Valerie Tiberius on the well-being of philosophy

A  fascinating, rich discussion of what is good for philosophy’s well-being.  She approaches this in the same way that she approaches the issue of how friends should advise one another.

 

Given my research, I started thinking… what if PHILOSOPHY were my friend?  I might worry.  Philosophy, what are you doing with your life?  You’re in the news, and not in a good way.

Thinking about philosophy as my friend led me to wonder what would happen if I took my own approach to helping and applied it here.  And that led me to creating a survey, which I hope many of you saw at the end of last summer (2016), called “The Value of Philosophy Survey”.  As I would do if I were approaching an individual friend in need of help, I wanted to know:  what are your values, philosophy?  As is inevitable, I came to the encounter with my own values to discover what we have in common, philosophy and I.  Given my own research and experience, I had particular interests in interdisciplinarity and in how philosophy engages with questions and problems that matter to people beyond philosophy.  Looking at the discipline, I thought diversity was another value worth considering.  I also convened an advisory board of people from different types of institutions and with different backgrounds who helped me generate more questions, and then I tried to reach as many participants as possible.

Do read it!

Women in academia do more service

“We find strong evidence that, on average, women faculty perform more service than male faculty in academia, and that the service differential is driven particularly by participation in internal rather than external service,” the study says. “When we look within departments — controlling for any type of organizational or cultural factor that is department specific — we still find large, significant differences in the service loads of women versus men.”

Read on.