Why submit your paper to Thought?

Thought features a quick review time, with a commitment to giving authors a response within eight weeks. Thought is available with a free subscription through the end of 2014 to Libraries so your paper can be read more widely than in other journals.

All submissions are blind reviewed at all stages of the review process. Only papers that exemplify the highest standard of clarity will be published.

A unique reviewing system ensures that each published paper is double reviewed by experts in six relevant subcategories of research, each headed by a sub-editor:

– Philosophy of Logic (JC Beall)
– Philosophy of Maths (Richard Heck)
– Philosophy of Mind (Susanna Siegel )
– Epistemology (Joshua Schechter)
– Philosophy of Language (Richard Heck)
– Metaphysics (Ross Cameron)
– Value Theory (Ralph Wedgwood)

Please review the Thought author guidelines and submit your papers to: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tht

Kit Fine on ‘Truth Making’

In 2011, dialectica held its 2011 annual lecture at the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division conference.

The lecture was given by Kit Fine, who is arguably the most important living philosopher, on the topic of ‘Truth Making’. A podcast of Kit Fine’s lecture is available for free below:

SAP Annual Lecture: Death in Our Life

The 2012 lecture will be given by Professor Joseph Raz on the topic of Death in Our Life.

Tuesday 22nd May 2012
5pm – 6.30pm, Corpus Christi College, Oxford, UK

All are welcome to attend the lecture, which will be followed by a drinks reception for Society for Applied Philosophy members. Find out more here.

Previous Lectures 
2011: The Global Reach of Human Rights, Professor Amartya Sen

2010: Militant Modern Atheism, Professor Philip Kitcher

2009: Measuring Development, Poverty and Gender Equity, Professor Thomas Pogge

2008: Naturalism, Normativity, and Applied Ethics, Baroness Onora O’Neill

 

dialectica Essay Prize – Cognitive Penetration

The dialectica 2012 essay prize topic has been announced! Submit your article on the topic of Cognitive Penetration before November 1st for your chance to win £1,500!

Cognitive penetration refers to the influence of beliefs, expectations, moods, desires or background theories on the content of perceptual processes or conscious experiences. This phenomenon has been in the forefront of the philosophy of science, the philosophy of perception, and the foundations of cognitive science. Philosophers of science have warned that cognitive penetration might threaten the epistemic role of perception as an objective source of knowledge and have used it to explain radical paradigm shifts. Philosophers of perception have tried to characterize the various ways in which perceptual processes or conscious experiences can be altered by other mental states or activities. Cognitive scientists have exploited this phenomenon as a starting point to motivate claims on the architecture of the human mind, including modularity and plasticity.

We invite submissions on any aspect of this phenomenon. Possible questions include: How is the influence of various mental states on perceptual processes or experiences to be characterized in psychological terms? Are there principled differences between the cognitive penetration of conscious experiences and that of subpersonal perceptual processes? What is the impact (if any) of cognitive penetration on the individuation of mental states? What kinds of cognitive penetration are there? Does cognitive penetration lend support to relativism? How does cognitive penetration relate to the confirmation of scientific theories by experience? Does cognitive penetration undermine (or support) some models of perceptual justification? Does the use of instruments to observe phenomena presuppose any form of cognitive penetration? What sorts of evidence can support or disconfirm claims about cognitive penetration? Could it shed new light on Kuhnian incommensurability?

Please send your submissions in pdf format to Philipp Keller, philipp.keller@unige.ch, by the 1st of November 2012. The author of the winning entry will receive £1500. All papers submitted will be considered submissions to the journal and should not be published or under review elsewhere.

Journal of Applied Philosophy 2011 Article Prize Winner

The editors of the Journal of Applied Philosophy are pleased to announce the winner of the 2011 annual article prize. Congratulations to Jakob Elster who was awarded the £1000 prize for his article How Outlandish Can Imaginary Cases Be?

 The Journal of Applied Philosophy will continue to award an annual prize of £1000 to the best article published in the year’s volume. The judgement as to the best article will be made by the editors of the journal; the Society for Applied Philosophy annual lecture, published in the journal, will not be eligible for the prize of best article.

 

Should We Prepare For The End?

New Report Calls for Decriminalisation of Assisted Dying In Canada 

A report commissioned by the Royal Society of Canada, and published earlier this week in the journal Bioethics, claims that assisted suicide should be legally permitted for competent individuals who make a free and informed decision, while on both a personal and a national level insufficient plans and policies are made for the end of life.  

End-of-life decision-making is an issue wrapped in controversy and contradictions for Canadians. The report found that most people want to die at home, but few do; most believe planning for dying is important and should be started while people are healthy, but almost no one does it. And while most Canadians support the decriminalisation of voluntary euthanasia and assisted suicide, both remain illegal under the Criminal Code of Canada. 

The Royal Society of Canada (RSC), a national organisation of distinguished scholars, artists and scientists, believes the time has come for a national debate on end-of-life decision making as assisted dying is a critically important public policy issue, where opinion, practice and the law seem out of alignment. 

Read this report for free now!

The Philosophical Quarterly: From past to present

The first issue of The Philosophical Quarterly was published in October 1950. In the sixty years since, the PQ has established itself as one of the world’s leading general philosophy journals. The journal continues to publish across the full spectrum of academic philosophy, and welcomes original research in all areas of philosophy and its history.

The editorial board have recently compiled this virtual issue to produce a representative sample of the last sixty years. Limiting themselves to two articles for each decade, they sought to give readers a taste of the variety of topics discussed in the journal, and the range of philosophical approaches taken to those issues. As the team find every week, when deciding which articles to publish today, the final choice was not easy. Many wonderful articles missed out. They could, of course, have included more, but wanted the virtual issue to be as close as possible to a real issue. The PQ hope  that their selection will whet your appetites – encouraging you to search back through the PQ archive and discover hidden riches for yourselves.

The virtual issue opens with the editor’s introduction from the first issue, and with a brief piece by Malcolm Knox.

The Virtual Issue

Front Matter
Volume 1: Issue 1, 1950

A Passage in Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’
T. M. Knox
Volume 1: Issue 1, 1950

Feelings
Gilbert Ryle
Volume 1: Issue 3, 1951

Direct Perception
Norman Malcolm
Volume 3: Issue 13, 1953

Aristotle on the Good: A Formal Sketch
Bernard Williams
Volume 12: Issue 49, 1962

Plato’s “Third Man” Argument (PARM. 132A1-B2): Text and Logic
Gregory Vlastos
Volume 19: Issue 77, 1969

The ideas of Power and Substance in Locke’s Philosophy
Michael R. Ayers
Volume 25: Issue 98, 1975

Common Knowledge
Jane Heal
Volume 28: Issue 111, 1978

Epiphenomenal Qualia
Frank Jackson
Volume 32: Issue 127, 1982

What does a concept script do?
Cora Diamond
Volume 34: Issue 136, 1984

A Furry Tile About Mental Representation
Deborah Brown
Volume 36: Issue 185, 1996

Finkish Dispositions
David Lewis
Volume 47: Issue 187, 1997

How to Reid Moore
John Greco
Volume 52: Issue 209, 2002

Kant’s second thoughts on race
Pauline Kleingeld
Volume 57: Issue 229, 2007