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About this Initiative
We, the founders and members of the planning committee, are a group of academics, mostly philosophers, with more than a century of collective college and university teaching experience. We’re greatly concerned by cutbacks to institutional philosophy in the US, and began meeting in October 2022 to think about new ways to support the teaching and study of philosophy.
Our discussions keep pointing in two directions — first to the need to document the problem, and second to the need for an alternative and complementary institutional home for philosophy.
We’re tentatively calling that complementary institutional home an Independent Philosophy Institute (IPI). The core idea of a nonprofit Independent Philosophy Institute is to offer small, online philosophy seminars across a wide range of topics, texts, figures, periods, movements, and cultures. It would be administered primarily by philosophers, and exist outside conventional colleges and universities, not subject to their budgets, curricula, staffing levels, or enrollment expectations.
Our hope, perhaps after a start-up period, is that faculty could be paid and students could earn transferable credits. (We realize that not all faculty will need to be paid and not all students will need credit.) A related hope is that many or most of its courses would be free of charge, even if it charged tuition for other courses to raise revenue to pay teachers and cover basic operating expenses. The idea is still in the planning stage, and we’re thinking hard about finances, quality control, curriculum, accreditation, governance, and infrastructure, among other central issues.
Planning Committee:
Anthony Beavers, Visiting Associate Researcher and Adjunct Professor of Cognitive Science, Indiana University; Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, University of Evansville.
Catherine Kemp, Associate Professor of Philosophy, John Jay College CUNY.
Peter Suber, Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, Earlham College; Senior Advisor on Open Access, Harvard University.
Saul Traiger, Professor of Cognitive Science and Philosophy Emeritus, Occidental College.
Mark Valenzuela, Project Manager, Academic Compliance and Accreditation, Washington University in St. Louis.
Support:
Legal: Dawn Meade, Attorney, Meade Law, PLCC.
Website: Thomas Walsh, Software Engineer
Resource Group:
Mitchell Aboulafia, Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Manhattan College; former Professor of Philosophy and Department Head at Juilliard (Liberal Arts), Penn State/UP, University of Colorado/Denver.
Marcello Guarini, Professor of Philosophy and former Dean of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, University of Windsor, Ontario.
Corey MacCall, former Associate Professor of Philosophy, Elmira College and Adjunct Instructor, SUNY-Corning Community College (The Corning-Elmira Prison Education Program) and the Cornell Prison Education Program.
David Weinberger, Harvard Berkman Klein Center and metaLAB.
The Death of Socrates - Jacques-Louis David - 1787
Metropolitan Museum of Art
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