The Sooty Empiric

    In recent times my online sphere has had a fair few people make the claim that, in some sense, the culture has moved on from Woke. The dates I see often given for the heights of this supposed social phenomenon are 2014-2020, and the thought is there's been a general tapering off since the pandemic of whatever woke was. I actually also feel like I can sense a vibe-shift, but then maybe that's just the very fact that my online circles keep saying as much reflecting back on to me. In any case, people who believe this has occurred have also been offering retrospectives on what they think we have learned from this era and how it will be remembered. I thought I would use my blog to contribute to the genre. So this will be that: some words on what I think wokeness is/was, the extent to which anything has changed, and what lessons will be learned from this. There is actually a small-industry of philosophers trying to define " wokeness " (sometimes " wokeism ") a...

For most of my life I have lived in the UK, but for six years I lived in the United States of America. Somewhat erratic and unpleasant political fortunes on both sides of the Atlantic have me thinking about the differing social models in the two countries, and I am just going to collate some of my impressions here. I will be appealing to various facts and figures but also just my own impressionistic sense of things. The big picture view is that I think that in some ways the USA is in a worse state than the UK, but I would be more optimistic about the USA's future despite that. So the major difference that has basically defined my whole experience of adult life is that since 2008 the British economy has more or less been stagnating when not actually declining. Source . It's not that there's been no growth, it's just been on the whole pretty slow. This is unlike the USA, which has actually experienced periods of sustained economic growth in that time: And, like, you can f...

I recently read and enjoyed  this  dialogue on philosophy grad school and why we have it by Barry Lam . While I enjoyed it and learned from it, I thought I had a slightly different take, so I decided to write my own dialogue on the matter! The two character are called "Grádwuma", pronounced GRAH-dwoo-mah, and "Ɔdɔfírinne", pronounced AW-daw-FEER-in-yeh. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ɔdɔfírinne: They’re trying to defund us, would you believe it!?
 Grádwuma: I would, trusting sort that I am, but all the same I’d feel better if you’d tell me who they are and what they mean to defund.
 Ɔ: Oh, cute — at least when we’re all unemployed you’ll have your career as a comedian to fall back on. G: Working on my tight-five. Ɔ: Well in the meantime, I just got back from faculty senate where I was told that in light of...

Josh Habgood-Coote  recently asked on BlueSky if there's any way of finding the most cited articles in philosophy overall. He noted that a recent informative Weatherson post , who was looking at a slightly different thing - citation networks within philosophy journals. What Habgood-Coote ended up doing was extracting the ten most cited papers from the 2019-2023 period using google scholar, and linked them here . Using my blog to brag a bit, I am happy to see Vindicating Methodological Triangulation there! But I decided I would like to look at something slightly different while we are here having this conversation. I wanted to see what topics philosophers are writing on that are actually getting attention. What are the areas of interest that drive conversation in or through our field, where is it that our work seems to get recognition and uptake, or at least spark conversation? That I thought I could do by looking at some of the highly cited philosophy journals and lookin...

Back when I was in grad school I kept a previous blog that I ended up replacing with this one. The other day I wanted to share Reichenbach's soliloquy that I had previously posted there, so I searched through my old archives to repost it. Along the way I found this old piece, which considering that I was a first or second year grad student when I posted it kind of shocked me by its effrontery. I reproduce below, then follow up with some reflections on what I now think of young me's presuming to give methodological advice to a field he'd made precisely 0 contributions to. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The humanities are often attacked for fairly silly reasons. People don't really understand what goes on therein and they say ignorant things about the scholarship that workers in the humanities produce. What is m...