Thanks so much! Would love to hear your thoughts.

Do something nice today if you can. I hope you make your goal, Ms. Edith!

As someone who has had the chance to organize alongside Ms. Edith for 2 years, I can say with certainty that she shows up for everyone. She uses her car for multiple grocery runs a week so she can feed her neighbors! Please donate anything you can to help Ms. Edith and, by extension, Healy towers! 🫶🏽

Tagging some folks and orgs who might be interested:
@nctenants.bsky.social, @housingjusticenow.bsky.social, @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social, @debtcollective.bsky.social, @prisonculture.bsky.social , @sudkrishnamurthy.bsky.social, @equalityalec.bsky.social

Donate to Help Ms. Edith Feed Her Neighbors!, organized by Matthew Shields Ms. Edith Chisholm is a force of nature. She is one of the most inspiring leaders a… Matthew Shields needs your support for Help Ms. Edith Feed Her Neighbors!

I'm hosting a fundraiser for an incredible community leader, Edith Chisholm: gofund.me/4095ab1ca. In addition to helping organize a powerful tenant union in her building, Edith collects grocery donations to help food insecure neighbors. She needs a new car. Please consider donating and share widely!

Open access version available here: rdcu.be/fdZOS

Thanks! Wrestling with that exact issues is part of what motivated this project.

These look great, @phaueis.bsky.social! Thanks so much for sharing. Looking forward to checking them out.

Nice! They should definitely feel free to reach out if they want to discuss anything.

😂 love it!

Many folks gave very helpful feedback on the paper, including @celinehenne.bsky.social, @tobiasflattery.bsky.social, @charactergap.bsky.social, and others not on BlueSky. Let me know what you think!

Hannah Arendt's account of "pearl diving" in her essay on Walter Benjamin from pages 205-206 from her book Men in Dark Times.

The title and the notion of conceptual recovery I lay out is inspired by my favorite Arendt passage:

I think there are some widespread implications for our understandings of nonsense, metasemantics, and metaphilosophy.

We do not know what our future needs, ends, or purposes will be, and not all of them currently exist. Desert landscapes do not sit comfortably with a tolerant approach to our conceptual agency that encourages us to let a thousand flowers bloom based on our evolving needs/ends/purposes.

Our very ability to conceptually engineer puts pressure on abandonment: insofar as we can revise and rebuild our concepts in ways that suit our needs/ends/purposes, then it is extremely difficult to permanently abandon any concept.

But there’s an unrecognized tension between conceptual abandonment and another topic that’s received a lot of attention recently: conceptual engineering. This tension was missed by positivist and post-positivist philosophers, who were fans of both engineering and abandonment.

Matthew Shields, Diving for pearls: conceptual abandonment, conceptual engineering, and the limits of thought and language - PhilPapers References to conceptual abandonment are ubiquitous in philosophy. I argue that making a case for abandonment is much harder than philosophers have realized and that this difficulty has striking, broa...

I have a new paper coming out on conceptual abandonment: philpapers.org/rec/SHIDFP-2. Abandonment is a ubiquitous strategy in the history of philosophy – philosophers have advocated getting rid of folk psychological concepts, the concept of harm, the concept of democracy, among many others.

Matthew Shields, Conceptual Inquiry and Pragmatism: Reply to Phelan - PhilPapers Kate Phelan’s reply to my “Conceptual Change and Future Paths for Pragmatism” channels elements of Rorty’s pragmatism to defend the view that the pragmatist need not face the challenge of accounting ....

New paper replying to some criticism of my work on pragmatism. Also used it as an opportunity to lay out some more general ideas about conceptual engineering and change, rationality, and Rorty: philpapers.org/rec/SHICIA-4. Let me know what you think!

Congrats! That's fantastic!

The bombing of Iran, the starving of Cuba, the waging of genocide in Palestine. It's time to let go of the idea the role of the US is to enforce a rules-based order, and instead recognize the incredible harm our country unleashes around the world, and take meaningful action to reduce it.

Officially up online here: doi.org/10.1080/0020.... Let me know if you'd like a copy!

Publications by Non-Tenure-Track Historians Since we began publishing in 2019, Contingent has published end-of-year lists of books and articles by non-tenure-track historians released in the past calendar year. To submit something for inclusion...

CONTINGENT PHILOSOPHERS! (Contractually, not metaphysically). I’ve been a big fan of @contingent-mag.bsky.social for a while. This year they’re letting philosophy piggyback one of their institutions: the year-end list of books and articles written by non tenured/permanent academics in that year.

Protect Academic Freedom, Our Faculty, Our Communities Faculty, staff, students, alumni, and community members: The UNC System is preparing to cave to political pressure from the Heritage Foundation, the Oversight Project, and the James Martin Center by ...

actionnetwork.org/petitions/pr...

These cases aren't the focus of this discussion, but I do view them as compatible with what I'm trying to say for just the reasons you cite. I think there's very interesting work to be done on how they factor into this sort of picture and expanding on the notion of 'material conditions' I rely on.

I think we could also add historical examples of philosophers rationalizing the oppression and disenfranchisement of various groups and how those arguments have been regularly weaponized by governing authorities to implement those policies.

Thanks so much for sharing these illuminating thoughts and reading the piece so closely @shengokai.blacksky.app! A lot of food for thought here. I really like the examples you give of how academic philosophers have in fact played an important role in rationalizing and generating these harms.

Very glad to hear it sounds like the paper can be useful for your work! I hadn't thought about this in the contexts you mention, but I'd definitely be interested in hearing more.

😂 did not notice that!

Thanks!

Would love to hear your thoughts!