PSA/Request: Recently I got an email from a graduate student asking for advice on getting into public-facing philosophy.
It surprised me I couldn't find a comprehensive list of resources to point him to, so I ended up making my own. I would be happy to learn what I missed! 🧵1/7 My immediate response to the student was that while editors are always open to pitches, it helps to have 1) a track record of prior work to point to and 2) a good sense of the kind of writing that the publication you are pitching tends to publish.

Beyond that: 2/7

📢ing today about a new paper on the x-phi of personal identity I have forthcoming in Phil. Studies.
The title is "One -- but Not the Same". It is coauthored with @byrd_nick, Enoch Lambert, and Matthew Taylor.
Preprint at PhilPapers: philpapers.org/rec/SCHOB-7. Short 🧵 below: How do considerations of norm or moral value bear on ordinary judgments of personal identity?
A popular answer is, "Quite a lot", as moral deterioration seems to make a larger difference than other kinds of psychological change in judgments of a person's continued identity.

Here is one more paper that I have newly forthcoming, co-authored with my brilliant doctoral student Marshall Bierson, on how to understand the way that what a person *thinks* makes a difference to the true description of what they *do*.

philpapers.org/rec/BIEWIT-3 Our focus is on how this idea is developed in Anscombe's early writings, from the first edition of Intention (1957) to 'On Promising and its Justice' (1969), including other important papers like 'On Brute Facts', 'Modern Moral Philosophy', and 'Authority in Morals', as well as /

How do normative considerations influence causal thinking? A short thread on my new experimental paper with Eric Sievers, "Cause, 'Cause', and Norm" (preprint here: philpapers.org/rec/SCHCQA-2). It's got video! To begin, take 30 seconds to watch the following animation, and then ask yourself the following question, which hereafter I'll call "CAUSED":

At the end, which shape caused the triangle to break -- the circle, the square, or both of them?

I agree with much of the argument in this thread by @rinireg. In particular, it's true that the hard work of defending open discussion comes when we have to identify the places where we think such discussion should not, in fact, be tolerated.

BUT.

https://twitter.com/rinireg/status/1280972857271627784

For one thing, a good number of those who are currently defending open discussion really do not think the thing that @rinireg says "almost everyone" agrees on, viz. that there should be exceptions to the norm of permitting open discussion of disagreeable topics.

This is an extremely important point.

I have had SO MANY conversations with junior colleagues who are terrified to give voice to their first-order views of sex & gender or their second-order views concerning the silencing of voices in that 1st-order debate. And it is totally /

https://twitter.com/ChloeReading/status/1163456581029285888

/ impossible for me to understand how anyone could think this is a good thing: those who are in this position are NOT going to have their minds changed by being cowed into silence & told they are bigoted just for thinking what they do.

To the contrary, what actually happens is/

I am going to say one simple thing re this: blog.apaonline.org/2019/08/07/on-… and then step far away from Twitter.

This is that, in my now 20 years of studying, teaching, & attempting to practice philosophy, my experience is that "calling into question ... the validity of [people's] own / / understanding of who they are" is SIMPLY THE THING THAT PHILOSOPHERS DO, and have done fairly consistently since Socrates got put to death for doing it.

No doubt this can be done better and worse, and with more or less concern for those whose self-understanding is at stake /

@r_a_mckinney @H_L_Smith_ That's right, I was just thinking that what I said was overstated somewhat. This charge gets traction when there is some body of specialized knowledge or expertise, for example in logic, linguistics, or some natural science, / @r_a_mckinney @H_L_Smith_ / that is required for engaging with scholarship in the subfield. But nothing like that applies here.

Hey, let me tell you a story. (Thread.) Scene: Oxford, UK. 1956.

"The women are up to something in Convocation", a don at St John's was heard to say to his colleagues; "we have to go and vote them down."