Wide Scope A philosophy blog that ranges over philosophy and other fun stuff.

Teaching Students About Arguments (My Google Slides)

08.26.2010 · Posted in educational technology, philosophy, teaching

At the beginning of each semester, I teach all of my students about basic argument structure and vocabulary (e.g. valid, invalid, sound, and unsound) and get them used to the idea of seeing arguments laid out in numbered-premise form. I’ve started using Google Presentations as a cool way to let them self-diagnose. I’ve created two presentation ...

Grade Book for Android!

08.19.2010 · Posted in android, educational technology

We (Android for Academics) just released a grade book program. I’m pretty excited about this. It’s been in the works all summer, and I’m very happy that we could get it out for the start of the fall semester. That’s really all due to  Jon Nalewajek - he did all of the coding on this ...

Critical Review of Lackey’s “Learning from Words”

08.02.2010 · Posted in educational technology, epistemology

I was invited to write a critical review of Jennifer Lackey’s book Learning from Words. I just submitted a draft to Philosophical Books for review, but I still welcome comments/feedback. In short, despite the fact that I disagree with Lackey on a number of issues, I think this book is excellent. Here’s a link to the ...

Law School Hirings Lean Left?

07.22.2010 · Posted in the academy

This was just posted up on Inside Higher Ed. A new study is claiming that law schools lean left in their hiring. The data is based on a sample of 149 hires. They could only get political ideologies for 40% of the sample. And here’s something weird; there is no information provided on distibution of ...

Submit to Sympoze from Google Reader

07.06.2010 · Posted in educational technology, sympoze

Now you can submit to Sympoze directly from Google Reader!. It’s simple. First you need to create your custom button in Google Reader. (p.s. if you don’t have a Sympoze account…sign-up here.) Step One: Create a Custom “Send To” Link 1. From Google Reader go to Settings 2. Click the “Send To” tab 3. Click the “Create Custom Link” ...

Sympoze Expanded to All Academia

07.01.2010 · Posted in sympoze

I’ve been a little silent for awhile, but that’s because I’ve been working on something that I’m pretty excited about. I started Sympoze, two years ago, as a social bookmarking site for philosophers. I’m now expanding it to all areas of academia. Social bookmarking for philosophy won’t be lost here. We are eventually going to structure the ...

A Defense of the No Minimum Response to the Problem of Evil

06.08.2010 · Posted in philosophy, philosophy of religion

I’ve posted the penultimate version of my paper “A Defense of the No Minimum Response to the Problem of Evil,” on my research page. It’s forthcoming in Religious Studies. You can also grab it here if you’re interested. It’s a short one, only three pages. ...

Companion to Epistemology Line-up

06.06.2010 · Posted in epistemology, philosophy

Here’s the line-up for that Companion to Epistemology I’ve been working on. 1. Some Puzzles About Methodology in Epistemology (Andrew Cullison) 2. What is Knowledge? (Earl Conee) 3. Foundationalism (Daniel Howard-Snyder) 4. Coherentism (Jonathan Kvanvig) 5. Infinitism (Peter Klein) 6. Evidentialism (Richard Feldman) 7. Reliabilism (Sandford Goldberg) 8. Proper Functionalism (Alvin Plantinga and Kenneth Boyce) 9. Skepticism and Justification (Richard Fumerton) 10. Contextualism and Interest-Relative ...

Two Papers Accepted for Publication

It’s been awhile since my last blog entry. We hit the end of the semester crunch, and then I went out of town. I’m now back doing work, and posts will resume. Two cool things happened in that break. I had two papers accepted for publication! The first is a paper on the problem of evil called ...

Grade Rubric - Demo Version

05.05.2010 · Posted in Uncategorized

We (Android for Academics) just released a free, demo version of Grade Rubric - just in time for the grading crunch! Read more here. ...