Why podcasts make excellent syllabi

Photo by David De la Rosa from Pixabay

My students asked me to convince more teachers to make a podcast syllabus for their course, so here goes.

Academic writing duos

Photo: Mia Blakstad

Most of my work is co-authored, which is not that common in philosophy or the humanities. In a feature article from Times Higher Education (THE), Matthew Reisz interviews a number of academic duos about their partnership. Stephen Mumford and I are also interviewed here about our 10 year collaboration as Team MumJum. Reading it, we were surprised to learn that so many of our own experiences – positive and negative – were shared by the other writing duos.

9 years of philosophy Twitter

Today is my 9th anniversary on Twitter. Back in 2009, when I first signed up, I was at the end of my Postdoc period in UK and heading back to Norway.

A super short introduction to our Causation VSI

Epidemiologist Ellie Murray (Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health) has made this excellent presentation on Twitter where she explains all the main points of our book, Causation – A Very Short Introduction.

What Tends to Be

This summer I received copies of our new book with Routledge, What Tends to Be. The Philosophy of Dispositional Modality. Besides from looking really cool, this book is the result of many years’ work on developing our theory on tendencies.

New Philosophy Resource

Struggle to keep updated on the latest philosophy papers in your research area? Despair no longer! Andrea Raimondi has developed a resource called The Philosophy Paperboy. This is a webpage that ‘publishes the latest contents from philosophy journals around the world’ and it is super easy to search for keywords. I tested it with a quick search for ‘causation’ and then ‘risk’, and I found several papers that would be useful for what I am currently working on. So give it a go and send a grateful thought to Andrea and web- & graphic designer Lorenzo Cataldi, who have spent their time making philosophy research easier for the rest of us.

BJPS blog – Causation in Scientific Methods

Need scientists worry about philosophy? Or should philosophers get off their backs and let them do their work in peace? Unsurprisingly, many scientists want to stay clear of philosophical discussions. What is more disturbing is when I hear philosophers themselves announce that our discipline has nothing useful to offer science. In my view, they could not be more wrong.

This blog post was written for BJPS‘s Auxiliary Hypotheses – Stories from the world of academic philosophy of science. Read full text here.

Evidence-Based or Person-Centered? An Ontological Debate

In a recent paper published in European Journal for Person Centered Healthcare, I argue that the choice between EBM and person centered healthcare is a choice between conflicting ontologies, involving two very different notions of causation. While the methodology and practice of EBM seems perfectly supported by positivism and a Humean theory of causation, person centered healthcare does not. There is, however, a trend called the EBM Renaissance Movement, attempting to make EBM more person centered. In the CauseHealth project, we urge that person centered healthcare and practice requires a very different ontology and methodology from the positivist scientific ideal inspired by David Hume.

Emergence and demergence

In the beginning of March, Stephen Mumford presented our paper ‘Emergence and Demergence’ at the Causal Powers and Social Science Conference 2016 at Yale University, organised by Philip Gorski (Yale) and Ruth Groff (St. Louis). Since the paper has already provoked a discussion, we thought it best to publish the presentation here. These ideas are still in its early stages and will be developed in more detail in an article. In the meantime, we welcome your feedback.

PhD course at NMBU on Causation in Science

30 May – 10 June 2016, NMBU, limited spaces

Some of the chief goals of science are understanding, explanation, prediction and application in new technologies. Only if the world has some significant degree of constancy in what follows from what can these scientific activities be conducted with any purpose. But what is the source of such predictability and how does it operate? In many ways, this is a question that goes beyond science itself – beyond the data – and inevitably requires a philosophical approach. This course starts from the perspective that causation is the main foundation upon which science is based.