“Lovely justified true belief you have there. . . . It would be a real shame if it weren’t knowledge.”

:(

"A university, at its best, is just a place carefully set up to allow other things to happen within. Beyond that, it does not have a role, a goal, a purpose, an identity, an agenda. It is not 'for' anything – except academic inquiry and excellence – or 'against' anything."

TL;DR: Even the most advanced language models crumble on first-person false beliefs, showing sharp accuracy drops and revealing that their “understanding” of others’ minds is still shallow pattern mimicry, not genuine epistemic reasoning. www.nature.com/articles/s42...

The day will include a panel discussion featuring APA board members & @udelphilosophy.bsky.social faculty; lightning presentations on topics connected to philosophy & issues of public interest; the annual APA lecture by @amiethomasson.bsky.social (Dartmouth College); and trivia night (with prizes!).

Join us on Friday, November 21 for a day of events celebrating the APA's 125th anniversary and 50 years of the APA at the @udelaware.bsky.social! Pre-registration is encouraged but not required. bit.ly/491r2RY

Studying social sciences & humanities makes students more left-leaning, controlling for initial views & major preference, driven by cultural views. Implies that if all students majored in business, college–noncollege ideological gap would shrink by 1/3 papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

APA member Anastasia Berg (University of California, Irvine) has an op-ed in the New York Times on why AI use is bad for students. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/29/o...

"Emails seen by the Guardian show staff grappling with how to manage the relationship with China. In September 2024, the university informed Chinese state security that it would not be publishing a final phase of research on forced labour in China. 'Immediately, relations improved,' an admin wrote."

Chris Ranalli and I have a new paper in the International Journal for the Study of Skepticism. We argue that philosophical scepticism need not lead to political conservatism. We also suggest that scepticism may support an anti-political stance that is worth cultivating. brill.com/view/journal...

It's insane that this even needs to be said. “A free country does not dispatch police in the dead of night to pull people from their homes because a sheriff objects to their social media posts,” @adamsteinbaugh.bsky.social speaking to @willoremus.com. www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/...

Gary Marcus was right.

Opinion | Faculty members are finally beginning to speak out about grade inflation.

Reading a summary is not the same as reading an argument. All the steps that come before writing--coming up with ideas, figuring out how they fit together, drafting--that's the important work, not the stuff we outsource to make time for the important work. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/29/o...

“Massacres of civilians in Darfur this week have become so extensive that the pools of blood in the streets can be detected from space.” www.theglobeandmail.com/world/articl... #KeepEyesonSudan

New in #Academe: Judith A. Wilde and James H. Finkelstein examine how executive search firms have played a significant, often underexamined, role in the erosion of shared governance and the corporatization of American higher education.

New episode (1168), with Dr. Jeff McMahan. We discuss the #ethics of political violence, and whether it can be justified. #Philosophy #politics YouTube: youtu.be/xCgL_5xitko Podcast: tinyurl.com/yc26wjkv

"Oh, you study philosophy? Cool! So which area of the philosophy of AI and emerging technologies is your specialty?" - airplane seat partner conversations 10 years from now, probably

"Ilya Shapiro was investigated for several months by his employer for a tweet deemed racist. . . .Bright Sheng was penalized . . for showing . . . Laurence Olivier in blackface. These were open-and-shut violations of academic freedom. FIRE intervened in both cases, the AAUP in neither."

“In particular, assertion in philosophical contexts is not governed by a norm that requires us to be in any particular doxastic state with respect to the asserted content.”

vibing www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hqK...

why didn't we think of this?

"Ilya Shapiro was investigated for several months by his employer for a tweet deemed racist. . . .Bright Sheng was penalized . . for showing . . . Laurence Olivier in blackface. These were open-and-shut violations of academic freedom. FIRE intervened in both cases, the AAUP in neither."

This is putting it mildly: "The AAUP’s construal of FIRE as primarily devoted to right-wing causes is difficult to square with the evidence." www.chronicle.com/article/two-...

My whole FB feed is now things like this. Obviously a cheating tool but also worth noting so many of these have this messaging--if you don't cheat, you'll be "left behind" (and also that "work smarter, not harder" is shorthand for "don't work at all")

“In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously to a) counter the technology industry's marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity.” philarchive.org/rec/GUEATU

If you're doing *any* out of class assessment, you're incentivizing AI use and harming students who do the work themselves. But some day we have to assess writing again. The solution is monitored computer-labs. What Universities are building these? We need to push for them.

The @aaup.org needs a new social media manager (and new management in general if it thinks these (from Twitter/X) are a good idea).

Very pleased that my Cambridge Element, The Indispensability of Intuitions, is now available. Free to download for the next two weeks. Check it out! doi.org/10.1017/9781... #philosophy #epistemology #philosophyofmind

The @aaup.org needs a new social media manager (and new management in general if it thinks these (from Twitter/X) are a good idea).

There will be fewer PhD students admitted to Harvard over the next couple of years...

Delaware FTW

Long and interesting review in TLS.

New version of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Dualism is now live! This update was a huge job, and there’s still plenty I’d like to improve in the next version, but this will have to do until 2030. plato.stanford.edu/entries/dual...

Postman (1985) really diagnosed so much of our situation.

"If you aspire to team up with notable heroes of the campus free speech movement... you need to take a loyalty oath." The oath is "logically self-contradictory and the act of requiring people to take it self-defeating," argues one philosopher...

Just learned you can search ads on FB and did adeep dive into the Perplexity ads. One of the most depressing: a student talking about "unfair standards" in which his prof "rants" about AI but was on LinkedIn asking for a Comet invite and so now this (fake) student will be using AI for everything. /1

The inimitable Joseph Heath, on populism as anti-cognitive elitism josephheath.substack.com/p/populism-f...

cheating machine which helps you cheat yourself out of learning

A Texas public university administrator's notes for a meeting with faculty. "No daylight": faculty "cannot discuss or teach anything regarding transgender - only male and female." They must "scrub" syllabi for "transgender items." And keep everything out of writing: "Don't email; talk directly."