* Rebekah Wallace, Legacy of angels, at "Aeon"
* Chris Pruett, Divine Command Theory, Robust Normative Realism, and the Argument from Psychopathy: A Reply to Erik Wielenberg (PDF)
* Andrew Chignell and Derk Pereboom, Natural Theology and Natural Religion, at the SEP
* Jean-Luc Solère & Nicholas Westberg, Descartes on God and Duration, Revisited (PDF)
* Louis Daoust reviews Deborah Boyle's Mary Shepherd: A Guide.
* Austen McDougal, Loving Your Enemy (PDF)
* Edmund Waldstein, Happiness as the Principle of Ethics, Law, and Rights, at "The Josiah"
* Nevim Borçin, Rethinking Natural Slavery in Aristotle (PDF)
* Kailani B., I Am Not the Main Character in Fictional Stories, at "Damsel in the Library"
* Sofia Calvente, Hierarchy of Beings and Equality of Men and Women in Catherine Trotter Cockburn (PDF)
* Edward Feser, A Catholic Defense of Enforcing Immigration Laws, at "Public Discourse"
* Michelle Kassorla and Eugenia Novokshanova, If Academic Neutral Isn't Dead Yet, It Soon Will Be, at "The Multimodal AI Project"
* Sue Curry Jansen and Jeff Pooley, For this unsung philosopher, metaphors make life an adventure, on Susanne Langer, at "Psyche"
* David Schleicher and Nicholas Bagley, The state capacity crisis, at Niskanen Center
* Victoria, The Anglo-Latin haibun, at "Horace & friends"
* Hilarius Bookbinder, The average college student today, at "Scriptorium Philosophica". The description is recognizable, although, of course, the degree to which it fits is variable; and complaints of this sort are very common among college professors. The problem, of course, is that by the point students get to college, all the damage is already done, and only the most motivated students will be able to correct course by this point. And, contrary to almost every bloviator with an easy solution, the problems are so pervasive and across so many domains that they quite obviously cannot be monocausal. Yes, phones are a serious problem, but students also generally don't have sufficient reading skills, which directly implies that they haven't read enough to develop the reading skills, since that's the only way one develops them, and something similar is true of basic writing and arithmetical skills; they often haven't been socialized enough to hold themselves to basic obligations or courtesies, and they sometimes take trying to bluff and fake their way through anything difficult to a truly extraordinary level, and, perhaps worst of all, they are extremely inclined to give up at the first serious challenge, to such an extent that they will fail to make use of second chance opportunities even when they need them. All of these problems are regular complaints, and none of them can be due entirely to the same thing. (I think a lot of them are tied to the fact that many students have never really been challenged before, as modern teenagers often don't have a wide range of opportunities for doing challenging things or incentive for using the opportunities they do have, but this is not a single problem, either.)
It's also true, of course, that there are many students who don't have these problems, or at least don't have them so severely as to damage their ability to get through just fine; but if you're not already that sort of student, there is no way to solve such problems on the fly in a college course. The closest one can get on the professor side is just to design the course in such a way that students are forced to do things in their head like memorization and analysis instead of trying to google answers, and required to do things in full view, like reading, that we have often just left to the discretion of the student; that is, one can bring directly into the class the sorts of things that they should be doing outside the class. But there's only so much time, and only so far one can go in doing this; almost everything substantial in higher education, necessarily and inevitably, depends on the initiative and self-instruction of the student. That's the whole point of it; college teachers are only there to give you resources and assistance in doing the learning yourself, not to try futilely to shove things into your head while you're scrolling the internet.
Of course, lest we be unfair, it is worth noting that many professors are idiots and stupidly think that they are brilliant at teaching because their college has a good pre-selection process in which the particular students who end up in their classes don't need much teaching in order to learn. And you get the common problem of the Myth of the Method, in which college teachers think that if only they have the right method, which must exist somewhere out there, all problems are solved. And you get the tech-hounds who think that the obvious problem is that professors are Luddites who can't get with the times, and who repeatedly ignore the very large amount of evidence that none of their tech solutions actually have the extraordinary results they claim, and sometimes have worse results than the old-fashioned technology of pen-and-paper. Perhaps it's not surprising that the problems are so complicated when so many people keep making them worse.
