Drew

Thank you for the recommendation! In what courses have you assigned it?

A Pedagogy of the Inevitable Over the last couple of years, two altogether incompatible discourses of “AI literacy” have emerged. One seeks just enough literacy to support a smooth, perhaps even joyful, integration with new techn...

Nothing I love more than a scathing, borderline-petty academic book review. Truly the best tradition in the genre.

One thing that helps me write easily is imagining I’m writing to my students. But I worry that material generated under this guise doesn’t constitute a good basis for revision. Maybe it’s too simple, or too unengaged with the literature to be a useful first draft. Thoughts?

So goes a lot of advice for writing: get something on the page, have a shitty first draft, etc. I really struggle with getting things on the page. I don’t struggle with jotting ideas down, but I do struggle with getting the engine really running, the paragraphs really flowing.

Teaching Dennett this week in intro. In his gloss of the “making mistakes” thinking tool, he writes: my students “get ‘writer's block’ and waste hours forlornly wandering back and forth on the starting line. "Blurt it out!" I urge them. Then they have something on the page to work with.”

Congrats, Thi!! Can’t wait to read it and start getting it for people 🤙

Call for papers for March 2026 undergraduate philosophy conference at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island.

Please share this CFP for our undergraduate philosophy conference at Providence College this coming March! Submission deadline is January 12. Encourage your philosophy undergrads (majors, minors, or elective) to submit to this interdisciplinary conference. @apaphilosophy.bsky.social

@apaphilosophy.bsky.social

I’m motivated to ask because in my ethics course this fall I’ve had some dud reading assignments. Readings that are arguably very significant to the field and history of the field, but nonetheless are hard for students to grasp or feel interested about.

Question for teaching philosophers: what texts do you teach that get your undergraduate students most excited?

Obviously lots of room for disabusing them of perspectives that philosophy is only and ever about first questions or ultimately method-less, but then that’s not very fun at a party. Usually examples are best in that setting (or any setting)!

Also, I don’t often find that saying I’m a philosopher shuts down party convos—much the opposite! People are like, “So, what’s the meaning of life.” Or, if they have familiarity with empirical research, they’ll say, “So can’t anyone just disagree with you and then that’s that?”

I often find it hard to explain at parties what I do; I really like Robin McKenna’s elaboration here of what epistemologists do. Moral epistemology seems to open a whole other bag of worms at parties, though.