October 8, 2017
At the top of every discussion thread in r/politics, the reddit forum for U.S. political news with over three million subscribers, there stands an automatically generated message exhorting users to engage one another in a civil manner. In particular it demands: “Attack ideas, not users.”
Well-intentioned as it is, there is surely something amiss in a call to civility which is, at the same time, a call to arms.
To be clear, I am not at all claiming that this message asks users to takes up guns and knives, nor that any sensible person could understand it as an invitation to physical violence – it is ostensibly directed toward peace. What it calls for is an activity modeled on physical violence: it asks users to participate in attacks. The consequences of and alternatives to this framing device deserve consideration...
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September 15, 2017
Probably the most common piece of advice I saw when I was deciding whether to pursue a PhD in philosophy was “don’t.” Data from PhilJobs suggests that the chances of finding a tenure-track academic position after graduating have steadily declined over the past decade from pretty good to about fifty-fifty, and conventional wisdom - certainly that of concerned relatives - held that there was little else a philosophy graduate could reasonably hope to do. More distressingly, career planning site 80,000 Hours tells me that “almost all professional philosophers who have written publicly on this topic advise against aiming to become a philosopher as a career, unless ‘there is nothing else you can imagine doing’.” Given how many times I had made up my mind not to apply, it seems I could at least imagine doing something else. I have just started the second year of my philosophy PhD program. The consensus of smart and sensible people is that I have made a big, stupid mistake.
How did it come to this? I certainly didn’t grow up dreaming of becoming a philosopher – the word had always struck me as not a job title but as an honorific...
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