In the small ads. section of Private Eye #1327, just under an advert for a book of ‘witty toilet graffiti’, is an unusual entry:

A question that crosses quite a few minds from time to time, given that academic jobs are (1) fewer than the people qualified to do them and (2) haunted by bureaucracy and political interference: what are the prospects for living a life of philosophical dialogue and enquiring research without institutional affiliation? In early 2010 Justine Johnstone …

Here are some recent book titles: Philosophy After Hiroshima (2009); Moral Philosophy After 9/11 (2005); Ethics for a Broken World: Imagining Philosophy After Catastrophe (2011); The Contract of Mutual Indifference: Political Philosophy After the Holocaust (1999); Ethics After the Holocaust: Perspectives, Critiques, and Responses (1999); The Double Binds of Ethics After the Holocaust: Salvaging the Fragments …

I’ve been correcting the typesetters’ proofs for Getting ‘Virtual’ Wrongs Right, which is basically an extended gripe at the way in which loose talk of ‘virtual murder’ and the like managed to migrate from tabloid headlines to ethics papers. (The final, typeset version will be paywalled somewhere; I’m more sanguine than usual about this aspect of …

Google reports about 8,190 results for the search term "ethics, broadly construed". Even allowing for the fact that some of those are for more specific variants like ‘business ethics broadly construed’ (and for the schism which has evidently opened between those who embrace the comma and those who decline), it’s a fair number. I wonder how …

Two old, two new, and please don’t mention sprite colour limitations.

I shall be doing some part-time Philosophy teaching again this academic year, and the start of term at Durham is fast approaching. What news comes from elsewhere in the sector to fill us with optimistic keenness and pedagogical vigour? This news:

Let’s assume that poisoning your child is wrong, whether it’s wilfully or negligently done. Let’s further posit, as many people do, that a foetus has broadly comparable moral standing to that of a baby after birth. Some possible implications...?

Young Bucky was... influenced by one strong female ancestor, his great-aunt Margaret Fuller... Her platform for change was the written word, and in conjunction with her good friend the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller founded the Transcendentalist literary magazine The Dial... Although she died decades before Bucky’s birth, Margaret Fuller’s influence endured within the Fuller …

When culinary traditions can be formally recognised as significant cultural heritage, it was only a matter of time before U.N.E.S.C.O. found itself having to consider the possibility of digital world heritage. Assuming that a website occupies a suitable level of individuation to begin with, I’d have favoured Archive.org, but in fact it’s Wikipedia that’s being proposed …

I think one of my correspondents is sulking. People sometimes do after having it explained to them in practically scholarly detail why they were wrong to take umbrage in the first place.

Keele may have got a reprieve, but with impeccable timing, managers at Greenwich have decided to debase themselves in turn:

The world doesn’t change when your feelings do; and how slowly we come to terms with that! As children we learnt that there were other thinking beings like ourselves, and a world to share with them; although a person decades older may be found dropping the most carefully disguised of hints, then growing frustrated with those …

Keele this time, and applied ethics especially:

When you see an artwork ‘in context’, how expansive is that context? How far can a work move before it becomes ‘decontextualized... in a different space’?