Nick Clanchy

FULLY FUNDED PHDs IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

I'm looking for *two* PhD students to join my ERC project on refugee-led approaches to displacement justice. The positions are funded for four years, and you get to join our lovely community in Bristol. Please share widely!

philjobs.org/job/show/30997

Anna Milioni has a paper on methodological nationalism and hermeneutical injustice forthcoming at Ergo (accepted more than a year ago but still not published…) which I think you’d like - one to keep an eye out for!

I'm co-running a weekly online reading group on trans philosophy. We're now meeting Thursdays, 16:00-17:00 UK time. If you want to be added to the mailing list, please drop me a message :)

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There’s a fairly good biopic of Juana Inés de la Cruz called I, the Worst of All - which raises the question, best film about a philosopher?

Elijah Milgram’s The Great Endarkenment as well!

Oxford Philosophy Graduate Conference

CFP for Oxford's annual graduate philosophy conference: www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/oxford-philo...

YouTube video by Sasha Velour Sasha Velour | "Cellophane" from "Smoke & Mirrors" 2022

This Sasha Velour performance deserves to have more views, it’s so good youtu.be/y0MTQSzRGPE?...

Science of sex and gender being misrepresented by Trump officials, experts warn Scientists say crackdown on gender-affirming care could have impact on healthcare of all Americans

Trump is screwing up the science of sex -- and that has implications for everyone's health care. My latest:
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

I also wanted this at the time, but actually ‘a low-key home-summer against a pair of middling sides in a renewed team at the start of a new cycle’ now sounds like as good a way as any to begin a run batting in the top 7 (hopefully)

The real ones know that Rehan should be opening for the test team too

Out of interest, is this unusual in your experience? I’ve sent half a dozen papers to more than a dozen journals over the years and only once have I got reviewer reports back in <7 months (worst was a 5-month no-comment desk-reject…)

Federal Prisons Bar Gender-Affirming Care for Trans People ‘People will die,’ an advocate warns, as standard treatments for gender dysphoria are replaced with therapy and antidepressants after Trump’s order.

The new policy denies trans people access to surgery, clothing or toiletry items that align with their gender identity. People behind bars on hormone medications will be forced to taper off them. Instead, the primary treatments will be therapy and psychiatric medications like antidepressants.

YouTube video by BBC Sport Alysa Liu Steals the Show to Secure Figure Skating Gold | Winter Olympics 2026 | BBC Sport

Completely obsessed with Alysa Liu’s gold-medal-winning skate, it’s just sooo joyous: youtu.be/5iPjzBl-f_U?...

Less surprising than one might think: studies find ethicists behave no better overall than non-ethicists (aeon.co/essays/how-o...), and on some measures behave worse - e.g. ethicists are significantly more likely to steal library books than non-ethicists (www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....)

You make good points! (Not arrived at by my original “look at the bookcase opposite my sofa” methodology.) Also Agamben’s Homo Sacer has >32,000 citations, etc…I’m sure we could go on and on

(I assumed there was some arbitrary “since 1950” cutoff since no one from before then appears not just Marx, but yes indeed)

Is Flesh A Problem Or An Opportunity In The Eyes Of God: An Excerpt An excerpt from, obviously:

Re-reading this essay by Daniel Lavery on rapid onset gender dysphoria/what it means for something to be irreversible/"a reflexive, implicit horror of flesh" with a surprising and beautiful take on Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, one of my all-time faves: www.thechatner.com/p/is-flesh-a...

Speech and Society: Contemporary Philosophy of Language The Cardiff University Philosophy Department will hold a conference on &ldquo;Speech and Society: Contemporary Philosophy of Language&rdquo; taking place 24th &ndash; 25th of June. In recent years, t...

We are organising a conference!! Our main goal with this is to bring together the awesome emerging philosophical work in the social, political, aesthetic & ethical dimensions of language.

CfP now open - deadline 2nd of April :)

philevents.org/event/show/1...
@cardiffphilosophy.bsky.social

Metropolitan! (Not actually set on a campus, but)

Fwiw I learned a lot from this recent doctoral thesis on Feyerabend on scientism: api.repository.cam.ac.uk/server/api/c...

YouTube video by Classic World of Flute F. Poulence - Sonata for Flute and Piano

Poulenc’s flute sonata slaps: youtu.be/v_N2mcwNfts?...

And if a whole nation were to feel ashamed it would be like a lion recoiling in order to spring. I admit that even this shame is not yet to be found in Germany.” - Marx, letter to Ruge, March 1843 (quoted by Frédéric Gros in A Philosophy of Shame, p.157)

“I can see you smile and say: what good will that do? Revolutions are not made by shame. And my answer is that shame is a revolution in itself; it really is the victory of the French Revolution over that German patriotism which defeated it in 1813. Shame is a kind of anger turned in on itself…/1

Also e.g. Axel Honneth’s The Struggle for Recognition has almost 11,000 citations? If that’s not a work of political philosophy I don’t know what is really

Worth noting that Leiter is explicit about e.g. not considering Judith Butler a philosopher: not only does Gender Trouble have almost 110,000 citations, but e.g. Precarious Life has 20,000 citations, Undoing Gender has 17,500 citations, Excitable Speech has 16,000 citations, etc.

NHS closed Tavistock over care complaints – there were only eight An eye-opening FOI report has revealed that just eight people complained about the Tavistock gender clinic's care provision in 10 years.

pure elite capture - the uk just folded to a hardline anti-trans campaign pushed by a tiny number of people

www.thepinknews.com/2026/02/11/n...

Oatly banned from using word ‘milk’ to market plant-based products in UK Supreme court makes ruling after Swedish firm’s long-running battle with trade association Dairy UK

The meaning of words is to be decided not by their use, usefulness, or history, but by their commercial benefit to the most powerful lobby groups. I have a recipe for almond milk in a cookbook from 1226. It has been used as a term in English for hundreds of years.
www.theguardian.com/business/202...

No line from CIS has stuck with me more than: ‘there is no such thing as the “voice of the oppressed” […] So the job of putting their situation into language is going to have to be done for them by somebody else. The liberal novelist, poet, or journalist is good at that.’ (p.94) 🤦

Consider, as a final example, the attitude of contemporary American liberals to the unending hopelessness and misery of the lives of the young blacks in American cities. Do we say that these people must be helped because they are our fellow human beings? We may, but it is much more persuasive, morally as well as politically, to describe them as our fellow Americans - to insist that it is outrageous that an American should live without hope. - Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity On the uselessness of the notion of ‘ideology’, see Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory. - Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity

Went to a talk engaging with Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity this afternoon, mention of which always reminds me of this pair of epigraphs from Terry Eagleton’s Ideology: An Introduction