PEA Soup

Two options for displaced/refugee academics holding a PhD

The University of Konstanz currently offers two options for displaced researchers/ refugees (holding a PhD). 

(1) At the Zukunftskolleg we will offer up to three Zukunftskolleg Bridge Fellowships for Displaced Researchers (any discipline represented at the University of Konstanz). The positions are available as soon as 1 December 2016 for a maximum of nine months.  Deadline for the applications is 15 September 2016. Please find the job offer attached. We also welcome researcher outside of Germany to apply. 

(2) The Philipp Schwartz Initiative by the Humboldt Foundation provides universities and research institutions in Germany with the means to host threatened foreign researchers for a period of 24 months on a fully funded research fellowship. (https://www.humboldt-foundation.de/web/philipp-schwartz-initiative-en.html) Applications are collected and jointly organized by the Welcome Center. If you have any researcher in mind, please inform the Welcome Center (Johannes DinglerJohannes.Dingler@uni-konstanz.de) by 19 September 2016 so the application can be dealt with within the university before it is passed on to the Humboldt foundation. Deadline for applications is 14 October 2016. Please note: candidates can not apply individually but only through the host organization, i.e. the University of Konstanz.

In both cases you can also contact the Back Office. 

Best,

Daniela

-- 
Dr. Daniela Kromrey
Programme Director for Internationalization
Zukunftskolleg
P.O. Box 216
Office Y 320
Universität Konstanz
78457 Konstanz

Tel. ++ 49 7531 88 5686
Fax. ++ 49 7531 88 4829
Daniela.Kromrey@uni-konstanz.de
http://www.uni-konstanz.de/zukunftskolleg

What does the experimental evidence actually say about the stability of moral intuitions?

Suppose you are sitting at your desk, reflecting on a moral question. Now suppose that as you are reflecting on this question, you happen to be looking around at a somewhat disgusting scene. Perhaps there is a half-eaten apple on the desk, or a bad smell in the room, or maybe you just didn't have an opportunity to wash your hands. 

I sometimes encounter the claim that experimental studies have shown that people's moral intuitions can be pushed around in surprising ways by subtle situational factors like these. It is then sometimes suggested that philosophers need to think more about the deeper philosophical implications of this kind of 'instability' in our moral intuitions.

 

This claim strikes me as a serious misrepresentation of the present state of the empirical literature. In fact, it might be more accurate to say that existing studies provide evidence that these factors do not influence people's moral intuitions. At the very least, it would be hard to deny that a whole bunch of recent studies suggest that people's moral intuitions are surprisingly stable. 

Do we have Vague Projects?

Tenenbaum and Raffman (2012) claim that "most of our projects and ends are vague." (p.99)  But I'm not convinced that any plausibly are.  On my own blog, I recently discussed the self-torturer case, and how our interest in avoiding pain is not vague but merely graded.  I think similar things can be said of other putative "vague" projects.

T&R's central example of a vague project is writing a book:

Suppose you are writing a book. The success of your project is vague along many dimensions. What counts as a sufficiently good book is vague, what counts as an acceptable length of time to complete it is vague, and so on. (p.99)

But it strikes me as strange for one's goal to be to reach some vague level of sufficiency.  When I imagine writing a book, my preferences here are graded: each incremental improvement in quality is pro tanto desirable; each reduction in time spent is also pro tanto desirable.  These two goals seem like they should be able to be traded off against each other -- perhaps precisely, or (if they are not perfectly commensurable goods) then perhaps not, but this sort of rough incomparability between two goods is (I take it) not the same as either good itself being vague.

 

I could imagine a cynical person who really doesn't care to improve the quality of their book above a sufficient level.  Perhaps they just want it to be of sufficient quality to earn a promotion, or some other positive social appraisal.  But these desired consequences are even more clearly not vague.

Submissions to Multiple Journals

[UPDATED WITH A CORRECTION] In my recent summer orgy of refereeing, there were two occasions in which it seemed that an author had simultaneously submitted to different places (in one case it turned out I was mistaken). I know there are movements amongst some folks to allow these, but for now they are against most (if not all) philosophy journal policies, for what I take to be pretty good reasons about the time and energy involved in refereeing and editing that could be wasted (I had one former really placid colleague who got so angry about people engaging in this practice that his face turned red and he banged repeatedly on the poker table).

Now the journal editors I contacted about these cases were very grateful for the information and handled the situation swiftly and delicately. My question here is this: What more could be done to prevent this activity? I'm assuming that editors would want there to be a way to check that submissions are only to their journals. So why not some kind of coordinated private wiki, where, say, the title and the first paragraph of the paper are entered when it's received? Or perhaps there are other solutions? Have editors tried anything? Or do they think this is like voter fraud, happening so infrequently that there's no justification for trying to do anything to prevent it? (I hadn't discovered anything like this before, and I've refereed well over 200 papers). I'm especially interested in hearing from actual journal editors. (I'm also interested in whether other referees have made these discoveries, although that's less important here.)

Call for Participants and Discussants: Climate Ethics and Climate Economics

Call for Participation and Discussants

Climate Ethics And Climate Economics: Fat Tails - Imposing and Redistributing Risks
Workshop at the London School of Economics
Convened by Kai Spiekermann and Jonathan Aldred, supported by the ESRC

14-15 September 2016

Accompanied by public lectures given by Prof Pindyck and Prof Gardiner on the evening of the 13th and 15th of September
The third of six ESRC-funded workshops on Climate Ethics and Climate Economics

We are now looking for participants. Priority will be given to participants willing to act as discussants.

Survey: "What Matters to Philosophers?"

Valerie Tiberius (University of Minnesota and APA Central Division President) seeks input from philosophers about what matters to us. We hope you will consider taking the survey below which only takes about 15 mins. Below are her words about the survey and its point.

Dear Colleague,

As chair of a philosophy department at a large state institution (University of Minnesota), I’ve frequently been called upon to defend philosophy and to justify its place in higher education.  This has made me reflect on what really is worth preserving, celebrating, or (possibly) changing about our field.  To this end I want to solicit the views of my philosophy colleagues in a more systematic way than just asking my Facebook friends, which is what drew me to the project of creating a survey. 

I am now writing to ask you to participate in this (fairly short) survey:  “What Matters to Philosophers”.  Please click the link below to take the survey, or copy it into the location bar of your web browser:

 http://z.umn.edu/PhilosophySurvey

The point of this survey is to gather your views regarding what is valuable in your academic discipline, so that we can address questions about philosophy’s future and its role in the academy on the basis of values we share as a community.