Doctoral graduates in philosophy are an excellent source of information about the discipline: they are at the cutting edge of research trends, have an inside view of researchfocused departments, and their employment prospects provide early insights on the future health of the discipline. We report on the results of a survey sent to recent PhD graduates and current students, as well as data gathering efforts by Academic Placement Data and Analysis that have taken place over the past ten years. In (...) this report we especially focus on demographic representation, program ratings, academic job placement, and non-academic careers. (shrink)

Empirical evidence indicates that women philosophers tend to submit their work to journals substantially less often than their male colleagues. This paper points out that this difference in submission behavior comes with other specific aspects of women philosophers’ behavior, such as a tendency to be reluctant to participate in discussions, to be willing to do work low in prestige, and to specialize in certain research topics, and it argues that these differences can be understood as indirect effects of social biases: (...) namely, effects on the working behavior of members of targeted social groups. Recent findings from philosophy journals’ book review sections and from other academic disciplines known to suffer from gender problems, especially from STEM disciplines, lend additional weight to this hypothesis. (shrink)

Simple regression (regression analysis with a single explanatory variable), and multiple regression (regression models with multiple explanatory variables), typically correspond to very different biological questions. The former use regression lines to describe univariate associations. The latter describe the partial, or direct, effects of multiple variables, conditioned on one another. We suspect that the superficial similarity of simple and multiple regression leads to confusion in their interpretation. A clear understanding of these methods is essential, as they underlie a large range of (...) procedures in common use in biology. Beyond simple and multiple regression in their most basic forms, understanding the key principles of these procedures is critical to understanding, and properly applying, many methods, such as mixed models, generalised models, and causal inference using graphs (including path analysis and its extensions). A simple, but careful, look at the distinction between these two analyses is valuable in its own right, and can also be used to clarify widely-held misconceptions about collinearity (correlations among explanatory variables). There is no general sense in which collinearity is a problem. We suspect that the perception of collinearity as a hindrance to analysis stems from misconceptions about interpretation of multiple regression models, and so we pursue discussions about these misconceptions in this light. In particular, collinearity causes multiple regression coefficients to be less precisely estimated than corresponding simple regression coefficients. This should not be interpreted as a problem, as it is perfectly natural that direct effects should be harder to characterise than univariate associations. Purported solutions to the perceived problems of collinearity are detrimental to most biological analyses. (shrink)

This paper examines the role of prestige bias in shaping academic philosophy, with a focus on its demographics. I argue that prestige bias exacerbates the structural underrepresentation of minorities in philosophy. It works as a filter against (among others) philosophers of color, women philosophers, and philosophers of low socio-economic status. As a consequence of prestige bias our judgments of philosophical quality become distorted. I outline ways in which prestige bias in philosophy can be mitigated.

Recently, researchers have begun to empirically investigate the gender gap in philosophy and provide potential explanations for the underrepresentation of women in philosophy relative to their representation in other disciplines. This empirical research as well as research on the gender gap in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics fields has shed light on a priori, armchair explanations of the gender gap. For example, implicit bias and stereotype threat may contribute much less to the philosophy gender gap than previously thought. However, new (...) candidate contributing factors have emerged. Drawing on the theoretical resources concerning fixed mindsets in response to difficult tasks, a new theory suggests that practitioners in various fields, including philosophy, hold the belief that success in their fields requires natural brilliance. Further, the extent to which members of a field hold that belief predicts the diversity of the members of that field. Initial findings suggest that among the set of students who hold these beliefs, women are disproportionately disinterested in continuing in philosophy. Other hypotheses seem plausible, such as the idea that lay people hold gendered schemas about philosophy, but require more empirical support to be partial explanations. Future empirical research should focus on these plausible hypotheses, replications of previous findings, and investigating the effects of intersectionality within the gender gap. (shrink)

This volume consists of the first of the John Dewey Lectures delivered under the auspices of Columbia University's Philosophy Department as well as other essays by the author. Intended to clarify the meaning of the philosophical doctrines propounded by Professor Quine in 'Word and Objects', the essays included herein both support and expand those doctrines.

This article is a data-driven critique of The Philosophical Gourmet Report, the most institutionally influential publication in the field of Anglophone philosophy. The PGR is influential because it is perceived to be of high value. The article demonstrates that the actual value of the PGR, in its current form, is not nearly as high as it is assumed to be and that the PGR is, in fact, detrimental to the profession. The article lists and explains five objections to the methods (...) and methodology of the report. Taken together, the objections demonstrate that the report is severely flawed, failing to provide the information it purports to and damaging the profession overall. Finally, the article explains how several modifications may improve the PGR so that it can more legitimately and equitably play the role it already plays. (shrink)

If contemporary analytic philosophy can be said to have a philosophical ideology, it undoubtedly is naturalism. Naturalism is often invoked as a motivating ground for many philosophical projects, and “naturalization” programs abound everywhere, in theory of knowledge, philosophy of mind, theory of meaning, metaphysics, and ethics. But what is naturalism, and where does it come from? This paper examines the naturalism debate in midtwentieth-century America as a proximate source of contemporary naturalism. Views of philosophers like Roy Wood Sellars, John Dewey, (...) John Herman Randall, Sydney Hook, and Ernest Nagel are cited, and some of the central tenets of naturalism, such as an adherence to “scientific method” as the sole source of knowledge and the causal/ explanatory closure of the natural world, are explored. The paper ends with a brief discussion of how certain naturalistic constraints lead to some of the problems currently debated in metaethics and philosophy of mind. (shrink)

On the surface, developing a social psychology of science seems compelling as a way to understand how individual social cognition – in aggregate – contributes towards individual and group behavior within scientific communities (Kitcher, 2002). However, in cases where the functional input-output profile of psychological processes cannot be mapped directly onto the observed behavior of working scientists, it becomes clear that the relationship between psychological claims and normative philosophy of science should be refined. For example, a robust body of social (...) psychological research demonstrates implicit gender bias in the evaluation of others (e.g., Steinpreis, Anders, & Ritzke, 1999). Many expected implicit bias to be a major cause of women’s underrepresentation in math intensive fields of science; however, quantitative sociological research of hiring and manuscript and grant evaluation has discovered no gender disparity in outcomes (Ceci & Williams, 2011). Why might this be so? This paper will discuss methodological challenges that go beyond classic problems of external validity in extrapolating psychological effects and explanations to scientific communities. These problems include more complex external validity issues raised by the introduction of multi-process models of cognition (e.g., implicit versus explicit social cognition) as well as the reflexive role that folk and experimental theories of social psychology play in guiding the behavior of scientists at the individual and community level. (shrink)

This volume covers the period between the 1890s and 1930s, a period that witnessed revolutions in the arts and society which set the agenda for the rest of the century. In philosophy, the period saw the birth of analytic philosophy, the development of new programmes and new modes of inquiry, the emergence of phenomenology as a new rigorous science, the birth of Freudian psychoanalysis, and the maturing of the discipline of sociology. This period saw the most influential work of a (...) remarkable series of thinkers who reviewed, evaluated and transformed 19th-century thought. A generation of thinkers - among them, Henri Bergson, Emile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Karl Jaspers, Max Scheler, and Ludwig Wittgenstein - completed the disenchantment of the world and sought a new re-enchantment. (shrink)

We present several quantitative analyses of the prevalence and visibility of women in moral, political, and social philosophy, compared to other areas of philosophy, and how the situation has changed over time. Measures include faculty lists from the Philosophical Gourmet Report, PhD job placement data from the Academic Placement Data and Analysis project, the National Science Foundation's Survey of Earned Doctorates, conference programs of the American Philosophical Association, authorship in elite philosophy journals, citation in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and (...) extended discussion in abstracts from the Philosopher's Index. Our data strongly support three conclusions: (1) Gender disparity remains large in mainstream Anglophone philosophy; (2) ethics, construed broadly to include social and political philosophy, is closer to gender parity than are other fields in philosophy; and (3) women's involvement in philosophy has increased since the 1970s. However, by most measures, women's involvement and visibility in mainstream Anglophone philosophy has increased only slowly; and by some measures there has been virtually no gain since the 1990s. We find mixed evidence on the question of whether gender disparity is even more pronounced at the highest level of visibility or prestige than at more moderate levels of visibility or prestige. -/- . (shrink)