Wait... maybe we should apply for these!?

Umeå University is advertising two assistant professor positions in the humanities: www.umu.se/en/work-with... I was a postdoc at Umeå and it's a great place to work! @ethannowak.bsky.social would back me up on this.

Why do people think there's conceptual inflation when there isn't? We suggest that it is, in part, just due to the diversity in language use. There is an assumption that drives me up the wall behind a lot of these complaints. People seem to think each word can only have this one meaning.

Oh yeah, nice!

@liao.shen-yi.org and my op-ed version of "Measuring Conceptual Inflation: The Case of 'Racist'" is up at New Work in Philosophy, thanks @marcusarvan.bsky.social! newworkinphilosophy.substack.com/p/measuring-...

Philosophy job in beautiful Lund 🇸🇪 lu.varbi.com/en/what:job/... #philjobs

This is the last of the trilogy that @nathansen.bsky.social and I have on conceptual inflation critiques and the word 'racist'. All the articles are open access. Download them all via the following DOIs, nerds! 1. doi.org/10.1017/apa.... 2. doi.org/10.3998/ergo... 3. doi.org/10.7015/JEAS...

Me and @nathansen.bsky.social has a paper called "Conceptual Inflation" that is now officially published by the TWese open access journal EurAmerica*. We do some natural history of critiques in this vicinity (cf. "concept creep"). We disentangle things people might mean by "conceptual inflation".

I had no idea this existed until now, and thought I had a good education: Mel Brooks' 1963 The Critic (h/t @kellylink.bsky.social ) www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pram...

This paper is amazing. Highly recommend

This is a big chunky paper! My favorite parts are at the end, when we give our account of why people think "racist" is being conceptually inflated when we haven't found evidence that it is.

Thanks to a suggestion from Ángel Pinillos, I gave the Big Five personality test to some of the philosopher personas that are at the heart of the ux-phi.com simulations: Thrasymachus, Socrates, G.W.F. Hegel, J.L. Austin, G.E.M. Anscombe, and Iris Murdoch.

"High Standards" is advance access in PPR (doi.org/10.1111/phpr...). Argues against the view that 'rational' and (moral) 'good' are maximum-standard gradable adjectives and sketches an alternative view on which these adjectives have non-maximal but normatively demanding standards. 2/3

Marking season

Last week I taught the part of Plato's Phaedrus where Socrates argues speech is superior to writing because writing can't argue back. I think Socrates is half right (Phaedrus's scroll can't argue back) so I made a version of the Phaedrus that *can* argue back: www.ux-phi.com/class/BLUESK...

I'm teaching 1984 and since we already ask our students to submit their work to an automated plagiarism detector, I thought I would make one for thoughtcrime: www.nat-hansen.com/minitrue Paste your work or bio to identify how much crimethink is in it and get a certified thoughtcrime-free version.

Nerds: This is basically an amazing open ended RPG set in important scenes in philosophical history. Pedagogy nerds: This is like Reacting (to the Past) simulations but single player. And philosophy. It’s not generic LLM generated but based on lots of research into academic and popular sources.

I made some playable philosophy simulations: -Oxford 1952 -Republic Book I -Jena 1799 -Paris 1945 www.ux-phi.com

New! Interactional foundations for critical AI literacies doi.org/10.5281/zeno... Why do Anthropic engineers talk to Claude as a witch-doctor to his potions? How is prompt engineering like spider divination? Can one reason without reasons? ft. Lovelace, Adorno, Suchman, Weizenbaum & many more ☺️

I built a text based simulation of 1952 Oxford where you can argue with Austin, Hare, Strawson, etc. and I'm trying to convince them that they should think about making searchable bodies of ordinary language using the computers that Alan Turing is working on and they're laughing at me:

The next round of Zed and my work on aesthetic judgment and conversation: inspired by Susan Sontag we make the case for "seriousness" in aesthetic judgment and against vibing, communitarianism and the "omnivore monoculture". onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

This is just another way of saying that I love mixed methods work, I guess. Archival research? Yes! Data collection? Yes! Quantitative analysis? Yes! Close reading? Yes! Case studies? Yes! Theoretical speculation? Yes! Let’s do it all why not

Twin peaks: The Return

This looks like a fascinating study both of what gentrification is and also of the stakes of expanding the meaning of political terms!

This is a fantastic paper!

To celebrate the launch of the xphi-journal and kick-off our talk series, we are happy to invite everyone to this talk by Edouard Machery. ruhr-uni-bochum.zoom-x.de/j/6780355881...

Reposting this convo with @xphilosopher.bsky.social about some evidence from conversations with participants that fits with the "truthfulness" finding in the recent Zyglewicz, Reuter, and Mandelbaum paper:

Beautiful experimental philosophy paper on what people ordinarily mean when they say that a statement is “true” Turns out it’s not always about corresponding correctly to the facts. Sometimes it’s more closely related to a moral ideal of “truthfulness” philarchive.org/archive/ZYGTJN

Hey @liao.shen-yi.org here's another new journal for your diamond open access file

It's a pleasure to argue aesthetics with @nickriggle.bsky.social!

Even with pretty extensive interventions (nearly hour long scripted conversations with participants where they were asked to explain their responses and consider disagreement) we also found it hard to find any effect: academic.oup.com/book/57562/c...

For people who like spicy

I'm interested in different methodologies in the humanities, so I wrote a review of Jonathan Kramnick's *Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies* for the British Journal of Aesthetics, which is now in an issue: philpapers.org/archive/HANC...

I agree! And sometimes you have more freedom to write a proper essay as a book review than in a peer-reviewed article.

Please share!

I think the best feature of Bluesky is the option of non-black-box algorithmic feeds. I haven't built a useful one but others have. So I want to share three that I use the most. First, Philosophy Papers by @catsaintcroix.bsky.social . Does it what it says. bsky.app/profile/cats...

Experimental philosophers: what do we do with this?

The new journal EXPERIMENTAL PHILOSOPHY will soon be accepting submissions!

Call for papers: Experimental argument analysis: Interdisciplinary perspectives on verbal reasoning. Deadline: 30 April 2026. Guest editors: Eugen Fischer and Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga. Submit your work! think.taylorandfranc... #philsoc #philpsy

amazing review essay alert! a pleasure to read, to edit, to work with @nathansen.bsky.social ✨

I wrote about two recent books that offer advice on how to pay attention to art in the midst of *gestures broadly at everything* Thanks to the awesome editors at the @mid-theory.bsky.social for their interest in this piece, they’re great to work with!

Yes, I think there have been more and more good subdiscipline open access journals. They are all worth taking seriously!! A partial list: liao.shen-yi.org/openaccess/ I've also tried to, individually, submit more to these journals.

Really enjoyed this essay J.D.! Goodreads should hire you guys to make data viz for readers—it'd be appealing to have graphs like this on profile pages

Kind of what the book I’m working on is about

Really excited to see this piece come out! Studying eclectic readers has been a fascinating and extremely rewarding challenge. We wound up operationalizing both genre and eclecticism in ways that (classic DH stuff here) point to the limits of both concepts. culturalanalytics.org/article/1429...

1/ I'm excited to share our new open‑access paper in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy (with Leda Berio, Benedict Kenyah‑Damptey, Steffen Koch & Alex Wiegmann). Part of an ongoing project in comparative philosophy of race, exploring the peculiar & often fraught dynamics of race talk in Europe.

We're delighted to welcome @kathrynbfrancis.bsky.social to the position of Senior Researcher in Moral Psychology and Design Bioethics, at the Uehiro Oxford Institute. Read more about Kathryn here: www.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/people/dr-ka... #morality #emergingtech #ethics #welcome

Call for papers : Stanley Cavell at 100 - UMR 8103 - ISJPS isjps.pantheonsorbonne.fr/actualite/ap...