How do you choose wisely? Do you try to figure it all out at once, by consciously considering the pros and cons of every aspect of every option, or do you relax and patiently wait for the decision to pop into your head, already made by your unconscious mind? There …
Did you know of the dining philosophers’ problem? It’s a classic problem in computer science, where it is used to study the sharing of scarce resources among different processes. Five philosophers sit around the table, where they think and eat. (Isn’t that what philosophers do?) There is a fork between …
I’ve been told that a foreign candidate has been hired for a junior philosophy job at the University of Parma. The job offer was advertised a few months ago, in English, in an international philosophy listserv. To my knowledge, this is the first time this has happened in recent years.In …
Amos Elon, “A Shrine to Mussolini,” The New York Review of Books, Vol. 53, N. 3.Relevant personal background: I was born and raised in Italy but moved to the U.S. in 1996. Amos Elon is an Austrian Jew who immigrated to Palestine in 1933, became a major Israeli journalist and …
Thom Brooks, The Postgraduate’s Guide to Getting Published. This is a very helpful guide to getting published as a graduate student. For some commentary on it, see Leiter Reports.Students should also be cautioned not to publish too much too early. If they publish lousy work, it will haunt them for …
Antti Revonsuo, Inner Presence: Consciousness as a Biological Phenomenon, MIT Press, 2006.If you are wondering who Revonsuo is, he is a neuroscientist from Finland. I haven’t read his new book but from the table of contents, it looks like a serious reflection on consciousness from a cognitive neuroscience and neurophysiology …
For the first time, this winter I observed the job market as a member of a search committee. Here are some things I wish someone had told me when I was a job candidate, or even better, when I was a beginning graduate student. Of course, they must be taken …
