Earlier this summer, the administration of the University of Dundee announced a plan to cut costs by, among other things, no longer offering students the option of majoring in philosophy. See this previous post. A petition was launched in protest of the plan. Oisín Keohane, lecturer in philosophy at Dundee, says that over 5,300 have signed the petition, and that the effort has a new centralized website. He writes: There is now a website for the campaign to save Philosophy at Dundee: savedundeephilosophy.org The University has proposed suspending entry to all named Philosophy degrees from 2027, as part of a cost-reduction exercise. Dundee is Scotland’s only programme specialising in the European “Continental” tradition, that we examine alongside Buddhism and Daoism and Ubuntu and analytic philosophy, and its joint degree with Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design has no equivalent anywhere in Scotland. No decision has been taken and the consultation is still open. More than 5,300 people have signed the petition, including over 1,100 academics at 365 universities in 40 countries. The site puts every one of those institutions on a globe, so you can see our international support rather than read a number. Here are some notable things: -The American Philosophical Association and the British Philosophical Association have written jointly in support (their letters are on the website). -All four office-holders of The Royal Institute of Philosophy have signed: Jonathan Wolff, Lucy O’Brien, Sarah Sawyer and Edward Harcourt. -Another group who have signed are people who think about AI and human values for a living. Luciano Floridi at Yale, Shannon Vallor FRSE at Edinburgh, Edward Harcourt at Oxford, Mpho Tshivhase at Pretoria, and Brendan McCord, founder of the Cosmos Institute. This last group on AI and philosophy is relevant in particular because the Dundee philosophy programme has put a counter-proposal to the University: a named Philosophy and AI qualification. The people best placed to judge whether that is a serious idea have already told us what they think. Our proposal is all the more relevant since Amanda Askell of Anthropic is a Dundee philosophy graduate. Please share the website savedundeephilosophy.org on all your channels so that we can widen our support further around the world!

The post Update on Fight Against Dundee Cutting Philosophy first appeared on Daily Nous.