Doing About What It’s Like.

It’s no doubt impossible to sum up the problems facing women in academia in general and philosophy in particular in any neat way, but the experiences recorded on WIILTBAWIP? strike me as essential reading for anyone thinking about this issue.

(See also a short article in The Philosophers’ Magazine about women in philosophy.)

Via Jason Swadley at Brown, a new online political philosophy quarterly: The Art of Theory. This issue contains an interview with Michael Sandel, pieces by John McCormick and Sharon Krause, and a roundtable discussion of Ryan Patrick Hanley’s Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue.

Hello Public Reasoners,Simon has graciously given me permission to use my posting privileges here to tell you about a new group blog that I’ve started, along with Jason Brennan, Andrew J. Cohen, Jacob Levy, Daniel Shapiro, and James S. Taylor.  It’s called “Bleeding Heart Libertarians.”  It is, in the words I used in our inaugural post, a blog that is meant to serve as a “forum for academic philosophers who are attracted both to libertarianism and to ideals of social or distributive justice.”  If that’s of interest to you, you might want to check it out.

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!

Nominations Open: 21-31 August 2010

Via Abbas Raza, 3 Quarks Daily – the website you should be reading if you are not already — are hosting their second annual prize for the best blog writing in philosophy. Akeel Bilgrami will be the judge. The details of last year’s contest are here. You can nominate blog posts written in English in the last year and not longer than 4000 words.

Via Edward Lewis, the first part of a two-part interview with Stuart White on political philosophy and the left at the New Left Project. Topics include Cohen on luck egalitarianism and freedom.

Josh Cohen and Tom Nagel have a piece in the TLS and Times Online on Rawls’s senior thesis on sin and faith. The piece is part of a longer introduction to A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith, which also includes Rawls’s 1997 piece, “On My Religion.” I’ve shared the uneasiness felt by some about the posthumous publication of a senior thesis, but from what Cohen and Nagel discuss there are a number of interesting anticipations of ideas later worked out in a secular form in Theory and Political Liberalism, particularly the rejection of teleology and a vivid sense of the arbitrariness of merit.

Also by Cohen, Boston Review have forwarded two recent pieces on libertarianism and on the technology, journalism, and democracy that may be of interest to people.

A new philosophy of science group blog, “It’s Only a Theory,” has started up. Contributors so far include Otavio Bueno (Miami), Craig Callender (UCSD), Gabriele Contessa (Carleton), Roman Frigg (LSE), Marc Lange (UNC), Chris Pincock (Purdue), Stathis Psillos (Athens), Mauricio Suarez (Madrid), and Michael Weisberg (Pennsylvania).