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STANCE, AN INTERNATIONAL UNDERGRADUATE PHILOSOPHY JOURNAL

CALL FOR PAPERS

Stance seeks original philosophical papers authored by current undergraduates.

Submission Guidelines:

Stance welcomes papers concerning any philosophical topic. Current undergraduates may submit a paper between 1500 and 3500 words in length (footnotes may extend the word limit 500 words at most). Stance asks that each undergraduate only submit one paper for the journal per year. Papers should avoid unnecessary technicality and strive to be accessible to the widest possible audience without sacrificing clarity or rigor. They are evaluated on the following criteria: depth of inquiry, quality of research/academic rigor, creativity, lucidity, struggle, significance, and, most importantly, originality.

Submission Procedures:

Manuscripts should be in Microsoft Word (.doc) format and sent as an attachment to ballstatestance@gmail.com

Manuscripts should be double-spaced (including quotations, excerpts, and footnotes)

The right margin should not be justified

To facilitate our anonymous review process, submissions are to be prepared for anonymous review. Include a cover page with the author’s name, affiliation, title, and email address. Papers, including footnotes, should have no other identifying markers.

Footnotes should follow Chicago Manual of Style. A style sheet with examples is available on our website under More about Stance – Information for Authors.

Please use American spellings and punctuation, except when directly quoting a source that has followed British style.

For further concerns, please visit Stance on the web at http://stancephilosophy.com/ or contact us at ballstatestance@gmail.com

DEADLINE: December 11, 2015

Since so many of our students are also readers of classics, I thought they might be interested in this interview with Caroline Alexander, whose new edition of the Iliad is “saying something true about a dimension of our life that will always matter, and that dimension is mortality, and particularly mortality as it is most exposed, which is in times of war.” Read about or hear the interview here.

Lots of interesting questions and ideas in this interview:

Read the full article here, occasioned by the frequent assertions made by public figures that majoring in the humanities somehow leads to chronic unemployment. An excerpt:

The report shows that humanities and social science graduates earn only slightly less than their peers with degrees in professional fields upon graduation from college, and by mid-career the earnings of humanities and social science graduates surpass those of graduates with professional degrees. Humanities majors are also more likely to go on to earn graduate degrees, a move which takes their median annual salary up to $71,000. All told, it’s hard to see a degree in the humanities as a bad investment.

(h/t USU History department)

Politicians from Cruz to Obama have been hard on liberal arts majors of late.  The idea they are peddling is that it is a bad idea to major in a liberal art – and to use public dollars to support people doing so – since these are not useful degrees in the job market.  So a lot of the old “degrees to nowhere” business.

Last night at the debate, Marco Rubio took a shot at philosophers in particular, saying, “Welders make more money than philosophers.  We need more welders than philosophers.”

I thought it would be worth fact checking this claim.  Two sources:

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median salary for welders is $37,420.  The median wage for philosophy instructors is $63,630.

According to pay scale.com, the mid-career average salary of a person who majored in philosophy (but is not necessarily a philosophy instructor) is $85,000.  (This excludes philosophy majors who went on to any sort of graduate school like law or a PhD, many of whom are likely to be making more than folks with just a bachelors).  Payscale.com did not provide a mid career earning for welders, but says that total earnings for welders ranges from $26,000 to $63,000.  So even if we assumed that by mid career all welders are making the highest end salary in their industry, they are making less than your average philosophy major.

So fact checking Rubio’s claim: Rubio is simply wrong.

Sadly, most of our politicians on both the left and the right simply do not understand the value of a liberal education and do not know what sorts of skills (“soft skills”, communication and critical thinking skills) are most valued in the 21st century job marketplace.