It seems that they might.

Matti Eklund, one of the editors of Philosophical Review, emailed me asking for some more detailed number crunching on the Journal Surveys section with respect to Comment Quality Ratings. He wanted to test the hypothesis that philosophers who have papers rejected tend to rate the quality of comments lower. So I did that. The numbers seem to confirm this.

The chart below compares quality of comment ratings for some of the mainstream general journals. The column labeled “All” is the average from all respondents. The column labeled “Initial Reject” averages just the ratings from respondents who received an initial verdict of “Reject” and the column labeled “Initial Accept” averages just the ratings from the respondents who received an initial verdict of “Accept” (Keep in mind the sample sizes for that latter column are low - these journals rarely give out an initial verdict of “Accept”).

What’s interesting is that, while it seems that rejected philosophers tend to rate quality comment lower, there is still marked variance among these journals among rejected philosophers. Also interesting is that Australian Journal of Philosophy and Philosophical Quarterly are both above 3 among rejected philosophers.

Also interesting is the major shift for Philosophical Review. They seemed to be at the bottom in terms of comment quality, but if you look at their average among rejected philosophers and you factor in PR’s very low acceptance rate…you’ll see that looking at the average among ALL respondents for PR would be misleading.

I started the Young Philosophers lecture series at SUNY Fredonia, when I first started a few years ago. Due to lack of funding, we had to suspend the program for a year. But I’m happy to announce that we’re back!

I just posted the Call for Papers. They are due by January 5. Please help me spread the word to other philosophers. Anyone who is A.B.D. or has received their Ph.D. within the last 6 years is eligible.

Get those papers in, and please spread to the word to anyone who might be interested!

Also, I had to re-do the website. The system we were using stop supporting some core functionality, and I couldn’t upload videos anymore or update the site. I did a fresh Wordpress install so we should be good from here on out. Video posting will resume.

Testing this

I recently created a short video that summarizes my lecture on how to write a short 3-5 philosophy paper. I thought I’d share it with people in case they want to use it.

Here are the handouts I give my students.

• Presenting, Explaining, and Evaluating Arguments
• What I’m Looking For
• A Method for Extracting Arguments

NOTE: I can’t really take much credit for the Present, Explain, and Evaluate method outlined here. It’s what I was taught in undergrad. I was surprised to see it taught the exact same way by one of my graduate professors. Then I discovered that similarity is linked to Fred Feldman. All of my professors who taught me this method had connections to him.

UPDATE: Here’s a more visible link to the spreadsheet

I’ve been playing around with Google+ for about a week, and I love it. Since it’s in beta, there isn’t yet a good list feature like on Twitter, and I know philosophers are trying to find other philosophers. So I thought I’d make it easier for us. Fill out the form below, and your name and G+ profile will be dumped into this spreadsheet.

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I recently reviewed John Hick’s Between Faith and Doubt for Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, and I just discovered that it’s already up online.

You can check it out here.

It’s been a little quiet here. I spent the last three weeks at the Purdue Summer Seminar on Knowing in Religion and Morality. It was AWESOME. Met a lot of outstanding philosophers. Had great conversations. Got a lot of great work done.

There need to be more philosophy summer camps. I’m going to work on that. I’m currently looking into trying to set one up at SUNY Fredonia’s college lodge.

Right now I’m thinking of a 10 day philosophers’ seminar/writer’s retreat. We would have discussions/presentations in the morning. We would break and everyone would go write during the afternoon. We’ll see if I can make it happen.

Philosophy Talk is having a contest. You can win their entire archive and come on the show if you win. Details here.

I am very excited to announce that Sympoze is transforming into an even better service for philosophers. We’re going to use it to crowd-source academic peer-review and create a high-quality open-access philosophy journal and high-quality open-access philosophy text books.

I started Sympoze a couple of years ago as a social bookmarking site for philosophers (something like Digg or Reddit for academia). After consultation with several philosophy/academic friends, it became clear that a better use for the social-bookmarking tools I was using would be to turn it into a peer-review service for scholarly publications.

Woot! I just heard from Pacific Philosophical Quarterly. They just accepted a paper I co-authored with Neil Feit titled “When Does Falsehood Preclude Knowledge”.

Here’s the abstract. I’ll post a penultimate version of the paper when I can.

ABSTRACT
Falsehood can preclude knowledge in many ways. A false proposition cannot be known. A false ground can prevent knowledge of a true proposition, or so we argue, but not every false ground deprives its subject of knowledge. A falsehood that is not a ground for belief can also prevent knowledge of a true proposition. This paper aims to provide a systematic account of just when falsehood precludes knowledge, and hence just when it does not. The paper is presented in large part as an approach to the Gettier problem and a search for an adequate theory of knowledge, but we ultimately arrive at a relatively simple theory that has virtues closely connected with many issues at the heart of contemporary epistemology

p.s. We had a really good experience with PPQ, and we had two great referees. Both gave us great feedback. If you’re one of those two referees and you stumble upon this post - Thank You!