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A group of bloggers discussing philosophical ideas as well as the profession of philosophy
The Gould (I) Files #2
What’s the ‘I’ for you ask? It’s Friday night. TGIF folks. I’d like to take this opportunity to discuss archival work because I’ve caught archive-fever, as it were. I recently read “Blue Years: An Ethnography of a Prison Archive” by Angela Garcia (Stanford University) published in Cultural Anthropology. Actually, I was fortunate enough to listen […]
The Gould (I) Files #1
February 22, 2019
by Alison K McConwell
What’s the ‘I’ for you may ask? It’s Friday. TGIF. This is the first post of what I hope to be a series tracking my access to archived work by Stephen Jay Gould at the Stanford Special Collections & University Archives. Up to this point my experience with archived and unpublished work in any special collections is limited. […]
Posted in: Philosophy
Top Posts from 2018
December 31, 2018
by APT Editors
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It has been over six and a half years since Justin Caouette founded A Philosopher’s Take. The blog surpassed 400,000 views and a quarter of a million visitors this year. Below we’ve highlighted then 10 most popular posts in 2018, as well as the five most popular posts published in 2018. But this is only […]
Meet ‘Most People’
November 12, 2018
by Aaron Thomas-Bolduc
We often talk about the need for diversity in philosophy in general, but we also need diversity in our lives. (I know it sounds corny, hear me out.) What I mean is that it’s important to have friends and acquaintances from diverse backgrounds and with varying perspectives. This is important when doing research, thinking about […]
Grinworthy Quotes (16): Self-promotion Edition
October 8, 2018
by Aaron Thomas-Bolduc
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I just had a co-authored (with Eamon Darnell) paper that’s based on a chapter of my dissertation (both titled “Is Hume’s Principle Analytic?” — link to preprint of the paper) accepted for publication (yay!). Near the end of the paper, we raise an issue that seems (to me at least) to have been under the surface […]
Congratulations to our Founding Editor: Dr. Justin Caouette
October 2, 2018
by Alison K McConwell
Bridgewater State University recently published a profile of our very own Dr. Justin Caouette outlining what many people close to him already know: Justin is currently making a difference in the lives of students attending BSU. Many of us (myself included) who are first generation college students–students with neither parent having attended college–are often faced […]
Job Market Problems
September 28, 2018
by Aaron Thomas-Bolduc
*Since drafting this post, I have moved to take a temporary job to be near my non-academic partner. I’ve decided to keep this post general, but hope to write about that experience once I’ve settled in properly. In this post, I’m going to talk about a couple of issues with the philosophy job market that […]
A Quick Update From Aaron
July 24, 2018
by Aaron Thomas-Bolduc
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Some of you may have noticed that I haven’t published a blog post in quite a while. There’s a good reason for that: I successfully defended my dissertation last month, and handed in my revisions a couple of weeks ago. That’s right, the whole editorial team here at APT are Doctors of Philosophy in philosophy! […]
Posted in: Aaron Thomas-Bolduc, Blogging
‘Get Out’, ‘Black Lives Matter’, and the Different Dimensions of Racism: Some Parallels to Kate Manne’s Misogyny Concept
July 20, 2018
by Celso Neto
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When a semester is in session I try to avoid reading philosophy outside of work hours. Usually, I prefer easy reads on topics related to science fiction, fantasy, and popular science. But recently I made an exception to this, as I started reading Kate Manne’s Down Girl (OUP 2018). I heard a lot about the […]
Causes in Real Life – How Organizations Perform a Root Cause Analyses (RCA)
July 19, 2018
by Mike Steiner
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Having spent considerable time studying the vexing problems related to causation in philosophy, I was immediately intrigued when I learned that companies and other organizations routinely engage in or perform what they call root cause analyses (RCAs). I recently had the opportunity to take the courses and training in order to perform RCAs, and have […]
Truth and meaning in the age of Trump
July 18, 2018
by Joshua Stein
I learned philosophy of language in the dogmatic antiquity of a couple of years ago. Many of my colleagues and senior philosophers seem still to cling to these dogmas, like “a sentence is made true by its disquotation.” In the now-times, though, it seems especially important to show where we went wrong in developing our […]
Form-Over-Content Morality: Denying Service
June 26, 2018
by James DiGiovanna
Charges of hypocrisy are popular in the current political landscape, and hypocrisy is certainly a vice, if a minor one. But much of what’s going on in these charges is an emphasis on form over content. To say any action is immoral requires an understanding of what it is in reaction to. Spitting in my […]
Turning Bad Rubbish into Good Lessons
May 30, 2018
by Joshua Stein
Alternately titled: What we talk about when we talk about Jordan Peterson. I should begin by saying that all thoughts here are mine. They are not endorsed or shared by the University of Calgary, the Department of Philosophy, or any other group with which I’m affiliated, unless those folks choose to endorse or share them. […]
The Technological Progress of CRISPR-Cas9
May 24, 2018
by janellabaxter
A common misconception about technological advancement is that they are ahistorical revolutions (Cook 1995). On this narrative, technological innovations emerge suddenly, without competition from other extant technologies, and are solely responsible for ushering in rapid, widespread social change. This misconception not only fails to account for the crucial social, political, and moral values that often […]
New Contributor: Janella Baxter
May 24, 2018
by Justin Caouette
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I’m happy to announce yet another solid philosopher to the fold here at A Philosopher’s Take. I had the pleasure of meeting Janella Baxter a few years back at one of our grad conferences here at the University of Calgary. Dr. Baxter is a pleasure to be around and talk philosophy with; here is a […]
Posted in: Janella Baxter, Notes on Contributors
The Moral Value of Compassion
It was an honour to contribute to Justin Caouette and Carolyn Price’s book The Moral Psychology of Compassion. They did an excellent job of putting together such an interesting collection and I’m really happy to have been a part of it. I have also enjoyed the interesting recent exchange on this blog between David Boutland and […]
Books by Contributors
A Philosopher's Take 
March 9, 2019
by Alison K McConwell
Comments Off on The Gould (I) Files #2