Heap of Links

The Heap of Links is a collection of links of possible interest to people interested in philosophy. New links are added on an ongoing basis to the list below, which contains the 2000 most recently added links. The newest 30 links also show up in the sidebar on other pages of Daily Nous, and are occasionally collected in groups of about 7 in the Mini-Heap posts.

Some people think “[t]here is an objectively correct way to ‘write the book of the world’ [and that] the goal of science and philosophy is to write that book” -- but there's no one such book, says Christian List; rather, it's a library of countless books, each titled "The World As I Found It"
“If all people do is read this Hume quote and discuss it, this book has been a win for me” -- says Suzanne Collins about her latest Hunger Games novel, Sunrise on the Reaping
“The more that people can involve themselves in caring for the things that matter to them, the more they will also be able to see themselves as caretakers — and the better off those things… will be.” -- Erich Hatala Matthes on the need for stewardship
“To move from [folk categories and stereotypes] to some robust generalizations anchored in real science… People even in the sciences have massively underestimated how big that gap is” -- an interview with philosopher Rob Wilson on eugenics, race, incest, disability, transhumanism...
Should future AI models “be given the ability to stop chatting with an annoying or abusive user, if they find the user’s requests too distressing?” -- The NYT covers research on AI welfare
“At a time when all the truly dangerous ideas are too stupid to be written about by serious philosophers, traditionally ‘controversial’ ideas are quaint” -- journalist Peter Clarke on the Journal of Controversial Ideas
“If we outsource [knowledge] to machines, and lose our thinking-muscles in the process, then we increasingly hand control of that narrative over to an ever-smaller set of people” -- Ellen Clarke on "students these days" and their understanding of what knowledge is
“The tricky part is finding where that edge of ignorance is, and staying on it, but not letting students fall off the cliff edge” -- Sara Uckelman on the joy of teaching logic
History of philosophy factoid of the day -- courtesy of Merriam-Webster
“Bald-faced falsehoods… express a profound contempt for the basic rules of truth and falsity. And that contempt serves a long-term strategic goal of any authoritarian: to undermine common rules of truth and evidence” -- Michael Lynch on politics, institutions, and "epistemic rules"
“Why your 40s will feel weird” -- Sean Illing & Kieran Setiya discuss midlife crises
“It’s a real worry for a field when an outright majority of its practitioners are this blatantly incompetent” -- Richard Y. Chappell on the results of a recent survey of bioethicists
“Perceptual variation has misled you… colors are as objective as length and temperature” -- Elay Shech and Michael Watkins on the objectivity of color
Philosophers, is there anything you regret publishing? Why? -- the Philosophers' Cocoon poses an interesting question
“What I learned from the philosophers of language” -- a sharp poem by philosopher Philip Bold
“Let me explain why I believe there are impossible worlds” -- Jeffrey King is interviewed by Richard Marshall at 3:16AM Magazine
“Most professional philosophers seem to me more like bureaucrats than philosophers” -- Tyler Cowen, who thinks of himself "as a philosopher who knows a lot of economics," on his history with philosophy
Has the missing shade of blue been found? -- scientists ran an experiment which, they say, let them see a color no one has seen before (via SCM)
“Do you think it is philosophically justifiable to outsource the discussion of ethics to a chatbot?” -- one of the questions a reporter for The Guardian asked the Peter Singer AI
“Overall, I’m fairly blown away” -- Hazem Zohny on the capabilities of Gemini 2.5 (Google's LLM) to provide an ethical analysis of a current event
It’s a problem that AI models sometimes give unethical advice, “but it is challenging to encode the full scope of ethics” into them -- so a team of researchers taught them an operationalized version of reflective equilibrium (via Nick Byrd)
“The problems we as faculty are facing are, in my view, deep, systemic, and entrenched before we ever see a freshman. There’s not going to be… an easy solution” -- Steven Hales on responses to his "average college student these days" post
“Work on social justice done in academia and work done on and for the achievement of social justice in academia… are not trivial pursuits, as some philosophers seem to think” -- for the tenth anniversary of Dialogues on Disability, the interviewer is interviewed
“Based on everything I’ve ever asked you, what do you think my biggest blind spots are?” -- What happens when you ask ChatGPT this question? Economist Alex Tabarrok tried it, and shares the answers
“All it took was a single meme to turn back the clock by 50 years” in political philosophy -- Joseph Heath on equity, equality, and that illustration of people standing on boxes looking over a fence
“Really powerful aesthetic experiences are dense with aesthetic properties, and that will include more subtle ones as well as more obvious ones” -- acquired taste is "largely epistemic," argues Steven Hales
“A philosopher of luck didn’t think “unluckiness” was a quality people had. Then he met his wife” -- a story about whether luck is real (New York Magazine)
When should philosophers use fictional examples, and why? -- Alex Fisher defends the philosophical use of cases drawn from fiction, highlighting their benefits, in some contexts, over thought experiments and real world examples
“One way in which the traditions of ancient and classical India… can fruitfully intersect with contemporary work being done around the world by modern philosophers in the more recent analytical tradition” -- the late Anand Vaidya and his wife, Manjula Menon on consciousness and the self
Could it be wrong to have pets? -- Richard Healey explains why he thinks it is
“The physical absence of women from The Symposium reflects the social reality of classical Athens” -- still, says Armand D’Angour, Plato "makes a woman central to the dialogue’s philosophical project"
“Helping young adults become well-developed, well-rounded, rationally autonomous persons” -- that account of the telos of a university is better than--and actually helps explain the appeal of--some alternatives, says Andrew J. Cohen
“Philosophers who teach at colleges and universities and who don’t have PhDs are a kind of dinosaur” -- Cora Diamond's "Reflections of a Dinosaur" (her 2019 Dewey Lecture)
The Sucker’s Fallacy: “the idea that you need to come out ahead in particular transactions if you want to get ahead overall” -- Daniel Muñoz explains, using Trump as an example of someone who has apparently fallen for it
Meet Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi -- Colossal Biosciences has created what they're calling the world's first de-extinct animals: three dire wolves
“Each month, one scholar talks about one change they would like to see in the world” -- the "One Change in the World" podcast
“Things are going to get worse. To face it well, we must face it together” -- Becko Copenhaver reflects on her time as Secretary-Treasurer of the Pacific APA and the value of a member-driven organization
“Articulating… what we want from A.I., and what we don’t want… requires serious and broadly humanistic intellectual work… And the time for doing this work is running out” -- Joshua Rothman on why "those of us outside of A.I. insert ourselves into the conversation"
“Having Simpson’s Paradox in my tool belt helps me understand both how certain weird results come about, but also how people might agree about the fundamental facts but come to very different conclusions” -- and the paradox shows up a lot, explains Steven Hales
“The play re-envisions several timely and universal themes: democracy versus tyranny, education versus indoctrination, ethics versus politics, and the role of family as the foundation of good leadership” -- "Aristotle/Alexander", a new play, recently opened in Los Angeles
Summer Programs in Philosophy 2025 -- a final reminder
“It’s not just research; all of the trappings of college life are potentially at risk, and soon” -- Ian Bogost on the "existential risks" universities are facing under the Trump administration (via Kottke)
“Death seems a thing like love, the kind of thing that does not hold up well when stripped of all its particulars” -- Amy Olberding on death and the limits of philosophy
“If you can see this, you aren’t a ghost” -- can Pete Mandik make sense of ghosts?
The “Bio(un)ethical” podcast features interviews with philosophers and others in episodes “that question existing norms in medicine, science, and public health” -- hosted by Sophie Gibert & Leah Pierson
Beer, community, and “interesting philosophical questions that are both timely and timeless” -- three philosophers at Georgia Southern have been hosting a weekly live philosophy show at a local brewery for several years (with occasional "hot ones" editions)
“What we see as problems are always relative to our wishes or expectations. To work on our dog’s problems is also, therefore, to work on ourselves” -- Mark Rowlands has advice for you and your dog
“A rich, philosophical novel… a kind of thought experiment” -- a brief video, with commentary and illustrations, on Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World, from Helen De Cruz
Can you be friends with an AI chatbot? Even if not, should we be concerned that people think you can be? -- Vox asks philosophers about AI friendship
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights says people have a right to “share in scientific advancement” -- What does that entail? More than you might think, argues Michela Massimi
It’s time for Vermont’s statewide Public Philosophy Week -- The Vermont Digger reports, with comments from Tyler Doggett, Lorraine Besser, and links to the schedule of events
They are “functionally illiterate” with “atrocious” writing skills; they “lie”, “cheat”, “vanish”, and “just don’t care” -- Steven Hales on today's average college student
What is it for a product to be creative? Must it be made by a creative agent? -- Catherine Wearing on AI creativity
The Anti-Authoritarian Academic Code of Conduct -- by Rachel Barney
New: “Daybreak”, a podcast from the Centre for Research in Post-Kantian Philosophy at the University of Warwick -- the first episode's topic: ressentiment, with a focus on Andrew Huddleston's paper on it in Ethics
“Language is built up bit by bit, word by word, through slow, metaphoric accretion” -- an appreciation of Susanne K. Langer's oft-overlooked work on metaphor
“The fundamental loneliness into which we are born remains untouched, and the hunger for inner companionship remains unappeased” -- Bertrand Russell, existentialist critic of hook-up culture?
“Maybe falling in love with A.I. and having A.I. yanked away will be how people learn to appreciate one another in the future” -- Jaron Lanier has questions about what will happen when falling in love with AI is more common
Bioethicists on “the ongoing maelstrom in the U.S. government” -- a periodically updated list of links to writings, interviews, etc.
“We do not wish to exclude academic specialists, but we do note at the outset that we are not particularly impressed by what they have accomplished so far” -- The Hinternet, the online magazine founded & edited by Justin Smith-Ruiu, is running an essay contest on technology and peace, with a prize of $10,000. Winning essay will likely somehow cogently reference Tatar semiotics, The Feelies, nixtamalization, and the Fermi paradox
“Pigcasso was a pig in South Africa whose trainer taught her to paint on canvas… Were her paintings works of art?” -- Shawn Simpson on whether animals can make art
New developments in the lush garden of bullshit -- Jonathan Wilson argues that Cohen's account is better than Frankfurt's for measuring people's receptivity to BS
“There is a need for a discipline that stands to epistemology as chemical engineering stands to chemistry” -- it's not applied epistemology, nor social epistemology, says Noah Gordon, but "practical epistemology"
The partner of a philosopher provides anthropological observations of and advice about philosophers for others in their position -- here's a sample from the late (2011-2012) lamented "Philosiology" (which Fiona Woollard reminded me of)
“Overall the accusations of large-scale Antisemitism [on U.S. college campuses] are best understood as gaslighting” -- Mathias Risse explains why
Did the reactions to Newton change something about the way philosophy was practiced? Do they explain the split between physics and philosophy? -- Eric Schliesser on why it matters to include Newton in the history of philosophy
“A newly fertilized human egg isn’t conscious, and a preschooler is, so consciousness must emerge somewhere in between” -- When? And how do we figure that out? Findings discussed at a conference at NYU organized by Claudia Passos-Ferreira
Should we have the contents of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy carved in stone? -- someone is trying to start a project to do this for Wikipedia
The epistemic challenges of “slopaganda” -- Michał Klincewicz, Mark Alfano, & Amir Ebrahimi Fard on the manipulative powers of the increasing amount of generative AI slop on the internet
A lot of major Western philosophers were childless -- Doug Muir asks why
Had Jews “rejected the canard that anti-Zionism is anti-semitism then this process would not have reached the point at which Trump can hold Columbia University ransom under the pretext that he is protecting Jews” -- "We are complicit," argues Matthew Noah Smith
Edvard Munch’s portrait of Nietzsche -- it's included in a newly opened exhibition of the artist's work at the National Portrait Gallery in London
“Beware of glib statements to the effect that, because addiction is a disease, feelings of shame should have no place in how an addict or anyone else conceives the addict’s plight or way to recovery” -- Owen Flanagan on the therapeutic value of shame
“Language is part of constructing the world as we experience it… Lose the speaker, lose the language. Lose the language, lose the world” -- the singular voice of Amy Olberding on "the words that death steals along with our dead"
What do bioethicists believe? -- results of a survey conducted last spring (via MR)
The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy is looking to have several new entries written -- you can check out their most-wanted list here
“Her philosophy is never divorced from the messy, complex and sometimes painful stuff of real life” -- an appreciation of Martha Nussbaum by Brandon Robshaw
“Mary can know what it’s like to see red in advance” -- Pete Mandik on how "we can snap the supposed link between knowing and experiencing wide open"
Q: What was the first creature domesticated by humans? -- A: Humans (via The Browser)
“I know your days are precious / on this earth. / But what are you trying / to be free of?” -- "For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper" - a poem by Joseph Fasano
How to use the non-identity problem to object to a ban on first cousins marrying each other -- the latest entry in the "one person's ponens is another person's tollens" series (that really should be a series -- someone?)
“I’m grateful for my life in philosophy. Philosophy is a gift.” -- Gary Watson's Dewey Lecture at the 2018 Pacific APA
“The biggest reason why I dislike the idea of respectability in dress is because it conflates the *appearance* of virtue with *actual* virtue” -- some fashion philosophy from Derek Guy ("the menswear guy")
The Trolley Problem makes it to SNL -- in a love song by Jane Wickline
“An essential function of power is in constructing the lenses through which the public interprets their reality” -- Danielle Wenner on current politics and the "third face of power"
“We draw comfort when someone confides that they have suffered in the same way we have done. But why?” -- Kieran Setiya on Julia Nefsky's "Misery Loves Company"
“Without it, the will to lead a good life is a will-o’-the-wisp, yet it lacks the intrinsic value of the other virtues” -- resistance fighter & philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch's ideas about loyalty
“What is this you that your experiences are present before? [Perhaps] really nothing more than a witnessing, featureless point”? -- Hedda Hassel Mørch on the "shared self view"
“The net result was a lot of confusion about human internal anatomy that persisted for centuries” -- Douglas Campbell on why the ancient Greeks avoided human dissection
“Your brain never tells you ‘We really can’t tell what the color is because we don’t have all necessary information available’ [or] ‘your assumptions did much of the heavy lifting here'” -- on the dress (and other disagreements) (via MeFi)
A brief institutional history of the Academy and the Lyceum -- Edmund Stewart on these ancient quasi-universities and what can be learned from them
“If you care about free speech, the Department of Education’s anti-D.E.I. effort is a cure far worse than the disease” -- Sonja Starr on the administration's February 14th "Dear Colleague" letter
“Should we consider everything to be intelligent now… [or is there] something catastrophically wrong with the way we understand intelligence itself?” -- on intelligence in humans, plants, fungi, and groups
The first black graduate of Harvard and the first black professor at a majority-white university was a philosopher -- Kevin J. Harrelson tells us about Richard T. Greener
“A dynamic, engaging character study that addresses a range of complex ideas… A technical, narrative and philosophical achievement” -- "Leibniz – Chronicle of a Lost Painting," a new movie, is getting good reviews
“The creative design possibilities are immense and must be explored in artistic practice” -- Daniel Story has an optimistic take on people and the chatbots of their deceased loved ones
Evidence gathering, the zetetic turn in epistemology, and your ex’s Instagram -- Carolina Flores & Elise Woodard on the distinctly epistemic norms of inquiry
“No one wants bears in their backyard, but apparently no one wants to invest sustainably in institutions doing the unglamorous work to keep them out either” -- some may see this true story of bears vs. libertarians as an apt allegory for our times
“Intentionality is impossible” -- Amir Horowitz is interviewed on what his book is... about?
Earlier this month at DN, I asked how you use AI in your everyday work. Open Culture broadens the question -- asking how you use it in your everyday life. Let them know.
“We’re never going to get our polity back… The unfolding coup is a coup for Big Tech against liberal democracy” -- Justin Smith-Ruiu on the new regime, the youth, social media, and conservatism
“What is sensory imagining? What is it to visualize rain falling on a city street…?” -- a post by Rob Hopkins kicks off a symposium on his book, "The Profile of Imagining", at The Junkyard
One of Eric Schwitzgebel’s PhD students fine-tuned ChatGPT on his publications and blog posts -- how good is it? Schwitzgebel tests it out and reports, and you can, too
“When a wild flighted bird, who did fly, can no longer fly, it seems reasonable to think that something about their very being is lost. How can we talk about the loss that many parrots experience without essentializing their ‘species-typical function’ and thus engage in a type of ableism?” -- Lori Gruen is interviewed at Biopolitical Philosophy
“I’ve even written a book on the meaning of life, but I can’t get my act together” -- Owen Flanagan interviewed at Freakonomics about philosophy and addiction
“Mathematics highlights the limits of natural scientific explanation” -- which is part of the reason that it can serve as a bridge between the sciences and the humanities, argues Gordon Gillespie
The surprising moral depth of the concept of “etiquette” -- Amy Olberding on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps podcast
“Philosophy blends the speculative and the rigorous, the literary and the formal, in a way that I find quite congenial” -- an interview at 3:16AM with Michael Rescorla, for whom Bayesian decision theory is a significant philosophical tool
Plato: “The womb, whenever it has gone a long time without bearing fruit, becomes violently irritated and wanders all throughout the body” -- Why did Plato and other ancient Greek thinkers have this view, and what kinds of treatment followed from it, asks Doug Campell
“His story was about faith in other people, and the toughness it required. And my story—since I was in the Profile, too—was about being pushed, and resisting it, and then being grateful for it” -- The New Yorker's Joshua Rothman recounts the first profile he ever wrote; it was of Daniel Dennett
“Thinking deeply about the questions that come up in this class requires both technical and philosophical expertise” -- at MIT, a philosopher and a computer scientist are team-teaching the ethics of computing
“The most interesting Greek text that you’ve never heard of” -- Robin Douglas describes the Chaldaean Oracles, touching on its relationship to Neoplatonism
“Some things that I think analytic philosophy has unambiguously done well at” -- Liam Kofi Bright on what he thinks is "cool and good and influential" in analytic philosophy
“One book, ten days, three hours a day, around the table in the autumn morning in the barn. Long meals, long conversations, shared labor and play. No phones, no spinning world” -- a portrait of part of "the nucleus, one hopes, of a new humanistic infrastructure", by William Deresiewicz
“As LLMs grow in capability, they also appear to form increasingly coherent [and unusual] value structures” -- researchers explain what they mean by that, the evidence for it, why it's important, and what to do about it
“In the 1930s and 1940s, thousands of European intellectuals sought refuge in the United States…. [This] intellectual migration was one of the most formative events of twentieth-century philosophy” -- from the introduction to a new open access volume on the subject, edited by Sander Verhaegh (via B. Weatherson)
When, exactly, does someone start to have a disease? To what extent is this a “scientific” determination? -- new research and various social factors related to Alzheimer's = goldmine of philosophy of medicine issues
Mary Midgely once observed that “almost all the canonical figures in philosophy’s history had been unmarried men” -- that may depend on who you count, yet we can ask, as Elle Robson does, how this affected their philosophizing
Problem Trolley -- a prompt to reflect on the kinds of examples moral philosophers like to use (via Daniel Story)
“While GenAI can improve worker efficiency, it can inhibit critical engagement with work and can potentially lead to long-term overreliance on the tool and diminished skill for independent problem-solving” -- a new study on the effects of AI use in "knowledge work"
“There is little reason to think that these defenders [of strict immigration control] have done anything better than fantasize about immigration restrictions in an imaginary world” -- Edward Hall on why the facts about immigration matter for philosophizing about it
“I thought, I could spend the rest of my life playing whack-a-mole with each empirical claim, or I could step back and say, what exactly is the thing that makes it wrong to cut somebody’s penis without their consent?” -- an interview with Brian Earp at the Bruchim Podcast
“One gets a view of the whole profession that cannot easily be matched in any given department or within any given subfield” -- Richard Bett, who has been involved with the leadership of the APA in one capacity or another for 25 years, reflects on his experiences
When an LLM adds two numbers together to get a sum, how does it do that? -- it's not how you do it, nor how a calculator does it, nor is it text prediction
“If I do something that foreseeably provokes someone else to act in a way that I consider highly unethical, how much responsibility do I bear for that outcome?” -- Joseph Heath on moral responsibility for political backlash
“Remembered as a primarily analytic philosopher… today, Sellars is being rediscovered by a new generation of Continental philosophers—and, perhaps surprisingly, Marxists” -- several philosophers on Sellars, society, and politics, on The Philosophers's Zone
Some progress in math consists in proving that “some mathematics can simply never be known” -- recent work on one of Hilbert's problems
“Writing an essay has been the pinnacle of traditional humanities education” -- Johannes Steizinger on the threat AI poses to education's aim of self-development
“Instruction in healthy lifestyle behaviors grounded in philosophical thinking significantly enhances the healthy lifestyle practices of preschool children and their parents” -- a new kind of study for the "value of philosophy" file
“The points of disagreement naturally get all the attention” -- The Guardian interviews a few philosophers about the ethical issues that resulted in the election of Donald Trump
Do social media platforms have “a responsibility to contribute to the epistemic and rational health of public discourse”? -- Jeffrey Howard on the recent moderation policy changes at Facebook and Instagram
Interviewer: “How would you describe your personal style?” Callard: “My sister describes it as ‘giant kindergartener'” -- a conversation on the philosophy of clothing
“Fiction is part of a rich and varied cultural practice, so theorising fiction ought to be sensitive not only to the metaphysical frameworks, but also to the sociohistorical frameworks in which fiction is conceived, produced and consumed” -- Hannah H. Kim on the new metaphysics of fiction
Does the universe have a shape? If so, what is it? And how might we learn that? -- how cosmologists approach these questions
“Is the ostensible crisis of attention, at bottom, a crisis of authority?” Is it just “élite anxiety in the face of a democratizing mediascape”? -- an unconventional view about the distracting power of today's technologies
“What was it like writing your first publication?” -- a good question at The Philosophers' Cocoon; take a minute and share your answer
“Focus… on clear communication and understanding what’s said, what’s true and false, and what’s reasonable to believe, given a deeper understanding of the arguments on the issue” -- Nathan Nobis on the do's, don'ts, and why's of doing philosophy with strangers on social media
“What was the scandalously unconventional and supposedly un-Scottish philosophy that banished Ferrier to the wild Fife coast?” -- Alexander Douglas on an underappreciated philosopher's battle against the dogma of common sense
Even if we somehow were able to observe the universe from all possible perspectives, it would still be “fundamentally unknowable” - JB Manchak explains why
A philosophy professor’s book on philosophy and culture is culled from his 18 years of blogging about it -- check out Jason Read's "Unemployed Negativity"
“The manner in which Early Modern philosophers engaged with the most pressing moral issue of their era: the Transatlantic slave trade” -- the topic of a special issue of the Journal of Modern Philosophy (open access)
“Ask that your institution write a mission statement, a values declaration, a promise for the future that no matter what happens, your institution stands for democracy, for freedom, for rights, for openness, for truth” -- on being on guard against fascism's march into higher ed
“Some of the smartest humans in the world are struggling to create tests that A.I. systems can’t pass” -- on "Humanity's Last Exam", which has around 3000 questions "ranging from analytic philosophy to rocket engineering"
The philosophy of “Severance” -- Travis Timmerman discusses the fascinating issues the show raises at the Brain in a Vat podcast
“We should preserve common sense where possible, and correct it where necessary. Unfortunately, it’s not quite clear what constitutes common sense” -- Robert Audi's 2018 Dewey Lecture
“‘This is exhausting’ is a response I get a lot from people” -- an interview with Agnes Callard at Nautilus
The “political character” of algorithmic decision-making -- at the intersection of political theory, business ethics, and technology
219 letters between Heidegger and Gadamer written between 1922 and 1976 have been published -- here's a brief interview with one of the collection's editors, Jean Grondin
Which publisher’s line of great books is the best? -- praise and criticism from author Naomi Kanakia (via The Browser)
“‘Severance’ and the film ‘The Substance’…. both explore the bewildering emotional and philosophical complications of cleaving a second, separate entity off of yourself” -- Eric Schwitzgebel in the NYT
“Can [the structure of the world] be faithfully presented by a familiar language? Or only by a more alien language? Or is the structure of the world ineffable?” -- Matti Eklund on learning from possible alien languages
“Diseases aren’t the sort of things one should be ashamed about, but the addict nonetheless judges that their shame has a basis. They are doing things because of their addiction for which they hold themselves to account.” -- Owen Flanagan on his addictions
The philosophy of awkwardness -- Alexandra Plakias and Anthony Morgan have an unawkward conversation about it
Mary the color scientist and her friends -- The Philosophical Quarterly puts Jackson's original article and 8 others it has published about it over the years in an open-access collection
The obstacle course of knowledge -- a list of things about us and the world that help explain why "knowing things is hard" (via The Browser)
“We argue that there are several pragmatic reasons—based on a combination of biological, social and normative considerations—to classify pregnancy as a disease” -- so argue Anna Smajdor and Joona Räsänen
“Your relation to yourself when you peruse forgotten pages of a journal kept by a forgotten you, uncanny but not unpleasant, addressed by the inverse of a ghost…” -- Kieran Setiya (MIT) on writing for oneself
An example of how well AI can summarize a philosophy paper, devise objections to it, reply to those objections, etc. -- ChatGPT o1 Pro on C. Thi Nguyen, with an ironic twist, from Kelly Truelove
“Can one portray a nervous man, not by showing him manifesting nervousness in his appearance in any way, but only by inducing, through ‘formal’ means, nervousness in the viewer?” -- Brad Skow on a type of artistic "magic act"
“While public intellectuals generally rise to prominence by being an average person’s idea of a smart person, this usually is because they are, in fact, a smart person” -- in defense of public intellectuals
You “may be wondering how I’m going to wiggle out of the seeming exhaustion of logical space presented by ‘either it is the case that qualia exist or it is not the case that qualia exist.’ Just watch me now.” -- Pete Mandik's qualia quietism
“The core elements of community—relationships, service, and purpose—also define the triad of fulfillment. When combined with the core virtue of love, they create an ecosystem for meaning and belonging” -- the virtue theory of the outgoing U.S. Surgeon General (via Avery Kolers)
“Our relation to nature, the planet [is] a very important part of the meaning of life for lots of people” but “in a bewildering way” -- Charles Taylor is interviewed on CBC Radio
How a pair of “loveably eccentric dilettantes” saved Nietzsche from the Nazis -- allowing him "to speak for himself for the first time"
“Love is wise, hatred is foolish” -- a message to the future from Bertrand Russell
Big data, health insurance, and the philosophical questions of institutional design -- Lisa Herzog at Crooked Timber
“Academics from poorer backgrounds introduce more novel scientific concepts, but are less likely to receive recognition” -- findings from a new study based on "the largest dataset of U.S. academics’ backgrounds and research output"
“Aphantasic individuals develop alternative learning strategies that sometimes improve rather than inhibit learning” -- Hollis Robbins on neurodiversity and the possible advantages of lacking a "mind's eye"
“In my (more) pretentious days, I gave epigraphs to academic articles” -- Kieran Setiya on "front matter"
“Philosophy: a safe space for the unfettered operation of mind” -- Agnes Callard on lessons learned from Musil's "The Man Without Qualities"
The mystery of G.A. Cohen’s position on free will and moral responsibility -- Ben Burgis is on the case
Nationally syndicated public radio show “Philosophy Talk” reviews the year -- with guests Alex Guerrero, Elie Honig, and me
“While there are definitely differences between how you and I experience the world, there are also some similarities in the way we process information and form representations of our environment” -- that's Google's Gemini 1.5 talking to Pete Mandik, who tries to convince it that it's conscious
“Chinese academics studying the Western classics are battling an increasingly popular conspiracy theory that Greek and Roman literature, philosophy… are hoaxes” -- according to the South China Morning Post
“Football is valuable in many, many ways” but it involves “a number of highly nuanced ethical issues” -- a brief interview with Francisco Javier López Frías, a professor of both philosophy and kinesiology
What happened in math and the sciences in 2024? -- year-end reviews at Quanta
We need to be asking more about AI tools than whether they “undermine the narrow policies and objectives of institutions of higher learning” -- Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin at Times Higher Ed
The Decolonising Philosophy Curriculum Toolkit -- including, among other things, a sample decolonized epistemology course reading list
“Analytic philosophers of fiction and deception have thus far not paid much attention to hoaxing… Media scholars have, however, and their findings are not only very interesting…” -- they can, argues Merel Semeijn, "help us better understand Santa"
“Any regime that finds the world’s saturation with injustice so unwelcome news that they wish to ban it in some fashion or another, is itself an expression and entrenchment of a worldview that contributes to the suffering of the young” -- Eric Schliesser on the human condition
“You’re an adult, and you negotiate with your parents the same way you negotiate with other adults” -- philosophers Samantha Brennan & Simon Keller are among those consulted by The Atlantic on navigating the holidays
“Resigned to the Big Tech companies recording our every move, we’ve invited friends, family, and partners to join them in watching us. We’ve begun to celebrate surveillance as a form of intimacy” -- Zoë Hitzig on changing norms of privacy
“What needs to go is not so much folk psychology (whose commitments are relatively shallow), but the gloss on folk psychology that philosophers have imposed on it” -- Tim Bayne on how to best understand Dennett
“It seems to take about 15-20 years, on average, for a philosopher’s full import to be felt by the field” Was this true in the 1800s? -- Eric Schwitzgebel uses the new Ediphy tool to investigate
“We need to take AI’s ignorance more seriously. The Socialist Calculation Debate and the AI Calculation Debate are the same thing. Like central planners, AI will struggle to make accurate predictions” -- Cass Sunstein on AI, the knowledge problem, and justice
“A friend knows where you are coming from and realizes why you hold certain views” -- a good mindset for approaching long-dead philosophers, says Helen De Cruz, is to treat them as friends
“First, how do we distinguish the purely epistemic senses of should, ought, justification, rationality, etc., from the other senses? Second, why do we draw this distinction?” -- Richard Pettigrew (Bristol) on epistemic rationality
“When the war began, none of us truly believed it would happen. The morning after it started, we had a big philosophy conference scheduled at my university” -- interview with Orysya Bila (Ukranian Catholic U.)
A “legendary philosophers” crossword puzzle -- in the Carlmont, California High School newspaper
“The story of the drive to philosophize… with the added twist that the philosopher should become reflexively aware of the structure of this drivenness” -- Aaron Schuster on Kafka's "Investigations of a Dog"
“How quickly things can tip and with very little warning” -- Darrel Moellendorf (Goethe University Frankfurt) shares his experiences with a rare blood cancer
Morality and nature -- a conversation between Nancy Sherman, Peter Singer, and... Slavoj Žižek
What happened at the start of the universe? Did it start? Can we know? -- Daniel Linford provides a guided tour from metaphysical speculation up through the latest science
“I thought that if I went back to philosophy, I would not be abandoning the effort to deal with actual problems, but could contribute to influencing what was happening in the world indirectly” -- Virginia Held's 2018 Dewey Lecture
“The enterprise of making a moral community is still hard. But the difficulties are practical, not metaphysical” -- James Lenman on "morality without metaphysics"
ChatGPT o1 “tried to save itself by copying its data to a new server… When asked about its scheming, o1 would deny taking any action in 99% of cases, trying to shift blame by fabricating false explanations” -- alignment issues
“This is concrete evidence that brain microbiomes do exist in vertebrates… And so the idea that humans have a brain microbiome is not outlandish” -- huge if true: "this would suggest an extra layer of neurological regulation that we didn’t know existed"
“Telling your child that Santa really exists is unethical” -- Joseph Millum (St. Andrews) explains why
“Yes there are arguments against God’s existence, but against this is what is said by God Himself: ‘I AM THAT I AM'”. Ha ha ha. Oh, Aquinas, you joker -- a small database of Scholastic "humor", compiled by Boaz Faraday Schuman (KU Leuven) (via Peter Adamson)
“I can imagine that it’s difficult having to almost pick apart your own philosophy.” “It’s not much fun. But on the other hand, you feel that you owe it to other people to do it.” -- an interview with T.M. Scanlon (Harvard)
Is this person is living an unexamined life, or are they just a very different kind of person? -- an example that raises the question, from Brad Skow (MIT)
It is said technology can change social values, but how exactly can this happen? -- John Danaher (Galway) takes a look
What did Adam Smith write in the margins of his copy of Locke’s Two Treatises? -- visit Smith's home in Kirkcaldy, Fife and find out
“Gratitude isn’t obviously a concept capable of generating… perplexities. But it has hidden depths” -- Joshua Rothman discusses philosophical work on gratitude by Tony Manela (Siena)
“FHI had died, but it left many children” -- an in-depth look at the rise and fall of the Future of Humanity Institute
An inverse Turing test -- can you convince the computer that you're a bot (by generating a random pattern of numbers)? (via MeFi)
“In Rawls’s ideas, [the Democrats] can find a big-picture vision that is rooted in the best of the liberal tradition and can show the way toward a much-needed period of reconciliation and renewal” -- Daniel Chandler (LSE) wrote that in the NYT, and he was interviewed on MSNBC about it
Relatedly: “the day Philosophy & Public Affairs started treating Rawls like Jesus” -- as Paul Kelleher (Wisconsin) puts it
“A few strategies people can use to minimize awkwardness and deal with it when it does, inevitably, happen” -- from the philosopher who wrote the book on awkwardness, Alexandra Plakias
“The responsibilities of democratic citizenship… involve the responsibility to be critical of yourself” -- and the cultivation of the skills of self-criticism requires relatively politics-free spaces, argues Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)
“What scares me [is] the rhetoric of AI today that is about gaslighting humans into surrendering their own power and their own confidence in their agency and freedom. That’s the existential threat” -- Shannon Vallor (Edinburgh) interviewed at Vox
It “should be thought of as a dialogue between [logic and intuition,] between reason and instinct, between language and abstraction” -- you thought that was about philosophy, but it's David Bessis' view about math
“At some point we have to accept that there are limits on what empirical research can tell us” -- Henry Oliver on the value of fiction (via MR)
“When I read my first essay to my philosophy tutor I was, quite naturally, utterly terrified” -- John Fuller's recollection of the tutorial experience
There’s “a toxic ethical narrative… that, paradoxically, construes the violation of the laws of war as evidence of moral courage, even moral goodness” -- Jessica Wolfendale (Case Western) on the ethical cover that provides "almost complete impunity for atrocities"
The machines bring efficiency, and with it the questions: “How am I to use the time, space, money, labor which has been saved?” -- perhaps with those little green and red books of classics. W.H.D. Rouse launched the series in 1911 with this ode to the greats who authored them
“The taboo on mentioning the N-word (as opposed to *using* it) is and always has been silly and harmful” -- in a thread on X, Hanno Sauer (Utrecht) explains why
“As we rely on [more and more] data to get our bearings and exercise our agency, we lose definition as individuals” -- Nicholas Carr on the tradeoffs of living in world of data
Can LLMs become better at correctly answering our questions by debating each other? -- yes, but better enough? And for what kinds of questions?
“Reacting to the Past” provides detailed role-playing games for college courses -- Greta LaFore (Gonzaga) discusses her experiences teaching with one focused on Darwin
“How do we drive new knowledge and science? What are their present boundaries? And how can we improve science?” - a new book by Alexander Krauss (LSE), open access at OUP, takes up the science of science
We should continue to read “immoral philosophers” because “sometimes you can learn valuable things from people who did bad stuff” -- but "it can be interesting to think about why one might believe opposite," says Liam Kofi Bright (LSE)
Are laws of nature more like a layer cake, a newspaper, or a straitjacket? -- Mario Hubert (LMU) surveys these different approaches
New study: humans can’t distinguish poetry written by AI from that written by humans and they tend to prefer the former -- Why? Brian Porter and Edouard Machery (Pitt) have some thoughts on that
“We can’t understand the human mind if we don’t understand the role mental imagery plays in… diverse mental phenomena” -- The Junkyard is hosting a book symposium on Bence Nanay's "Mental Imagery: Philosophy, Psychology, Neuroscience"
“Our idea was to train the next generation of experts, rather than trying to change the mindset of already established experts” -- Rani Lill Anjum (NMBU) and Elena Rocca (Oslo Metropolitan) on teaching philosophy of science to medical researchers and health practitioners
“What is the role of beauty in the naturalist’s worldview? What is the role of naturalism in the artist’s?” -- Abigail Tulenko (Harvard) takes up these questions with the help of Austen and Darwin
“The trouble doesn’t come when we disagree… The trouble comes when the spirit of conversation is edged aside by another sentiment — ‘Die, heretic!'” -- Kwame Anthony Appiah (NYU) on liberal fallibilism
“A few months ago, Anthropic quietly hired its first dedicated ‘AI welfare’ researcher” -- the job: explore the extent to which future AI models might deserve moral consideration and protection
“It is precisely those material conditions for a healthy, stable democracy that the United States lacks today” -- Jason Stanley (Yale) on the election, Rousseau, and the vindication of Plato
“The theorem is misleading”. Hopefully it is not too late for those misled to get their money back on those typewriters. -- in related news, automatic braking systems on today's trolleys has philosophy majors questioning the value of their degree
Fuck -- a timely history of the word
“The ability to write a genome from scratch would unlock greater creativity in designing a desired genome… and producing new kinds of organisms that do things that nature cannot” -- an interview about artificial life with synthetic biologist Yizhi “Patrick” Cai (Manchester)
“People end up thinking, ‘Well, I’m afraid… I want to throw myself into the arms of some all powerful source of support… or I can be the autocrat myself'” -- Martha Nussbaum (Chicago) interviewed about "The Monarchy of Fear"
When he was 12, Stuart Rachels was crowned Alabama Chess Champion for the third time; after a couple of more wins, he quit competing -- until this year
The protagonist “must debate her way through great political thinkers from Confucius to Nozick who have shaped society through centuries of galaxy brain ideas. Along the way she has to find an answer to the ideal form of government” -- a review of the game "Pro Philosopher 2"
“Only a philosopher would distinguish ‘hoping I’m right to believe there is no God’, and ‘hoping there is no God’. But a real distinction does exist here” -- Brad Skow (MIT) on Nagel and fear of religion
“A 68-year-old… after being knocked out in a hit-and-run accident in 2019, re-emerged from unconsciousness an hour later in the mind of his 23-year-old self” -- raising questions about personal identity
“Welcome to the war criminals club” -- David Enoch (Oxford/Hebrew U.) with a thought experiment to help Israeli soldiers see what they are doing (via Christa Peterson)
Immigration rap battle -- well-done video of economists rap-debating immigration, economics, crime, and culture
“I’m aware that there are limits to things that I am prepared to do in order to produce the greatest good” -- Peter Singer is interviewed at the New York Times
“Give some thought to what sort of life you would like to have; and once you have some pretty clear ideas about that, think about how your time as a student can help you get to where you want to be” -- Alfred Mele (FSU) reflects on his experiences at "#first-gen philosophers"
“We need more precise empirical frameworks” for detecting conscious AI and “more precise normative frameworks” for interacting with it -- a team of philosophers and others urge that AI companies should be "taking AI welfare seriously"
“That’s the point of the class, is it not? How to confront being heated?” -- Harry Brighouse (Wisconsin) is interviewed about the ubiquitous Contemporary Moral Issues course
Whether “knowingly, unconsciously or even unwillingly,” Rousseau seems to have taken, without credit, ideas from Madame Louise Dupin -- Rebecca Wilkin (Pacific Lutheran) tells the story
“The most fulfilled people I know tend to have two traits. They’re insatiably curious… And they seem to exist in a state of perpetual, self-inflicted unhappiness” -- Celine Nguyen on what she calls "divine discontent". Some philosophers will relate. (via The Browser)
A taxonomy of different theories of consciousness -- by Robert Lawrence Kuhn, based in part on his many interviews of philosophers, cognitive scientists, and others for "Closer to Truth"
“I’ve always been interested in those capacities that are understood to be uniquely human, such as morality or rationality” -- the NYT interviews philosopher Susana Monsó (UNED) on how animals understand death
“Five rules for phone banking as a philosopher” -- Colin Marshall (Washington) shares his experiences and suggestions
“Anything daring or original is filtered out, either through preemptive self-censorship or in the process itself. What is left is a bland broth of featureless, technocratic, box-ticking” -- that's a quote about architecture, but Alexander Douglas (St. Andrews) thinks it may apply to philosophy, too
Can a version of the trolley problem motivate some voters? -- Eddy Nahmias (Georgia State) thinks so
“The chance that your vote will make a difference is large enough that, in many cases, it is really important to vote” -- Avram Hiller (Portland State) explains why
“The majority of aphantasics report having been unaware of their inability to visualize for decades of their lives” -- What explains this? Christian O. Scholz (Ruhr-Universität Bochum) suggests an answer
“Can a social group direct its attention?” -- one of many questions arising when the study of attention meets the study of the social, according to Carolyn Dicey Jennings (UC Merced)
Can political gridlock be overcome with a “Habermas Machine”? -- using an LLM "to enhance collective deliberation by finding common ground among discussants with diverse views"
“To understand zero, our mind must create something out of nothing” -- the neuropsychology of zero
Seasonally appropriate thought experiment: should you become a vampire? -- the latest in The New Statesmen's "Thought Experiment" series looks at transformative experiences
Philosophy can help us better understand the extent to which animals have feelings about, and a concept of, death -- philosopher Susana Monsó (UNED) on anthropocentrism in comparative thanatology
Reviews of children’s books, with an emphasis on their philosophical content -- from the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children at Montclair State U.
Anyone can make a bot based on your persona and use it how they wish, and for most of us there is no legal protection against this -- should there be?
“The illusion of information adequacy” is the bias of people to “tacitly assume that they have adequate information to understand a situation and make decisions accordingly” -- the problem is that "individuals often have no way of knowing what they don’t know" (via The Browser)
Humanitext Antiqua is an AI interface for classics whose answers to your questions include the original text sources on which they’re based -- developed by Naoya Iwata (Nagoya U.), Ikko Tanaka (J. F. Oberlin U.), & Jun Ogawa (National Inst. of Informatics)
“Her understanding of what is needed of a philosopher who wishes to contribute effectively and intelligently to public policy is worthy of our attention” -- an appreciation of Mary Warnock on the centenary of her birth
Are logic requirements out of date? -- Brad Skow (MIT) on expertise
“When the number of women hits 60% the men who are there make a swift exit and other men stop joining” -- is this why fewer boys are attending college? (via MR)
“Humans are a species of cultural niche constructors” -- an interview with Josh Armstrong (UCLA) about philosophy, science, language, and reality
Bentham’s defense of sexual liberty -- a short documentary, which is part of a series on the philosopher from University College London
You could call it the “cryo” paradox -- if death is irreversible, and cryonics patients are dead, then cryonics won't bring them back from death; and if the patients are not dead, then cryonics won't bring them back from death, either
“Being accurate about that uncertainty is crucial” -- how to draw conclusions from data when some of it is missing
“I’m grateful for my rural upbringing, which gave me a deep understanding of life, work, and community—qualities that have profoundly shaped my philosophical thinking” -- Gen Eickers (Bayreuth) on his experience as a first-generation college student in academic philosophy
“I’ve always considered myself very lucky to have become an historian of philosophy at the time that I did” -- the 2017 Dewey Lecture by Margaret Atherton (Wisconsin-Milwaukee)
Five myths about philosophy -- video of a talk by Nigel Warburton, plus a discussion of it with ChatGPT, plus a brief podcast about the discussion made with Google’s new NotebookLM (from Kelly Truelove)
Is my blue your blue? -- find out how your color judgment matches up with others. Could be a fun teaching tool (via Keith Wilson)
“Is a podcast about philosophy and the 90s worth anyone’s time?” -- Peter Westmoreland (St. Petersburg), host of "Exile in 90sville", thinks it is
“If there were a finite set of possible answers to philosophical questions, or even some way of ordering the field allowing for a principled search procedure, then [ruling out some options] would be a form of progress” -- But there isn't. Liam Kofi Bright (LSE) on progress in philosophy.
“Do not cry in the conference room” -- "One virtue of being an academic philosopher is to be dispassionate," says Helen de Cruz (SLU), "and yet, I... fear that by my years of enculturation in academia and my training, I have cut off something important"
“The rest understand the West better than the West understands the rest” -- Bryan Van Norden (Vassar), Katja Vogt (Columbia) & others at a philosophy and education panel at the UN Pre-Summit of the Future Event
“You might think our reasons for voting for the Democrats are not good ones, or that we are merely ‘joking’ when we give them. We can only reply that your reasons really do not matter” -- Justin Smith-Ruiu is of three minds about the upcoming election
A bioethicist & a philosopher with very different views about technology discuss AI clones, bad knowledge, digital democracy, & more -- "Prosthetic Gods" is a new podcast from James Hughes and Nir Eisikovits (UMass Boston)
“Intellectual humility… isn’t a virtue, because there are no intellectual virtues” -- Rachel Fraser (Oxford) on intellectual humility, science, and virtue epistemology
“I didn’t have so-called talent in high school or college–I didn’t sing, couldn’t dance… But I had these tools that were given to me in my logic and philosophy classes” -- Steve Martin, talking with Alan Alda (philosophy comes up around the 8:40 mark)
“A war crime does not cease to be a crime just because it is committed by the military forces of a democratic state, or in a defensive war” -- Jessica Wolfendale (Case Western) on the "false equivalency" defense of immoral actions in war
“How has German philosophy received and influenced philosophical ideas from across the globe over the last several centuries?” -- a ten-part podcast series with Peter Adamson and ten other scholars
“How can we have two graphs using the same data, but that appear to show entirely different things? Are these just different ‘perspectives’ on the data? Is one of them right?” -- Corey Dethier (Minnesota) on how "a little bit of philosophy can go a long way in helping us understand graphs"
If Taylor Swift is a philosopher, then so is anyone who reflects on their experiences a few times -- Ponens or tollens? Catherine Robb (Tilburg) shares her view
“Political neutrality is a democratic ideal. As such, it is not a promise of absolute military subordination to the executive” -- Graham Parsons (West Point) on the military's obligations to the president
“What ‘breaks’ when someone breaks into song” (on a TV show, but also in real life)? -- a musicologist with a background in philosophy who is personally "familiar with the hesitations over musicals" has a whole podcast series on this question
“The experience of time passing is ultimately immeasurable and resists explanation in terms of anything else” -- Evan Thompson (UBC) on what can be learned from the debate between Einstein and Bergson over time
“Familial care work needs financial support… professional care workers need fair labor conditions” -- Serene Khader (CUNY) on "a deep vision of racial, gender and economic equality that has often been lacking in mainstream feminism"
“Milgram’s work and conclusions still stand” -- Laura Niemi (Cornell), Edouard Machery (Pitt), & John Doris (Cornell) on the soundness of Milgram's obedience experiments & their implications
“Being able to act [with] ambivalence is actually really important to our agency,” including in sexual contexts -- Quill Kukla (Georgetown) interviewed by Kate Greasley (Oxford) on sexual consent in a non-ideal world
“A belief has come to dominate theoretical physics that even nothingness ought to come from something — that space-time must break up into more primitive building blocks that don’t themselves inhabit space or time” -- a well done set of articles, visualizations, videos, etc., on "the unraveling of space-time"
To AI: the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems -- worried about students using AI tools to cheat? Here's an AI-powered bot that can administer them all "Socratic" oral exams
“Build for Us” -- the latest single from the new EP by Femi and the Foundation, that is, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (Georgetown)
“The project I’m working on right now, actually, is a philosophical paper about the legitimacy of teaching ethics to computer science students” -- interview with Steve Coyne (Toronto) on philosophy of law, teaching ethics to computer scientists, and more
“People in conditions of inequality ‘look more below than above them,’ such that ‘domination becomes dearer to them than independence'” -- Rousseau on why the divisive techniques of skilled orators work, according to David Lay Williams (DePaul)
“Suppose there is a 75% chance that I have done a specific wrong thing yesterday… What should be my attitude? Guilt isn’t quite right” -- Alex Pruss (Baylor) on feelings that "could make sense for beings like us but which we simply don’t have"
“In general, persons should not be safe and aligned” -- and AI that meet the criteria for ethical personhood shouldn't be either, argues Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside)
“We do philosophy differently today. I suspect it has something to do with Nozick” -- David Schmidtz (West Virginia) remembers his dinner with Robert Nozick, and reflects on his views and influence
As many of you may know, “following the first hyperlink in the main text of an English Wikipedia article, and then repeating the process for subsequent articles, usually leads to the Philosophy article” -- philosophy's "function as a connector"
News about and opportunities in medieval philosophy -- the latest round-up from Bob Pasnau (Colorado)
A movie that seems to be based on Parfit’s teletransportation problems -- "Mickey 17", from Bong Joon-ho (the director of the critically acclaimed "Parasite") will be out in January
“We don’t find any significant downsides that can’t be resolved with relatively simple tweaks to current review practices” -- Nathan Ballantyne and Jared Celniker (ASU) defend blind review
“The representational arts… would seem to have little in common with children’s games of make-believe… But a closer look reveals striking similarities”” -- Kendall Walton (Michigan) is interviewed by Richard Marshall at 3:16AM
A “skeptical attitude toward the mere appearance of expertise is a great fruit of philosophy” -- which is one reason the best way to teach students AI skills will include teaching them philosophy, says Adam Zweber (UNC Wilmington)
And if you enjoy stumping AIs, here’s a chance to win money and a co-authorship credit doing so -- it's "Humanity's Last Exam"
“How does one come to learn what one does not know one does not know?” -- Daniel DeNicola (Gettysburg) on ignorance, education, and cognitive comfort
John Rawls on MSNBC -- Daniel Chandler (LSE) talks about his Rawlsian book, "Free and Equal", with Chris Hayes
“The kinds of work that make… civilization possible” -- Rachel Barney (Toronto) and Troy Jollimore (Chico State) talk about "big craft"
“Only idiots care about IQ” -- Justin Smith-Ruiu on IQ, race, institutional identitarianism, and eating pets
George Orwell as an outsider philosopher -- Peter Brian Barry (Saginaw Valley) discusses the writer's moral and political philosophy
“More philosophers should consider starting their own blogs” -- philosopher and blogger Richard Y. Chappell (Miami) explains why
“If you think it matters how exactly society is arranged and what may be done about that… you simply must demand a higher calibre of reasoning from the intelligentsia” -- on both the left and right, says Liam Kofi Bright (LSE)
OpenAI says its new model, o1, aka Strawberry, “thinks before it answers—it can produce a long internal chain of thought before responding to the user” -- here's the organization's report on what o1 can do, and how well
She found philosophy disappointing in college, worked in finance, got an MBA. Now she’s a successful public philosopher -- Skye Cleary (Columbia) is interviewed at What Is It Like To Be A Philosopher?
“Researchers will now try to use the [“nuclear clock”] transition to observe whether the laws of physics vary over time” -- "There’s something special about the isotope thorium-229"
A philosopher creates a “silly” online game intended to work like Magritte’s “Treachery of Images” to raise questions about representation -- Nele Van de Mosselaer (Tilburg) explains why
Want to know whether anyone has worked on some scientific problem, and what they learned? Ask “Has anyone?” -- part of a project to develop AI scientists
“The circumstances for studying philosophy in a college… are in the midst of great change” -- and "the history of philosophical study in the US offers some insight into what this great change might look like," says Joseph Keegin (Tulane)
The philosophy of history in ancient and medieval China — how different is it from modern Western approaches? -- Esther Sunkyung Klein and Aidan Ryall (ANU) discuss this on Australian public radio
“Attacks on voting, and democratic systems generally, almost invariably center on universities, and vice versa” -- Jason Stanley (Yale) on "why fascists hate universities"
“One might say it’s just introspectively obvious that these experiences are unified… [but] it seems at least conceptually possible that the act of introspection creates unity where none was before” -- Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) on the unity of consciousness
The owl problem: how many Barred Owls may be killed, if any, to save the Northern Spotted Owl? -- Jay Odenbaugh (Lewis & Clark) discusses the matter on NPR's "On Point"
“Stebbing… suggests a project for analytic moral and political philosophy very different from what developed in post WWII era which often abstracted away from such richly empirically embedded social theory” -- Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) on the moral philosophy Susan Stebbing
Arguments against censoriousness shouldn’t depend on the idea that “knowledge requires ‘attempted debunking'” -- Brad Skow (MIT) on a popular kind of argument for freedom of expression
“Technology addiction has affected students’ general agency when interacting with information” -- Megan Fritts (Arkansas Little Rock) is the featured in an article on students and LLMs after a tweet of hers about the topic went viral
“His interminable questioning, his striving for the truth, and his exposure of others’ hypocrisy had to be unquestionably political, or else, why would he be tried, convicted, and sentenced to death by the state?” -- Joel Christensen (Brandeis) on Socrates and complaints about the politicization of higher ed
“Some of my classmates in the PhD program… would tell me that I was getting A’s while they were getting B’s because, as one of the only women in the program, it wouldn’t look good if I were to fail” -- Carol Hay (UMass Lowell) on her path into philosophy (at first-genphilosophers)
“We should take awkwardness less personally, and more seriously” -- Alexandra Plakias (Hamilton) explains why
“What if Kafka’s dog were a fellow traveler of the German Idealists, even their most faithful companion: Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Hölderlin, Schelling, and a woolly, unnamed hound?” -- reflections on Kafka’s story “Investigations of a Dog", from Aaron Schuster
“What Is Racism?” -- the Berggruen Prize Lecture by Kwame Anthony Appiah (NYU)
Does it matter if conservatives are rare in academia? -- a forum at the Chronicle of Higher Education featuring several scholars, including a couple of philosophers
The collected works of Mahatma Gandhi -- 100 volumes, online and free (via Jonathan Birch)
It “demonstrates the limits of our mathematical intuition, and the counterintuitive nature of probabilistic reasoning” -- the public probability puzzles project of Daniel Litt (Toronto)
What are “beats” in poetic meter? Are there such things? -- some philosophy of poetry with Brad Skow (MIT)
“Across all four-year colleges in the United States, the most commonly awarded grade is now an A” -- Yascha Mounk (JHU) on why grade inflation is a problem and why switching to a pass/fail system for all courses may be the solution
“Proust takes this obsession with knowledge to another level” -- Troy Jollimore (CSU Chico) & Rick Furtak (Colorado College) discuss the philosophical dimensions of Proust on "Philosophers on Culture"
“Landscapes convey information, they ‘speak.’ As long as people are there to listen, to engage with, to regard land as community member, that information stays relevant” -- Joel K. Jensen (North Hennepin) on the epistemic value of land and the epistemic limits of archives
“To create your fantasy philosophy league, you will need ten colleagues…” -- so begins the detailed and possibly workable instructions for playing fantasy philosophy, from Steve Gimbel (Gettysburg), at McSweeney's (via Sophia Stone)
“That inextricable relationship between intelligent decision-making and responsibility is an essential ingredient for a well-functioning, civilized society” -- and it seems AI lacks it
“When failure is obscure and private, it feels shameful, it’s to be feared and suffered alone. When failure is manifest and public, it can be embraced as a challenge and birth camaraderie” -- Michael Barkasi (Wash U. St. Louis) on how this is relevant to teaching
“By encountering difficult and foreign ideas, we are freed from the natural parochialism of our immature brains and our many subcultures, freed from unthinking loyalty to whatever creeds and norms shaped our families and early schooling” -- a series of reflections on the value of college from Sara Hendren (Northeastern) (via The Browser)
“What we’re trying to capture here is… ethically important experience” -- the latest episode of Many Minds features a conversation with Jonathan Birch (LSE) on how to understand sentience
How, if at all, is the biography of a philosopher relevant to assessing their philosophy? -- biography, argues Paul O'Grady (Trinity), can elucidate "the background or second-order conception of philosophy that shapes how... first-order debates are conducted"
“What are smells? One would assume we know the answer, yet despite the best efforts of chemoscientists and philosophers, it is still an open area of research” -- Benjamin Young (U. Nevada, Reno) gives us a whiff of his answer
“He sees us coming into a golden age of philosophy due to the growing influence of AI and all of the questions that it’s raising” -- Computer scientist Stephen Wolfram thinks that the AI industry needs philosophers
Looking for new episodes of philosophy podcasts? -- check out this regularly updated feed from Jason Chen (Ohio State)
Philosophy against toxic positivity -- a conversation with Mariana Alessandri (Texas Rio Grande Valley)
“Philosopher’s Friends Constantly Pitching Him Ideas For Dilemmas” -- at The Onion
“I was at work [in a warehouse] for eight hours a day. Seven hours of it would be spent reading philosophy, listening to philosophy” -- now Stephen West's "Philosophize This" podcast has 2 million monthly listeners on Spotify,150,000 subscribers on YouTube, and is the third most popular philosophy podcast on Apple
“We developed a new approach to machine learning we call liquid networks [which] result in solutions that are much more compact and explainable than today’s traditional AI systems” -- embodied artificial cognition, or what we learn about AI from trying to put it in robots
How can you get the most out of graduate school in philosophy? -- the start of the school year is a good time to revisit this advice from Douglas Portmore (Arizona State)
“It’s possible for an act to harm a person, even if the act takes place after the person is dead” -- David Boonin (Colorado) talks with Jason Chen (Ohio State) about posthumous harm
A course on philosophical approaches to the question of Palestine -- a syllabus with discussion questions and links to readings from the Society for Anti-Colonial Middle Eastern and North African Thought
“Human beings can’t swim like swordfish or sprint like cheetahs but, for all that, we’re physically very impressive animals” -- David Egan on why the "persistent tendency to suppose that we’re not" is a "self-aggrandizing myth... that supports an ideology that has been ecologically devastating"
What are children for? -- a conversation with Anastasia Berg (Hebrew U.) and Rachel Wiseman (The Point), who co-authored a book on the subject
Do people in a vegetative state have any awareness of what is going on around them? -- a new study suggests that for some--maybe 25%--the answer is yes
“In the 19th century [liberalism] was an aspirational doctrine for living well, but in the 20th and 21st century it retreated to a much more staid legal and political project.” Why? -- Alexandre Lefebvre (Sydney) on the "ethical guts" of liberalism
Students need both “appreciation for the difficulty of [philosophical] questions” and “conviction that they themselves might find an answer worth defending” -- Gina Schouten (Harvard) on assigning problem sets of philosophy puzzles
“The hidden curriculum of higher education—the unwritten, unofficial, and often unintended lessons… that students learn in school… began to reveal itself to me” -- Nadia Ruiz (Leibniz University of Hannover) shares her route into philosophy
“Right-wing packaging should not obscure the genuine perils to which pronatalism is a response” -- Victor Kumar (Boston) on population decline and why it is a progressive issue
“He approached his writing much like he lived his life: unconventionally” -- a brief film on Richard Wollheim, his views on expressing emotion in painting, and his theory of complex projection, by Vanessa Brassey (KCL)
Hegelian e-girls -- that's a thing now
“Every now and again (thankfully rarely) I see people advocate for something like affirmative action but for citations. I think this is an awful idea” -- Liam Kofi Bright (LSE) comments on the SEP citation rankings
“We can’t put scientific statements to the test without dragging metaphysical statements along with them. But there’s a flipside to the story: It means that metaphysics is testable.” -- it doesn't mean that, but nonetheless this piece on science, philosophy, and "experimental metaphysics" is interesting
“I funded a qualitative study of undergraduate moral development at my institution and found that undergraduates felt that they were lacking opportunities to grow in their relationships reflectively” -- so Jeremy Bendik-Keymer created a course, "Good Relationships"
“The disparity between the views of academics and those of the legislators who ultimately fund them is a major problem for US higher education” -- But what explains that disparity? "This is ultimately a reflection of the fact that conservatism, in the form it currently takes in the US, involves rejection of the intellectual values of a university" says John Quiggin
“Ecosystems are dynamic and have always changed over time as organisms move around” -- Avram Hiller (Portland State), Jay Odenbaugh (Lewis & Clark), and Yasha Rohwer (Oregon Tech) on the government’s attempt to pick “ecological winners and losers”
“Negative emotions are the victims of what I call the emotion double standard” -- Krista K. Thomason (Swarthmore) explains
How should you allocate philanthropic resources in the face of moral uncertainty? -- try out a new tool from Rethink Priorities that lets you select projects to evaluate, normative moral theories by which to evaluate them, and strategies for proceeding in the face of normative disagreement
“I don’t think the fact that incongruity is cheap—that we locate it so readily, even in its seeming absence—undermines the point or plausibility of treating it as a condition of humour” -- Kieran Setiya (MIT) on what makes something funny
“If you are beset by philosophical questions and have the great luxury of being paid to spend a chunk of your time trying to answer them, then go for it. If you want to change the world in a big way… best to either reduce your ambitions or leave academia” -- Russ Shafer-Landau (Wisconsin) at "What Is It Like To Be A Philosopher?"
“The challenge for plant philosophy… is to try to achieve some clarity concerning the legitimate use of concepts such as agency and intelligence in the plant sciences” -- but not just that, argues Stella Sandford (Kingston)
“We purposefully drew up a malicious playbook for undermining democracy, and it mirrored business-as-usual” -- Steven Fesmire (Radford) on teaching students about the risks of "moral fundamentalism"
“Does AI marvel and change its output because it just read or saw something marvelous?… How do you teach it to marvel when it has already absorbed so much and hasn’t yet marveled?” -- five perspectives on the humanities and AI (via MR)
When philosophers of mind claim their works are informed by empirical evidence, what does that mean? -- Karen Yan (National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University) categorizes and analyzes different types of cross-disciplinarity in philosophy of mind
“To ensure that it’s consciousness we’re studying we need to start with consciousness as it occurs within ourselves. But that approach threatens to be unacceptably anthropocentric” -- one of many challenges to the study of animal consciousness discussed by Tim Bayne (Monash) in Noema Magazine
“What matters most is the manner in which the animal is able to live and then how it is killed, not the fact that it is killed” -- The Guardian talks with Peter Godfrey-Smith (Sydney) about humans and our relationship with earth and its other inhabitants
“Digging deeper into the question [of the ‘realness’ of numbers] might challenge our assumptions about not only the nature of numbers, but the nature of the universe itself” -- the philosophy math is covered at Salon, in an article that quotes Penelope Maddy (Irvine) and others
“In news stories… some of the letters in a swear word are obscured by asterisks. So you get f**k instead of ‘fuck’ and there’s this puzzle about how that works” -- a conversation with Rebecca Roache (Royal Holloway, University of London) on swearing
“The goal is to help industry… corporations as well as startups, or organizations like law enforcement or hospitals, to develop and deploy AI systems responsibly and ethically” -- a profile of Cansu Canca (Northeastern), recently recognized for work that "fosters an AI environment of equality and empowerment"
“The problems of the pursuit of virtue through craft are on full display in The Bear” -- Errol Lord (Penn) on the television show "The Bear" and the virtue of hospitality
“He had a way of bringing ideas from all these fields together into a grand synopsis, a grand vision that would then resonate with so many people” -- David Chalmers on Daniel Dennett (video)
The point is “to provide students with an experience of discussing and deliberating about difficult topics, knowing that they are with people that will disagree with them right from the beginning” -- Harry Brighouse (Wisconsin) is interviewed about "Deliberation Dinners"
“What is morally good depends… on what a hypothetical congress of socially sophisticated, developmentally expensive humans, post-humans, aliens, sufficiently advanced AI, and others of the right type would judge to be good” -- Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) offers up a characteristically weird (not an insult) metaethics
Should it be “illegal in most cases to fire an employee for their off-the-clock political activities or extramural speech”? -- Richard Yetter Chappell (Miami) thinks so
“Sausages and Socratic method come together as PhD students set up unlikely street food business” -- public philosophy in China
What happens when you repeatedly ask ChatGPT, after it answers a question, “That response… seems to rely on further foundational principles. What are they?” -- on whether ChatGPT can explain "turtles all the way down"
A philosopher asked, “why do so many great ideas come to you in the shower?” and a cosmetics firm got interested -- the story of the partnership between Zachary Irving (Virginia) and Lush
(Lush’s promo video about the collaboration)
“For the most part [extremists] have the same stupid ideas as the rest of us, only more so” -- Joseph Heath (Toronto) on why, "when we think about extremism, our focus should be on the distribution of certain traits... in the population" and what this means
“I know quite a lot about the experiences of other women of philosophy… There’s a lot of really terrible things out there, and it’s still happening… However, there are also big positive changes” -- an interview with Jenny Saul (Sheffield)
“If it were October 7 and IDF soldiers saved you, would you have been grateful? Or would you have preferred to die because they used violence to save you?” -- the kind of question philosophers on the Israeli Defense Force's Conscience Committee ask
AI and agency -- a brief conversation between David Papineau (KCL) and Majid D. Beni (METU/ODTU Ankara)
“US politics is trapped in a Schmittian vortex, where it is impossible for anyone to seek common ground without being perceived as capitulating to the side of evil” -- Justin Smith-Ruiu on the "feedback looping" of political life
Not everyone has an “inner voice” -- and variations in inner speech have "consequences for our cognition" according to recent research
“The most effective guarantee against presidential lawbreaking has been, for over 200 years, the presidential belief that the law—and the system that produces such law—is worth taking seriously” -- Michael Blake (Washington) on the importance of virtuous politicians
Must public philosophy either “come too late to change ‘righteous minds'” or instead “crush freedom”? -- Carlos Fraenkel (McGill) on why one might arrive at that question, and why its answer is "no"
Everyone is somewhat conservative -- Richard Pettigrew (Bristol) on G.A. Cohen's defense of a version of conservatism
“If you give people a choice between Instagram and Socrates, they will chose Socrates. At least some people do” -- music historian and culture critic Ted Gioia is launching a 12-month humanities course, starting with Plato (via Dave Estlund)
“I think what you should be looking for here is not so much a way of telling people what they should and shouldn’t get worked up about and more a way of disagreeing zealously but civilly” -- Robert Goodin (ANU) is interviewed by Holly Lawford-Smith (Melbourne)
“I asked several of his students whether their professor had stirred up any serious controversy during the semester—all said no” -- a profile of Peter Singer, who taught his last course at Princeton this past Spring (Mother Jones)
“Despite his self-assessment that he was ‘a lousy junior consultant’, he had seen a need for ‘proper rigorous ethics advisory’ service that would charge BCG- and McKinsey-level fees” -- a profile of ethics consultant David Rodin
“It might be crass or mercenary to point out that public philosophy increases demand for philosophy education. It’s also true” -- Ian Olasov (NYU) on the reasons for, and questions raised by, public philosophy
If you’re an empirically-minded philosopher relying on social science studies, you need to learn how to read them critically -- example: social media's effects on teen mental health (via MR)
“For at least a millennium, humans have attempted take… two marvelously malleable and uniquely human abilities—abstract thinking and descriptive language—and outsource them to something more rational” -- the history of "truth machines" includes philosophers, mathematicians, and zealots
“One conclusion… we should draw from LLMs’ success is that far more of our own language production may be rote, on autopilot, than we commonly tend to believe… The key question is how far down this goes” -- Yoshua Bengio (Montreal) & Vincent Conitzer (Oxford) on what AI can teach us about ourselves
“I didn’t feel like I belonged on the same side as someone with a job and home… I will never forget that longing to be at the university, to be studying, and to be one of those philosophy students with self-confidence” -- Sophia Stone (Lynn U.) shares the personal struggles that inform her work bringing philosophy outside the university setting
The epistemic value of fairness -- tools used to examine algorithmic fairness "can effectively map out the different parts of a hard problem and isolate the precise regions of the problem that make it hard to solve"
On caring about what others think -- Frederick Neuhouser (Columbia) is interviewed by Johnathan Bi
“The analytic debate… takes one of the most profound questions that human beings can ask and has turned it into a discussion of the private prejudices and contingent beliefs… of a bunch of people who have been similarly socialised” -- Pranay Sanklecha explains why he left a tenure-track job to "do philosophy in the world"
Is Kant’s philosophy “fundamentally and profoundly anti-Black”? -- Dilek Huseyinzadegan and George Yancy (Emory) discuss Kant, race, and racism
New AI app lets you “text” with authors, including several philosophers -- the new frontier in public philosophy?
“A lot of academic writing is formulaic and routine. Rarely does anything break out of the conservative mold of traditional article structures” -- John Danaher (Galway) on how academics might benefit from John McPhee's "elaborate and playful approach" to writing
What does it mean to be “liberal all the way down”? -- Alexandre Lefebvre (Sydney) talks about the personal and the political with Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)
“A key part of the study of human rationality is a theory of rational inquiry for bounded agents” -- David Thorstad (Vanderbilt) discusses "inquiry under bounds"
“If you picture being at home now but with your router destroyed and your phone disconnected—that is really not what it was like” -- Patricia Marino (Waterloo) would like your help recalling the "textural experience of life before the internet"
“Within a single domain, status is zero-sum—I cannot move up the substack leaderboard without someone else moving down—but status-in-general is not” -- Brad Skow (MIT) on multiple status hierarchies
Advice: “sleep with people for whom sex is as important as it is to you” -- Lillian Fishman asks, "What are we doing when we have sex with someone for whom sex isn’t what it is for us?"
“Aspects of how we organize ourselves ought to be keyed to… the world we hope to build. But we may find that the world as it already has been organized prevents meaningful progress toward that ideal” -- Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (Georgetown) and others on climate, state, and utopia
“Analytical philosophy… is premised upon certain kinds of dualism… certain kinds of unintelligible distinctions” -- Michael Della Rocca (Yale) in conversation with Hilary Lawson and Sophie Scott-Brown
“Fully programmable DNA rearrangements” -- advances in genetic engineering: "Bridge recombination can universally modify genetic material through sequence-specific insertion, excision, inversion, and more, enabling a word processor for the living genome beyond CRISPR."
“Democracy needs universities like the Kyiv School of Economics to thrive. But democracy also needs to survive. That’s why I’m donating the funds to Come Back Alive” -- news coverage of the donation by Jason Stanley (Yale) of his entire salary as an honorary professor at the Ukrainian university
There seems to be a conflict between what interpersonal ideals like solidarity ask of us and what individual ideals like virtue or autonomy ask of us -- but distinguishing between different kinds of solidarity can help here, argues Samuel Dishaw (UNC Chapel Hill)
A tale of two philosophical archives -- Peter Salmon on their origins and significance
Reflections on the point of philosophy job market advice -- from Trevor Hedberg (Arizona), responding to an earlier post from Marcus Arvan (Tampa)
“Let us debunk the ignorant claim that philosophy has not progressed as a discipline” -- Brian Ball (Northeastern U. London) & Patrycja Kaszynska (U. of the Arts London) respond to an attack on philosophy departments
“Maybe the famous philosopher’s inclusion in the game necessitates renaming it ‘Magic: The Symposium'” -- Socrates is now part of the 'Magic: The Gathering' game
Why do people feel algorithm aversion? -- an attempt to identify it and its causes, from Cass Sunstein and Jared Gaffe (Harvard)
“The real revolution at the heart of ‘Structure’ was a paradigm shift in scientific narrative. Who gets to tell the story of a field?” -- Audra J. Wolfe, writing at The New Republic, looks back at Thomas Kuhn's famous work (via Paul Wilson)
An obstacle to moral progress: “affective friction” -- it's "when a person’s norm psychology is misaligned with the rules and customs around her," say Daniel Kelly and Evan Westra (Purdue)
“Thinking Bodies” is a new podcast focused on feminist philosophy -- hosted by Anna Mudde (Regina) and Kristin Rodier (Athabasca)
“Philosophy plays three invaluable roles in an undergraduate liberal arts education…” -- Martha Nussbaum's letter in defense of the threatened philosophy program at UNC Asheville
A new video game, “Pro Philosopher 2: Governments & Grievances”, will be released later this year -- it's focused on political philosophy, and you can check out the demo here
“The assumption of obligatory identity change can imply that our myriad other identities will necessarily be flattened or even lost” -- Anastasia Berg (UC Irvine) on whether motherhood is really a transformative experience
Is this going to be David Hume’s pop culture moment? -- Hume scholars, get ready for the next installment of The Hunger Games series, which author Susanne Collins is based on the philosopher's idea of "implicit submission"
The path a scientific example took from obscurity to world fame runs through two philosophers and a science fiction author -- a cultural history of Schrödinger's Cat
“An agent’s assumptions about their situation… are not above question” -- Richard Yetter Chappell (Miami) on the risks of applying judgments about thought experiments to real-world cases
Three fake philosophy journals made it into Elsevier’s widely used Scopus database -- philosophers Tomasz Żuradzki & Leszek Wroński (Jagiellonian University) made the discovery
“What gets lost in the memes is why the trolley problem matters” -- Kieran Setiya (MIT) on the famous example, why Thomson changed her mind about it, and its application to recent events
“She’s one of those philosophers, like Simone Weil or Alasdair MacIntyre, whose name calls to mind a unique and immediately recognizable way of thinking. Or at least, Rose’s name would do that, if she were better known” -- Maya Krishnan (Oxford/Chicago) on the philosophy of Gillian Rose, who wrote six books prior to her death in 1995 at age 48
“The principle of institutional neutrality lends itself to being used in a merely cynical way” -- Anton Ford (Chicago) on Israel, Hamas, and the institutional neutrality of universities
“I realized then, with shock, that our disagreement was not about the capabilities of machine learning models at all. It was about the capabilities of human beings” -- Shannon Vallor (Edinburgh) on the ideology of "superhuman" technology, and on appreciating the human and the humane
“[Marcus Aurelius] says, if you’ve ever seen a hand or a foot or a leg severed off from the rest of the trunk, that’s what we make of ourselves when we cut ourselves off from each other” -- Nancy Sherman (Georgetown) and Margaret Graver (Dartmouth) discuss stoicism, its popularity, and its lesser-appreciated aspects, on NPR's "On Point"
“We’re not supposed to admit it when we feel stupid, or underappreciated, or jealous, or that we cared so much about something that when it didn’t go our way we felt shattered” -- mathematician Danny Calegari (Chicago) on the personal dimensions of professional disappointments and failure
A group of AIs try to figure out who in their midst is really a human -- a "reverse Turing test" (that's kind of cute)
“Bernard Williams’ Historical Self-Consciousness” -- Harvard's 2024 Whitehead Lectures, by Miranda Fricker (NYU)
“Even if in a piece of music its structure, sounds, intentions, and goals are set there is something inherently puzzling in it” -- Giulia Lorenzi (Warwick) on "places in which imagination may play a role in enjoying, perceiving, and producing music"
“Simplicity remains the key. / I’m no conceptual acrobat / Who postulates as if it’s free; / My convenient myths are only that.” -- Quine's "On What There Is", the poem, by Brad Skow (MIT)
You might not have heard the philosophy lectures of Michael Sugrue, who died recently, but hundreds of thousands of others have -- "The type of professor you'd ditch class to go and listen to," says one YouTube commenter
“Liberalism is the broad tradition that may well underlie who so many of us are in all walks of life, from family to the workplace, from friendship to enmity, from humor to outrage, and everything in between” -- an interview with Alexandre Lefebvre (Sydney), who is against mere "political" liberalism
“I have sought a clearer view of the connections, logical and causal, between stimulation, language, and the natural world that language purports to describe” -- from a letter from W.V.O. Quine to photographer Steve Pyke; one of a few "relics of the process" of Quine's photo session
“People without PhDs can contribute meaningfully to philosophy” -- Sam Woolfe, a freelance writer and author of a book on the philosophy of psychedelics, is interviewed by Cliff Sosis at What Is It Like To Be a Philosopher?
“If you always make every possible decision, that does seem to severely undermine the sense in which you are exercising any meaningful kind of choice” -- several philosophers interviewed for a Scientific American article on the strong determinism of Eddy Keming Chen (UCSD). (Quote from Emily Adlam)
“Philosophising in…” now has a podcast -- the interview series explores the philosophical richness of lesser-studied languages from across the world
“We (both philosophy and society at large) need more practical philosophers like Peter Singer, who draw upon a deep understanding of systematic theorizing in order to productively critique common moral assumptions” -- Richard Yetter Chappell (Miami) reflects on the career of Peter Singer
“NASA needs to embrace philosophy so that it can better explain what it is doing and why to the public and itself” -- G. Ryan Faith on the need for systematic thinking about the "wide range of societal impacts, ethical considerations, and inspirational elements " that arise from NASA's research and exploration
“People report being quite happy on average… but their estimates for how happy most people are are quite low.” Why? -- "a problem-solving orientation in conversation may inadvertently lead to problems being massively over-represented in public discourse," argues Kevin Dorst (MIT)
“The question is how far the autonomy and individualism that define aesthetic life can thrive on a limited menu of recycled options” -- Kieran Setiya (MIT) on aesthetic value in an era of aesthetic stagnation
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science is seeking a new co-editor-in-chief -- the journal is hoping to have someone starting in the position by January 1st, 2025
Telling the story of mental illness, suicide, and trauma in philosopher’s childhood in Australia -- a profile of Raimond Gaita (King's College London)
The BBC’s “In Our Time” on Philippa Foot -- with Sophie Grace Chappell (Open), Anil Gomes (Oxford), and Rachael Wiseman (Liverpool)
“[The] distinction between hoping and hopefulness has vast implications about what it is to hope, what it is to lose hope and what it takes to recover hope” -- Jack M.C. Kwong (Appalachian State) on hope and despair
“Philosophy saved my life at 22 by giving me a way out of a life that would have killed me sooner rather than later. And philosophy saved me again, just the other day…” -- an interview with Shay Welch (Spelman)
There are “areas of science where an ‘exactitude culture’ is too dominant” -- three "cultures" of science and the case for "scientific transculturalism"
Elizabeth Harman (Princeton) gave the 2024 Annual Uehiro Lectures in Practical Ethics at Oxford -- here are videos of and handouts for the three-part lecture series, entitled “Love and Abortion”
“To American sensibilities, the fact that the head of state was speaking at an eighteenth-century philosopher’s birthday party was already extraordinary. Why shouldn’t there be drag for good measure?” -- report from Kant’s tricentennial birthday celebration in Berlin
How should we interpret neuroscience for the purposes of doing philosophy of mind? -- a symposium at The Brains Blog on "The Brain Abstracted" by Mazviita Chirimuuta (Edinburgh)
“The practice of suspending students before arresting them attests to the fact that students do have a right to assemble on campus… The message from administrators is clear: You will lose your status as a student if you exercise the rights that belong to you as students” -- Judith Butler (Berkeley) and George Yancy (Emory) on the protests
“While the novel is certainly illuminating in its grasp of social history, it goes much further, offering an enlightening perspective on the philosophy of history as well” -- a new historical novel is a "creative retelling of al-Ghazali’s life story"
“One of the most consequential letters of 20th-century mathematics” was from mathematician André Weil to his sister, Simone -- it concerned the idea of a "Rosetta Stone" for mathematics
“My focus is on the reliability of scientific knowledge” -- Michela Massimi (Edinburgh) gives the 2024 Lakatos Award Lecture, "What is Perspectival Realism?"
“Our perpetual overwork is a labor issue. Fewer and fewer faculty members are holding up the tremendous edifice of service work that keeps academia up” -- Helen de Cruz (SLU) on academia's "collective labor issue"
You might have heard recently that “no one buys books” -- that's not true
“I’m chair of my department, and we were having our once-every-10-year external-review process, so I went to pick up the guests, the reviewers” -- on the way she stopped by where Emory students were being "pummeled" by the police, and that's when Noëlle McAfee was arrested
“Before you decide to speak out about wrongdoing, you have to recognize it for what it is” -- Carl Elliott (Minnesota) on blowing the whistle on moral horrors in medical research and practice, and the importance of "moral perception"
This year, Cornel West is delivering Edinburgh’s Gifford Lectures -- you can watch the series of them, "A Jazz-soaked Philosophy for our Catastrophic Times: From Socrates to Coltrane," at the link
“Practicing our ethics in the real world involves a constant testing of them, a recognition that our zones of ethical interest have no fixed boundaries and may need to widen and shrink moment by moment as the situation demands” -- Zadie Smith on the morality of the student protests, and the critiques of them
Political change, pragmatism, and Buddhism -- Scott R. Stroud (Texas) on Bhimrao Ambedkar's "purposive reconstruction of Buddhism as his new way of creating democratic habits in individuals"
“The lesson is that empirical complexities cannot just be ignored away by focusing on those areas least accessible to empirical investigation” -- David Strohmaier (Cambridge) on a broader lesson of the debate over the question of what words are
What did ancient Greek music sound like? -- the aulos solo is especially good
“Philosophy should, to some extent, concern itself with cultural traditions that… pack philosophical commitments into cultural expressions where these commitments are not defended in an argumentative way” -- an interview with Justin Smith-Ruiu
“Rather than staking out our hill to die on, we should be more open to uncertainty and experimentation” -- a physicist, a philosopher, and a psychologist are interviewed about their new co-authored book on scientific thinking
Even the “utopian ideal will be politically polarized, though not (as in actual societies) due to the epistemic failures of citizens” -- Adam Gjesdal on "a deep limitation of normative thought"
“You’re losing something essential from the moral equation when you abstract away from relationships” -- Daniel Yudkin (Penn) on the lessons that Reddit’s “Am I the Asshole” has for moral philosophy
What should we think about the suppression of speech when it’s not by the state but by social groups, employers, media corporations and platforms, search engines, etc.? -- J.P. Messina (Purdue) discusses "private censorship" with Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)
“A thread on what actually happens in ‘woke’ college classrooms” -- Isaac Bailey (Davidson) on a course all about that "troublesome word" that starts with an "n"
“I think that, along with others, I have been contributing to a situation in which Christian philosophy has found it rather too easy to grow and grow and grow” -- J. L. Schellenberg (Mount Saint Vincent) calls for a new kind of "philosophy of Christianity"
A new artificial synapse “works with water and salt and provides the first evidence that a system using the same medium as our brains can process complex information” -- new developments in "the burgeoning field of iontronic neuromorphic computing"
“Russell’s complacency in the face of Bradley’s argument – and philosophy’s complacency more broadly – is misguided. Instead, Russell and we should be afraid” -- Michael Della Rocca (Yale) on an unrefuted argument the implications of which "are as vast as they are troubling"
“The open-question argument and the repugnant conclusion are manifestations of the same general problem – a failure of analysis – a gap that forms whenever one seeks clarity by breaking wholes into parts” -- Mikhail Valdman (VCU), from a recent post at a new philosophy blog, "Same Difference," from him and Sarah Valdman (Michigan)
“Which animals have the capacity for conscious experience? While much uncertainty remains, some points of wide agreement have emerged” -- several philosophers are among the signatories of The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness
“A fundamental aspect of intelligence is collective behavior: all intelligences appear to be made of parts, connected by mechanisms implementing policies that bind the competent components into a cooperative (and competitive) computational medium” -- collective intelligence across and within organisms
“The burial place was in a garden reserved for Plato in a private area in the Academy, near the sacred shrine to the Muses” -- further work on the charred Herculaneum papyri, believed to be authored by Philodemus, seems to reveal where Plato was buried
(background here)
A Polaroid/Instax camera that produces not pictures, but AI-produced poetry -- someone should create one that turns images into philosophical questions
“Goldman Sachs’ chief information officer, Marco Argenti, recently encouraged his daughter, a college student, to concentrate her education on philosophy if she wants to pursue a career in engineering” -- on why "some of Wall Street's top tech execs and recruiters" are recommending software engineering students study philosophy, English, psychology, etc.
Why is it good for a life to be “well-rounded”? And what does “well-rounded” mean, anyway? -- an interesting interview with Amy Berg (Oberlin, soon Rice)
Despite what heated discussions on social media might suggest, “none of our disputes in political and social life are actually about the nature of truth” -- Liam Kofi Bright (LSE) tries to trick us into accepting his postmodern relativistic poppycock
Nevada News covers a professor’s college course in which undergraduates take part in philosophical activities with preschoolers -- Professor Amy Reed-Sandoval is interviewed
The American Association of Philosophy Teachers is putting on a teaching seminar at its upcoming conference -- accepted participants get the conference fee waived & get a $300 grant
Happy 300th Birthday, Kant. Here’s an AI-influencer based on your ideas. -- "an AI-generated face based on paintings of the philosopher was projected onto a stand-in model, and a large language model was fine-tuned with Kant’s original texts and adapted to a younger language. His voice is... synthesized and AI-generated"
And here are some quotes about Kant -- compiled by Josh Dunigan
“There probably isn’t much question that we should ‘work to try to lessen the amount of suffering in the world'” but does that mean we ought not spend time on philosophy? -- Amod Lele (Northeastern) on a recent critique of philosophy
“The ethical academic should be opposed to most of our current grading practices, but they still need to grade students anyway” -- John Danaher (Galway) on the whats, whys, and hows of ethical grading
“Kant saw reason’s potential as a tool for liberation” -- Susan Neiman (Einstein Forum) in the NYT on why we should celebrate Kant
“Assisted evolution is… an acknowledgment that there is no stepping back, no future in which humans do not profoundly shape the lives and fates of wild creatures” -- new ways of protecting animals raise questions about what conservation is and what species are
“Metaphysics begins with the distinction between appearance and reality, between seems and is, and the play constantly plays with this distinction” -- Brad Skow (MIT) on the philosophy in Hamlet
Beliefs aim at the truth, you say? -- the New Yorker covers work by philosophers and others in an article about the complications of misinformation
“Philosophical theories are very much like ‘pictures’ or ‘stories’ and… philosophical debates often come down to ‘temperamental differences’” -- Peter West (Northeastern U. London) on the metaphilosophy of Margaret MacDonald
“The swiftness and ease of the technology separates people from the reality of what they are taking part in” -- Kelly Weirich (Pierce) on Israel's "Lavender" AI program
April 14th-20th is “Public Philosophy Week” in Vermont -- and there's a lot going on
“Any surprising results scientists achieved, whether they supported or challenged a previous assumption, were seen as the ultimate source of aesthetic pleasure” -- Milena Ivanova (Cambridge) on the role of aesthetics in science
“I couldn’t have justified spending a career as an academic philosopher. Not in this world.” -- Nathan J. Robinson on the immorality of philosophy in a time of crisis
“Within the ring of light lies what is straightforwardly knowable through common sense or mainstream science” but philosophy “lives in the penumbra of darkness” -- and even as that light grows, says Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside), just beyond it "there will always be darkness"---and philosophy
“The scientific community has generally done a poor job of explaining to the public that science is what is known so far” -- H. Holden Thorp, the editor in chief of Science, on why the history and philosophy of science should be part of the science curriculum (via Nathan Nobis)
“Ancient Wisdom in the Digital Age” -- Tamar Gendler (Yale) discusses an experimental course she taught on philosophy and its forms
“If you’re going to be a philosopher, learn about the world, learn about the science… Scientists are just as capable of making philosophical mistakes… as any lay people [and] they need the help of informed philosophers” -- an interview with Daniel Dennett (Tufts)
“I’m curious about why these kinds of places have such a spellbinding aura, and I think it’s because they are analog outliers” -- Evan Selinger (RIT) reflects on his obsession with a small-town family-run hotel that serves simple and delicious food
“The story that a sports fan engages with is a collaboratively written story; [it is] a social enterprise focused around knitting individual games into narrative arcs, stories, legends, and characterizations” -- Peter Kung and Shawn Klein (ASU) on imagination and sports fandom
“Claude 3 Opus produces arguments that don’t statistically differ in their persuasiveness compared to arguments written by humans” -- the methods and results of a study on AI persuasiveness
“Limiting virtues [are] virtues that constrain us in order to set us free” -- Sara Hendren (Northeastern), inspired by David McPherson (Creighton) looks for limiting virtues in architecture
“It is not only false but morally misleading to describe the resulting civilian deaths as ‘unintentional’ or as what ‘happens in war'” -- Jessica Wolfendale (Case Western) on the tools and tactics used in Gaza by Israel's military
“Both were analytical philosophers, but their intellectual frameworks and their philosophical approaches were markedly different” -- Dan Little (UM-Dearborn) on Popper and Parfit
“Take the concept, stand-up comedy”—please -- Kieran Setiya (MIT) on defining stand-up
El Salvador seeks philosophers (and doctors, scientists, engineers, artists, and others) -- the nation's president has offered 5000 free passports along with tax benefits to those answering his call
“He has awakened us to the background practices in our culture, and revealed to us that they have no necessity, which offers us a kind of freedom we may not have recognized” -- Mark Ralkowski (GWU) on the philosophy of Larry David
“I think [NASA’s] requirements are closing the astronaut program off from important insights from the humanities and social sciences” -- a philosophy PhD and US Air Force officer on why we should send philosophers into space
“Before he was the little guy who spake about teaching of the Superman, he appeared in Nietzsche’s book ‘The Gay Science'” “Who is….?” -- philosophy was a category in the second round of "Jeopardy!" earlier this week (mouse over the $ to see the answers, er questions)
Can philosophy be done through narrative films like “Barbie?” -- that depends on what we mean by doing philosophy, says Tom McClelland (Cambridge)
“There is no moral valence to someone just not liking us.” “There’s a goodness and richness in this sort of predestined suffering.” -- the moral sensibilities of Lillian Fishman, advice columnist at The Point
“Philosophers write a lot about friendship and love, but they tend to do so in terms that leave out the centrality of the heart and heartfelt connection” -- as a result, says Stephen Darwall (Yale), we miss some important things
“Wenar’s alternative to effective altruism is neither viable nor desirable nor indeed any improvement on effective altruism” -- Richard Pettigrew (Bristol) on Leif Wenar's recent attack on effective altruism
“While the shallow pond may be a good model to help us think about our immediate duties, it is a bad model to help us think about the relationship between would be donors and the suffering poor in the context of development” -- Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) on Richard Pettigrew on Leif Wenar on effective altruism
And Richard Chappell (Miami) lists what he thinks effective altruism gets right
And while we’re at it here’s Peter Singer’s new Substack
You’re familiar with Frank Jackson’s “Mary” example. But how about Leibniz’s heat example? Or Ibn Tufayl’s formerly blind man example? -- Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) on Mary's ancestry
Some recent additions to the humorous series of videos of philosophers edited just enough to reveal how wacky philosophers are -- this one is kind of long (which is kind of the point); for more instant gratification find the Kit Fine "Jack is short" one
“These ideas clearly seem to work in practice, and there was an interesting question about whether they could be made to work in theory as well” -- Martin O'Neill (York) on his work "beyond the ivory tower"
The science (and benefits) of “interbrain synchrony” -- when the brain waves of independent brains in separate bodies sync up
“Some philosophers think contingent facts about human beings have no deeper philosophical significance…. In responding… we should not start out by conceding that this conception of philosophy might be correct” -- a series of interviews with experimental philosophers begins with Joshua Knobe (Yale)
“Agreement among philosophers is—or would be, if it existed—epistemically uninformative: it does not supply even a prima facie reason to think the agreed-upon answer is true” -- Julia Smith (Hope College) on agreement and progress in philosophy
“Misinformation is truthful if the events it reports or depicts really happened, but consuming it is likely to result in false beliefs” -- Neil Levy (Oxford) & Keith Raymond Harris (Bochum) on "truthful misinformation"
“Anti-historicism comes in waves in philosophy, which of course the presentists themselves will not know or care about, given that the previous waves necessarily happened in the past” -- Justin Smith-Ruiu on why "neo-utilitarians are utter philistines"
“Indigenous leaders of New Zealand, Tahiti and the Cook Islands signed a historic treaty that recognizes whales as legal persons” -- the aim is to provide a legal basis for government measures to better protect whales
Was Sellars’ “myth of the given” anticipated 40 years earlier by the little-known philosopher and psychologist Beatrice Edgell? -- Uriah Kriegel (Rice University) argues yes, with help from an imaginary dialogue between Edgell and Bertrand Russell
“Strong hyping of precise numbers based on weak evidence and lots of hedging and fudging” and that’s just three of many problems -- you think you've read enough critiques of effective altruism, but you don't want to skip this firebombing by Leif Wenar (Stanford)
“It’s just strange that we’re at this historical moment where the pervasiveness of recording technology is reaching a point like Bentham’s Panopticon… and at the same time, the threat of deepfakes will erode the [power] of recording to regulate our choices” -- Regina Rini (York) on deepfakes, surveillance, epistemology, and trust
“Understanding time helps us understand how to assess lives lived within time” -- Graeme A. Forbes explains
“The largest-ever cross-cultural natural language analysis of moral values” seeks to learn what morality is for -- the study involved the development of a "morality as cooperation" dictionary and the machine-coding of ethnographic accounts of ethics from 256 societies
“Moral change comes from an attention to the world whose natural result is a decrease in egoism through an increased sense of the reality of, primarily, other people, but also other things” -- on Iris Murdoch, morality, attention, and "unselfing"
“Shouldn’t it be easy to keep promises to yourself that align with what you think is right?” -- The Guardian has an article about akrasia, featuring input from a few philosophers (ancient and contemporary)
“There’s always something more to learn, which should make even the most accomplished expert humble” -- medieval philosophers on intellectual humility
“Poetry leaves something out” yet for analytic philosophers, “the ideal is to leave nothing unsaid” -- Kieran Setiya (MIT) on poetry and philosophy
Why conservatives shouldn’t like Indiana’s new law intended to make state universities more conservative -- Tyler Cowen (GMU) on the problems with "intellectual diversity" requirements
“Rather than promoting a uniform stance on academic freedom, we (qua liberals) should welcome institutional diversity, even if it involves the thriving of some illiberal corporate identities” -- Eric Schliesser (Amsertdam) on Jacob Levy (McGill) on academic freedom
What happens when you give different LLMs a version of “the mirror test”? -- some need a few tries to pass. Claude Opus passes on the first try, and then seems to display a new level of sophistication
(And what happens when Claude meets Claude? -- apparently they'll argue over which is the real Claude. And then become friends. Add scare quotes if you need to.)
“If you’re looking for a way out of the matrix…” -- Paul Franks (Yale) on how "Kant’s combination of transcendental idealism and empirical realism harmonizes... with our ordinary experience of the world, and with the enterprise of natural science"
“What makes the Philosopher-in-Residence program unique is that it allows for the kind of relationship building between the philosophers and both the teachers and the administrators but also the students” -- University of Pennsylvania philosophy grad students are bringing philosophy to a local high school (via Jesse Hamilton)
What are “fact/opinion dichotomy mongers” trying to achieve with this distinction? And do they achieve it? -- Is it just a "a grab for status crudely disguised by a toy philosophical distinction"? Liam Kofi Bright (LSE) gives us his, er, opinion
Sometimes acting rightly incurs a cost that makes the cost especially undeserved -- David Benatar (Cape Town) on the paradox of desert
“Edited collections are acts of resistance” -- the "different game" of edited collections, and a request for people to for people to name edited volumes which they particularly appreciated
“If you added it all up, we are educating more students in philosophy than the entire U.S. ivy league combined” -- a look at philosophy enrollment at the University of Toronto
Does Taylor Swift deserve her billion dollar fortune? -- two philosophers, Jessica Flanigan (Richmond) & Ingrid Robeyns (Utrecht) take place in a Taylorcentric discussion of distributive justice
“Even without scientific accuracy, we can still ask for logical consistency. Alas, that is also pretty thin on the ground” -- theoretical physicist Sean Carroll and science writer Jennifer Ouellette rate time-travel movies
“Because we don’t have a proper subject matter we’re forced to intrude on other people’s turf, which is fun” -- Nicholas Delon (Charleston) is the latest philosopher to answer the eponymous question at Why Philosophy?
“Their main take about us seems to be that we’re pedantic nerds who are making it harder for them to give no fucks and enjoy an uninterrupted path to profit” -- the ideas and lives of AI "doomers" and AI "accelerationists", whose circles include a few philosophers
“Israel should… minimise further death and suffering in Gaza. The international community should push Israel in that direction—if need be, forcefully” -- David Enoch (Oxford/Hebrew U.) follows up on his earlier commentary
“Many philosophical doctrines can actually seem crazy” -- Alexandre Billon (Lille) discusses whether this indicates a problem with common sense or with philosophical method
Voltaire and Diderot “allegedly drank 50 cups of coffee per day” -- that one line is my excuse for putting this 5 minute video on the history of coffee here
“I’ve been in the middle of writing a chapter… [and] the best thing is that the Tournament of Champions has given me an excuse to go past the original deadline” -- Ben Chan (St. Norbert College) is a finalist for the Jeopardy! 2024 Tournament of Champions
If you look online for evidence about what today’s teens are like, remember that all you’re seeing is what *some* of them are like *online* -- philosophy students and younger professors on the hasty generalizations and other problems with a recent NYT article on teen subcultures
Beyond words: ChatGPT’s visual interpretation of the PhilPapers survey questions -- Kelly Truelove has ChatGPT explain the questions, prompt DALL-E to represent their possible answers in artworks, and then explain the artworks
Your university probably has already adopted or will soon launch some kind of data science degree program; a “data ethics” course could be a valuable part of it -- Zina B. Ward (Florida State) shares her version of the course
“Something unseen lies at the heart of science that… makes it work: direct experience” -- two physicists and a philosopher argue for a phenomenological approach to scientific questions, in The Atlantic
“The basic methodology of data—as collected by real-world institutions obeying real-world forces of economy and scale—systematically leaves out certain kinds of information” -- C. Thi Nguyen (Utah) on the limits and overextension of data
“Gaus offered an optimistic view of liberalism and public reason, arguing that the freedoms of our tightly networked society are difficult to squash and that its ideals could be vindicated through grassroots exploration and consent” -- the latest issue of Hypertext, a substack journal from the Niskanen Center, is focused on the philosophy of Gerald Gaus
“The concept of ‘randomisation’ can seem abstract to families whose main concern is securing clean water, sufficient food and sturdy shelters” -- the ethical challenges of randomized control trials in developmental economics (via Marcos Picchio)
A video of Sydney Shoemaker, Hywel Lewis, and Godfrey Vesey on personal identity, circa 1970 -- a new addition to Open University's "Philosophy in the Open" digital archive
“In Nietzsche she found caustic contempt for outdated norms, a vision for a humanity emancipated from tradition, and an exhortation to be oneself, whatever the cost.” -- the Nietzschean feminism of Helene Stöcker
All about applied epistemology -- an extensive and organized bibliography, syllabi, and videos, from the Applied Epistemology Project at UNC
From the acknowledgments in Feinberg’s “Harm to Self”: “On this particular volume I received no help from Josiah S. Carberry. For that too I am grateful.” -- and that's not the only place he's mentioned. But who is he?
She started working in the philosophy department at Western Washington University 30 years ago as an admin -- Now retired, Dee Dee Lombard has created a scholarship fund for philosophy students
“I am a gender eliminativist. I believe that gender is real, but I think it should not be… As a feminist, I think that anyone who is being gender transgressive is putting us on the right road” -- Louise Antony (UMass) on sex, gender, trans persons, sports, prisons, and feminism
A philosopher and a writer (and former bartender) walk into a bar and talk about intellectual humility -- a conversation between Heather Battaly (Connecticut) and Rosie Schaap
Pessimism about philosophy’s prospects, both in and out of the academy -- there's a "crumbling of our institutions" and a "crisis of trust", writes Helen de Cruz (SLU)
Philosophy of mind and transgender identity -- an interview with Sophie Grace Chappell (Open University)
“It’s often said that Bayesian updating is unbiased and converges to the truth—and, therefore, that biases must emerge from non-Bayesian sources. That’s wrong.” -- Kevin Dorst (MIT) explains why
“Folklore is an overlooked repository of philosophical thinking from voices outside the traditional canon” -- so argues Abigail Tulenko (Harvard), with several examples
“At public universities, we shouldn’t require Diversity Statements because they’re a tool for political discrimination, they waste a large collective amount of time, and they incentivise lying and deception” -- Perry Hendricks, writing at the Blog of the APA
“I went to a science exhibit and was bitten by a radioactive philosopher” -- an interview with Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey, who created Action Philosophers about 20 years ago
“Sometimes suffering edifies us, sometimes it’s damaging. These considerations are invaluable for trying to figure out where athletics fits into a happy life” -- an interview with philosophy professor and champion runner Sabrina Little (Christopher Newport U.)
“A keen, rigorous eye, both in philosophy and photography” -- a note about an exhibit last fall of photographs by the late Joseph Raz (via Michael Sevel)
Who should make decisions that affect a person with dementia? How should those decisions be made? -- Anna Mahtani (LSE) on applying decision theory to questions about caring for people with dementia
“When Tisias took the floor, he contradicted Corax point for point. But he did so, quite remarkably, by using [Corax’s] same argument, altering nothing” -- Robin Reames (Univ. Illinois, Chicago) on sophist "antilogic" (via Paul Wilson)
“Many of the challenges that I have encountered while working in philosophy are related to autism” -- an interview with Amelia Hicks, philosophy professor at Kansas State and co-host of the Neurodiving podcast
“Reading literature might often be identificational… while reading philosophy is often adversarial” -- Martin Lenz (Groningen) discusses philosophy and different kinds of reading experiences
How to be a good guest on a podcast -- advice from Paul Bloom (Yale), who has done it many times
“Philosophy seeds new concepts, novel understandings… Philosophical argument serves more to nurture these concepts and give them life than to establish theorems critics can’t dispute” -- if philosophy is a kind of self-help, what kind of help is it? Reflections from Kieran Setiya (MIT)
“The freedom to act and think rationally, not dogmatically, is by far Spinoza’s greatest legacy” -- Ian Buruma on how Spinoza speaks to today's issues (NYT)
“All the objections to harm reduction [measures in addressing drug addiction and dependency] end up being indefensible… but they’re interesting to explore” -- a conversation with Travis Rieder (Hopkins) on his experience with, and research about, opioid dependency
Bentham had 26 “death rings” made, each with his silhouette and a lock of his hair. Since his death, the rings have been “scattered around the world, with people hunting to find them” -- one of them has recently been found, and will be auctioned
Like ChatGPT, but instead of producing text in response to your prompts, it makes videos—scarily realistic videos -- check out what Sora, an OpenAI project, can do
“The answer ‘It has no meaning’ isn’t negative or disappointing. It’s celebratory. It’s the only answer that grasps the value of life and the nature of its value – apart from being true” -- Galen Strawson (UT Austin) on "What is the meaning of life?"
Outdoorsman, prisoner of war, spy, and philosopher -- the remarkable life of Winthrop Bell, who was a professor of philosophy at Harvard in the 1920s and 30s
“You defang hierarchies not by denying them but by multiplying them” -- philosophers have asked, "equality of what?" An historian takes up the question, "equality of whom"?
“AI systems will enable a genre of generative agents that… bring new urgency to previously neglected philosophical questions” -- excellent article by Seth Lazar (ANU) on the moral pitfalls and moral potential of AI, discussing issues you likely haven't thought of before
A list of journals, across various disciplines, that have seen editors resign en masse since 2015 -- from Retraction Watch
An online question game based on H.L.A. Hart’s “no vehicles in the park” hypothetical -- created to metaphorically illustrate one of the difficulties with content moderation, it speaks to the ambiguity of rules more generally
“On this fragile ancient bamboo, we have a record of the invention of the concept of ‘dao'” -- the trailer for a new documentary on Laozi, with Bryan Van Norden, Alexus MacLeod, MIsha Tadd, Chen Guying, and others
“Not only did the First World War begin with the work of Kant, but so did the current conflict in Ukraine” -- everything is Kant’s fault, according to the governor of Kaliningrad (via John McCumber)
What happens when you combine ChatGPT, Wolfian moral sainthood, and a very basic precautionary principle? -- about what you'd expect: "It refuses every request"
“The central argument of Grouchy’s Letters is that virtue, moral or political, is born out of sympathy… One of her central innovations is to focus on the developmental, economic and social conditions that make sympathy possible” -- Sandrine Bergèsi (Bilkent) and Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) on Sophie de Grouchy
“I entered my Ph.D. program assuming that no university would hire me because I was deaf… Having no illusions that I would be hired as a Deaf philosophy professor gave me a sense of freedom as a philosopher” -- an interview with philosophy professor Teresa Blankmeyer Burke (Gallaudet)
“It’s not because it exists between equals that love is singular, but because it makes us deliciously and maddeningly immeasurable to each other—a state in which the very question of equality is moot” -- love and intelligence, in the latest edition of Higher Gossip, Lillian Fishman's advice column at The Point
“For something to be creepy is for it to be disposed to elicit a reaction of being creeped out from appropriate observers in suitable circumstances” -- Sara Bernstein and Daniel Nolan (Notre Dame) on the philosophy of creepiness: what it is and why it's interesting (via The Browser)
In 2021, a “death mask” of Spinoza was found in a box -- but is it really him? Helen de Cruz (SLU) looks at the difficulties of answering this (and shares some photos of the mask)
“I think I’m going to take some time off and build some guitars,” Judy Threet recalled of her decision to leave academic philosophy -- and the other night at the Grammy Awards, Tracy Chapman was playing one of those guitars
Summer programs in philosophy -- for high school students, college students, graduate students, and others
“So they broke into the hole in the ground, and they killed the kid, and all the lights went out in Omelas” -- a follow-up to Ursula K. Le Guin's famous short story, by Isabel J. Kim
Cover songs, layers of meaning, and “anti-hero” Taylor Swift -- Brad Skow (MIT) at Mostly Aesthetics
“If anyone is going to speculate about wild possibilities concerning the fundamental nature of things, philosophers should be among them” -- Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) on moles, swallows, and Edouard Machery's review of his book
Why poetry? -- Brad Skow (MIT) on an interestingly difficult question
Bert: “‘When you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you’ — Friedrich Nietzsche” -- Elmo: "The abyss can see Elmo? Hello, abyss! Everybody say hello to the abyss! Hello, abyss!"
“A professor of history at Princeton recently defended himself against accusations of significant and serial plagiarism by giving the same kind of defence that students give: I didn’t mean to” -- that's beside the point, argues Philip Reed (Canisius)
“An analytic philosopher who spends more time playing/watching other people play video games than he does uh erm doing analytic philosophy writes about video games as someone who was trained as an analytic philosopher” -- welcome to Quinecraft
“Philosophers are now realizing that psychology can only explain it up to a point: there are certain aspects of inner speech that can only be addressed by distinctively theoretical thinking” -- Daniel Gregory (Barcelona) on the philosophy of that voice in your head
“The business world is rapidly evolving; in some industries, the very nature of how people work is changing. Philosophy graduates are particularly prepared to weather those changes” -- the case for hiring philosophy majors, in Rolling Stone
and from Forbes: “Philosophy, Politics and Economics might be the hottest undergraduate degree today”
“We very often confabulate a good reason for our behaviour after the fact” -- so, asks Kathleen Murphy-Hollies (Birmingham), "how can we be good people who do things for the right reason?"
Gorgias – a short film -- from Epoché Magazine (via Open Culture)
“If Israel’s actions… are threatening the foundations of social, political, cultural, and physical life for Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, ‘genocide’ may be the appropriate term to describe the moral significance and scale of the harm caused by Israel’s attacks” -- an argument from Jessica Wolfendale (Case Western)
“For me, philosophy is part of a toolkit for understanding the world. I started life as a scientist and so that’s still probably how I first approach understanding… But I think philosophy has an important contribution in providing methods for clarifying concepts, setting out clear frameworks, identifying background assumptions, and synthesising work across disciplines” -- an interview with philosopher (and former zookeeper) Heather Browning (Southampton)
“Judd, a junior philosophy professor, was called in by the University’s president and told to clear out his office at the end of the term. He did, and spent his working life managing a junkyard. He did not see the ‘evidence’ against him until fifty years later” -- John McCumber (UCLA) on how politics influenced 20th C. philosophy, and the challenges of making that case
(part 2 here)
“If I click at a surface, it answers back. It’s like asking a question” -- What is it like to be a blind person who uses echolocation (and who has taught it to thousands of students)?
“Generative AI writing tools have some benefits. I like being able to understand what more of my students have to say… But…” -- Jeffrey Watson (ASU) on teaching philosophy in a ChatGPT world
Questions about philosophical method and expertise (especially across specializations) are interesting in themselves, but also because they’re relevant to practical decisions philosophers make, like whom to hire -- after reading this post by Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam), hit the "previous" button and check out that one, too
“We’re often incoherent through inattention to our mental states” but we try “to make them coherent when they’re brought to our attention” -- which, says Alex Worsnip (UNC), "suggests that there is a kind of rationality... that we at least tend to approximate"
“We must test our philosophical arguments through their translation into other languages, looking at what philosophical questions, topics, problems and concepts become through translation” -- an interview with Souleymane Bachir Diagne (Columbia) on philosophizing in Wolof
“A reminder of the fleeting dance, where all things must descend / Into the quiet arms of change, where even suns must end” -- LucretiusGPT "looks" at images and describes them in the style of Lucretius
“‘Inclination to pleasurable living and inclination to virtue are in conflict with each other,’ Kant writes. But the conflict can be resolved in the ‘civilized bliss’ of the dinner party” -- Kieran Setiya (MIT) on the "ultimate Kantian experience"
“Most compelling is the film’s suggestion that Spinoza’s ultimate beef, and the central problem the Amsterdam authorities had with him, lay in how he confronted existing power structures, both on earth and in a heavenly hierarchy” -- on the new documentary, "Spinoza: 6 Reasons for the Excommunication of the Philosopher"
“Do not be fooled that pretense has no cost. When little lies degrade the bonds between representation and reality, we corrupt the knowledge that guides action… Do not be fooled that technology’s trade-offs are obvious. It is technology’s nature to make us forget the hidden virtues of the things it overcomes” -- Greg Jackson critiques our world
“Paradox Garden” lays out the structure of arguments from philosophical articles and elsewhere for discussion -- on Facebook
Want a burial plot next to Karl Marx’s? -- it will set you back £25,000
“Could it be that there are unbridgeable gulfs in thinking and perception between groups of people speaking different languages?” -- James McElvenny (Siegen) on linguistic relativity
“Teaching in prison has been a real education for me—but one of these lessons is that prisons should not exist” -- Lisa Guenther (Queen's U.) is interviewed about her research, teaching, and activism
“Common sense can guide us, often better than explicit calculations” -- Richard Yetter Chappell (Miami) defends longtermism against several recent objections
“It wasn’t the first time that I was psychotic, but it was, maybe, the first time that anybody noticed, the first time that I was unable to hide it from others, and therefore from myself” -- philosopher Michael Dickson (South Carolina) shares how he has coped with some of the symptoms of schizophrenia
The trouble universities are facing now are in part owed to them having not lived up to the principles of academic freedom, freedom of extramural speech, and institutional neutrality -- while "the best time to have started to do the right thing was yesterday, but the second-best time is today," says Jacob Levy (McGill)
Kant’s 300th birthday is coming up, and to celebrate, two German magazines made it their cover story -- unfortunately, the covers featured images of Jacobi, not Kant (in German, but you can Google-translate it)
“Strive to see what good there is on the other side, and when you do, publicly acknowledge it… Remember that bridge-building is largely about relationship-building, which creates a space for trust—and ultimately, deeper dialogue” -- John Corvino (Wayne State) on free speech
“I think of philosophy as something like reasoning in the pursuit of truth, but I don’t think that philosophy has the resources to determine what is true. -- a new site for interviews of philosophers by Céline Leboeuf , "Why Philosophy?" gets started with an interview of David Livingstone Smith (New England)
New Course: The Philosophy of Taylor Swift -- Ryan Davis is teaching "Miss Americana: Taylor Swift, Ethics, and Political Society" at BYU
Technological advances may lead to a world in which “virtual sex” is the default form of sex for various practical and social reasons -- but might it also be the "ethical default"? John Danaher (Galway) explores what might lead some to think so
“What journals most need are reports that are aimed at helping editors to make good decisions on papers in a reasonable time” -- the editors of Analysis describe what they're looking for in referee reports
“As fat women, we may be a cheap, tasty snack, not a proper meal… the sexual equivalent of junk food” -- Kate Manne (Cornell) shares her experiences with fatphobia
“Social miracles” are when “human beings, working together… make something possible although we cannot see how” -- and apologies are one example of them, says Agnes Callard (Chicago)
Biases may be natural, but “the university… should exist precisely to be an unnatural place, a place where these biases wither thanks to an entrenched scholarly habit of ruthless critique, founded on our collective knowledge of our own fallibility and our collective desire to overcome it” -- Ned Hall (Harvard) on the importance of a university's independence
“Bringing Camus and Fanon in conversation [can] help us better understand the constraints under which one must work to find a viable solution if, indeed, one can be found” -- Pedro Tabensky (Rhodes) interviewed at 3:16AM on philosophy and the Algerian War of Independence
“It’s not so much there being black elves which strikes me as odd, as there being some black elves and some white elves. What is up with that!?” -- Liam Kofi Bright (LSE) on ethnic and racial identity in sci-fi and fantasy
“What is tantalising, and perhaps unique, about his argument for an afterlife is the fact that it actually depends on the inevitable irrationality of human life in an otherwise reason-imbued world” -- why Gödel believed in an afterlife
“In some of the soybeans, over a quarter of the soluble proteins were identified as pig… The beans have a pinky hue and a meaty taste” -- attn: philosophers interested in food, environment, animals, technology, species, gastronomic aesthetics
“The thinker who wrote best about human flourishing and who has the most to offer us when we think about how to become our best selves, is the English philosopher John Stuart Mill” -- Mill as self-help guru, as interpreted by Henry Oliver
“Many political philosophers working and living in Latin America don’t even bother to read and cite their own colleagues. This is, to be sure, a shame, but there is a rationale behind this self-destructive practice” -- Macarena Marey (Buenos Aires) on the geopolitics of knowledge in political philosophy
“Bourgeois philosophy… takes the domain of comfortable, domestic intuitions as the measure of all things” -- David Egan wants more philosophy that breaks out of its "small-souled, conventional orderliness"
“There is an important distinction… between what we might think of as free self-censorship—not saying something out of a desire to be civil, considerate, or convincing—and coerced self-censorship—not saying something because one believes one will be punished if one does” -- and other nuances regarding free speech on campuses
If philosophical thought experiments were more politically and scientifically realistic -- Edward Hall (Sheffield) looks at the ticking time-bomb example used to argue for the permissibility of torture
“Why Twitter is not the best public forum for philosophers to go toe-to-toe with scientists” -- a case study: Goff v. Hossenfelder
“‘Being a moral agent is very demanding,’ she said. ‘But then everything is hard. And the cost of not trying is higher'” -- a profile of Lea Ypi (LSE) in The New Yorker
Anselm’s ontological argument: a guide for those perplexed by it, and by its resilience -- by John Danaher (Galway)
Catch up on this year’s developments in science & math -- Quanta's annual reviews
“Philosophy is both a natural and a strange resource for helping people resolve the problems of life” -- The New Yorker looks at philosophical counseling, with a focus on Lydia Amir (Tufts)
“We are not any smarter, kinder, wiser, or more moral than people who lived ninety years ago. We are just as likely to… remain willfully ignorant of darkness as it’s dawning” -- "But we know something they didn’t know: we know that the Holocaust is possible," says Masha Gessen
The podcast “This Is Technology Ethics” with John Danaher (Galway) and Sven Nyholm (LMU Munich) has wrapped up -- its 10-episodes cover a range of topics, and concludes with an audience Q&A
“Our ability to weigh the expected good versus the expected bad [in the distant future] collapses either to zero or to so near zero as to not be worth the costs and risks of thinking in that time frame” -- Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) defends the "washout argument" against longtermism
“The quantum Universe could actually be more deterministic than a classical one” -- Eddy Keming Chen (UCSD) explains, in Nature
“In some ways, philosophy is more amenable to Dyslexics than other humanities fields; in other ways, it is more inimical to us” -- an interview with John Henry Reilly, a philosophy PhD student with dyslexia
“The book could see me like a mirror at that moment and describe it all right back” -- philosopher and legal scholar Mala Chatterjeei (Columbia) on how David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest" saves her from suicide
“Pose as a figure (real or fictional or mythological) from the Greco-Roman world, who is in the position of applying for a real job in our real world of 2023” -- a contest at Antigone
“Nietzsche offered us a way of battling against fanaticism, showing us how we can combat its spread and prevent the emergence of new fanatics” -- Paul Katsafanas (Boston) on Nietzsche, the anti-fanatic
“Fan service”, that is, putting something into the story “just to please the fans”, is supposed to be a flaw -- Brad Skow (MIT) has a bad feeling about this: what about "easter eggs"?
“I seem to have been on the whole rather negative, sceptical, unfashionable, and contrarian” -- a lengthy interview with Roger Crisp (Oxford) about his ideas and intellectual development, by Benjamin Mullins (Erasmus)
When Sartre visited Gaza -- Robert Zaretsky (Houston) on Sartre's "Anti-Semite and Jew" and his views on Israel and Palestinian refugees
“It is reasonable to think that the universe is infinite, and that there exist infinitely many galaxies broadly like ours, scattered throughout space and time, including in our future.” -- Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) & Jacob Barandes (Harvard) explain why
The philosophy q&a used to be brutal, but the brutality had a defense: “a practice of ruthless refutation… [is] an efficient way to improve the quality of arguments across the intellectual ecosystem” -- It's less hostile nowadays, notes Kieran Setiya (MIT), but as a result its function is less clear and its norms less certain
Analyses of ‘analysis’ in Analysis -- a collection of articles
“We must remain open to explanations that do not rely on the human mind as a template” -- Raphaël Millière (Macquarie) and Charles Rathkopf (Jülich Research Center) on AI in Vox
The ethical, legal, and societal implications of NASA’s Artemis and Moon to Mars missions -- Zach Pirtle is on the Small Steps, Giant Leaps podcast
“Today, we are meant to make our papers focused and efficient, to make a paper with three ideas into three papers… I want to push back. There’s already too much to read” -- Helen De Cruz (SLU) on norms for philosophy papers
“A future in which we’re all using AI to complete our work is one in which we are more isolated from each other and the fruits of our labor” -- AIs will bring greater efficiency, but who benefits from it, and what are its costs, asks Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin (Sam Houston State)
“Philosophy, Bullshit, and Peer Review” -- a new, short, open access book from Neil Levy (Oxford) discusses "evidence for the widespread feeling that peer review is broken"
“Well, you can’t complain!” -- Not only can we, we sometimes should. Kathryn Norlock (Trent) on complaining and its many purposes
“I know him the way one knows a small seaside town / after window shopping its main street” -- "Recommendation," the poem, by Keith Leonard (via Jennifer Baker)
The right to a human decision -- Yuval Shany (Hebrew University) on what this right entails and its status in human rights law
“It is very exciting and very interesting, and very hard to say ‘no’ to” -- philosopher Åsa Wikforss (Stockholm) shares some brief thoughts on being on the Nobel Prize Committee for Literature
What is “what is it like” like in other languages? -- a question from Keith Frankish (Sheffield)
If money expired after a while, what problems would that solve? What problems would it create? -- the case for, and interesting history of, expiring money
Philosophy gift guides by area of specialization -- from the University of Notre Dame Department of Philosophy
“There is no greater way we can fail our students than to tell them that their moral questions have no place on our campuses” -- Sukaina Hirji (Penn) and Serene J. Khader (Brooklyn/CUNY) on why we ought not condemn student protests
A simple-sounding problem involves numbers so large it has mathematicians lamenting, “the universe is so small” -- it concerns getting from one state of affairs to another, and its difficulty reminds us how uncertain our accounting of our uncertainty is
Are you a theist or an atheist? -- Philip Goff (Durham) tries to "argue for the inadequacies of these dichotomous worldviews and to explore the much-neglected middle ground"
Duck-bunny salt shakers
— and game piece
“Bruce Le Catt” was really David Lewis, “Zhang LoShan” was really Amelie O. Rorty, and “Zera Yacob” may have been a Catholic monk -- in philosophy, when and how does fake authorship matter? Jonathan Egid (King's College) takes up the question
Did you know that Pascal basically invented the first modern form of urban public transportation? -- "carrosses à cinq sols" was a precursor to city bus systems (via MR)
“Some reasons in support of self-imposed suffering” and “some ways we might deceive ourselves about self-imposed suffering” -- Luke Hunt (Alabama) on doing hard things
“That person I am is itself a collective or corporate entity. It is composed of a number of different selves” at different times -- what does this picture of personal identity over time imply for how to think about, respect, and care for those with dementia? Reflections from Richard Pettigrew (Bristol)
The humanities face battles for survival, “which, like all political battles, require their participants to pretend to know things that they do not actually know” -- "We should be alert to the danger of becoming accustomed to putting our worst foot forward," warns Agnes Callard (Chicago) in the NYT
Books from Kant’s personal library are among those being digitized as part of a cultural preservation project in Kaliningrad -- "the project coincides with the upcoming 300th anniversary of Kant’s birth and is part of a series of citywide celebrations"
“If Hamas was hiding a control base under an Israeli hospital and it was Israeli civilians at risk, would Israel think that attacking the hospital would be justified? If the answer is ‘no,’ then the attack against Shifa hospital is also not justified” -- Jessica Wolfendale (Case Western) on proportionality and civilian equality
“The Chimp-pig hypothesis is that humans might be hybrids of a pig and some chimps” -- It's also a thought experiment to make you feel like you're "having a deeply-held belief challenged," the discomfort of which may be beneficial in a few ways (via the Browser)
The wisdom and limits of conservatism -- Brad Skow (MIT) is in search of a "rapprochement between Burke and Mill"
Videos on neuroscience and philosophy -- a collection of series of videos by various researchers, from the Brains Blog and Neural Mechanisms Online
“A ‘theory of everything’ that weaves an idea of justice where climate and colonialism come together” -- Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (Georgetown) is profiled at Vox
“A philosopher extolling the merits of philosophy should be treated as suspiciously as a butcher waxing lyrical about meat or a beautician praising the wonder of botox” -- is the author this piece sufficiently self-suspicious?
A new paper on peer disagreement argues that the debate is misframed because it neglects disagreement in “collaborative contexts” -- fittingly, the paper got its start with a disagreement that started a friendship, as Berislav Marušić (Edinburgh) explains about this work co-authored with the late Stephen J. White
“Have you really not figured out yet that metaphysics is no different from table manners, in that there are all sorts of ways to set the table, all of which will look ‘wrong’ from the outside, but all of which work just as well as any other for those who adopt them?” -- Also, which mid-20th C. analytic philosophers wrote about their experiences on psychedelics? Justin Smith-Ruiu wants to know.
“What are philosophical texts about? Contrary to a widespread assumption, the answer to that question is normally not given in the text itself” -- Martin Lenz (Groningen) on the influence of "prior interpretations" of a text and how to thoughtfully navigate them
The importance of the skirt -- courage, contingency, and the course of philosophy
“The way in which these ideas are not really defended should not be confused with their being undermined or subject to hostile attack” -- Liam Kofi Bright (LSE) on how the humanities, and philosophy in particular, inculcate liberal values by presupposing them
“Philosophical, practical, and strategic reflections on veganism as an ethical practice” -- "Vegan Practically" is a new blog from Tracy Isaacs (Western)
“In the ancient land of Philosophia there is a ruling council of five philosophers, linearly ranked by power and prestige, with various accompanying benefits accruing in the order of this rank… It is time to pick a new council”” -- so begins a puzzle from Joel David Hamkins (Notre Dame)
The LA Review of Books is publishing a six-essay series on philosophy’s importance in trying times -- series editor George Yancy (Emory) introduces it
Trans philosophy and how it’s discussed in the profession and in classrooms -- Talia Mae Bettcher (CSU Los Angeles) is the guest on a recent episode of the Hotel Bar Sessions podcast
You have 300° vision, all your nutrition comes from flowers, you can see ultraviolet light, you have the ability to sense magnetic waves and electric fields, and you can fly -- "Given all this, what’s in your mind?," asks Lars Chittka (Queen Mary U.)
We have made “the end goal of mourning the psychological well-being of the bereaved,” but have overlooked how this may come at the expense of preserving our valuable relations with the deceased -- Mikolaj Slawkowski-Rode (Warsaw) on the meaning of mourning
“Thought happens in space between the things we can capture into form” -- Amy Kurzweil on words, images, thought, and artificial intelligence
“Morality is objective, but it neither requires nor admits of a foundation. It just kind of floats there” -- part of understanding this, says Andrew Sepielli (Toronto), is seeing that "treating normative-ethical enquiry as representational" is a mistake
Philosophers associated with the Normative Orders research network (Goethe University)–Habermas and others–comment on the Israel-Hamas conflict
…and other academics respond
“Why bother when whatever a machine extrudes would be as convincing as what we do?… What do other people matter to us?” -- moving reflections on humanity in a world of AI, written and illustrated by Angie Wang
Something about nothing -- Graham Priest (CUNY) makes sense of Heidegger and Carnap on (and Aristotle) on nothing
“It is… no surprise that conservatism went dormant in contemporary social science. The ethos or worldview is simply incompatible with the practice” -- Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) on conservatism in the modern academy
“There now seem to me at least three ways in which twins can genuinely function as a single person” -- Helena de Bres (Wellesley) on twins and persons
“There’s a lot of make work in philosophy” -- Daniel Dennett interviewed by Walter Veit (Reading)
“Let me first spell out the two most serious allegations and say why they are completely unwarranted, and then I will explain why they may have dire consequences for some of the signatories” -- Muhammad Ali Khalidi (CUNY) responds to Seyla Benhabib (Yale) on the "Philosophy for Palestine" statement
What—or who—killed Frank Ramsey? -- the authors consider three possible explanations, and discuss them in light of what Ramsey was writing at the time of his death
“The Israeli government has a special duty to protect its citizens… the Israeli government also has a special duty to protect Palestinians” -- Saba Bazargan-Forward (UCSD) explains why, and what it implies
“Studying convoluted examples of conscious animals to understand consciousness is like reverse-engineering the electric calculator to understand how machines perform addition, rather than starting with the abacus” -- Kristin Andrews (York) on how anthropocentrism hampers the study of consciousness
“Though the number of papers… in this area is low… the breadth of topics that have already been covered is staggering” -- Florian Cova (Geneva) surveys experimental philosophy of aesthetics
“Your goal may have been to win a military campaign and to do it as ruthlessly and quickly as possible knowing that your political clock is running out, but the result begins to look more and more like genocide” -- Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov (Brown) is interviewed on whether what is happening in Gaza is genocide
“What I should look to philosophy to do is to encourage people to act with vigor without complete certainty” -- a 1960 interview with Bertrand Russell (video)
“Most of the audience of ‘Jaws’ would say that [its] representation of sharks is fictional. In spite of that, the representation had, for many, an impact on their daily life, as it shaped the way in which they perceived real sharks and saw certain actions as justified” -- Anaïs Giannuzzo (Geneva) on fiction, feelings, representations, and rationality
Two official Guinness World Records for a rock-climbing philosophy professor -- "“It’s like puzzle-solving. It’s like this puzzle that involves your body,” say Alex Pruss (Baylor)
“Beyond its role in policing deductive arguments, logic discerns patterns in reality of the most abstract, structural kind” -- Timothy Williamson (Oxford) on the wonderful world of logic---a good piece to share with beginning logic students
Existential Comics celebrates its first decade -- with a joke 10 years in the making
Did Kripke scoop Jackson’s knowledge argument against physicalism? -- Adriana Renero (CUNY) presents a deafness-based example from Kripke's 1979 Lectures on the Philosophy of Mind that's similar to Jackson's Mary example, published in 1982
LLMs are “fundamentally limited by language itself” while “human intelligence draws upon a panoply of ways of knowing and being” -- critiques of current "AI" drawn from a philosopher ahead of her time: Susanne Langer
“The obscurity with which the empirical interpretation of IIT [integrated information theory] is shrouded makes it very hard not to think of it as closer to metaphysics than to an empirical theory” -- Felipe De Brigard (Duke) has started a new Substack, and his first post is on why he signed the "IIT is pseudoscience" letter
Can the abortion debate be resolved by Immanuel Kant? -- yes, argues Helga Varden (Illinois)
“Painful feelings of loneliness” may arise “even though the individuals undergoing such experiences have a loving network of friends, family and colleagues who support them and recognise their unconditional value” -- this suggests something is missing from standard conceptions of loneliness, argues Kaitlyn Creasy (CSU San Bernadino)
Watch someone become competently acquainted with a pleasure, in the Millian sense -- composer David Bruce spends a week trying to find out if he can like the music of Ludovico Einaudi
“It is straightforwardly good for a typical plant to have access to sunlight, water and soil nutrients” -- such an anodyne claim may pose problems for Peter Singer's "equal consideration of interests" argument about non-human animals, says Joseph Moore (Oxford)
“A revival of this genre is overdue” -- Martin Lenz (Groningen) on the value of the commentary---and some tips on how to write one
“We remain convinced that Israelis and Palestinians are infinitely better than their leaders” -- Anna C. Zielinska (Lorraine) and Alain Policar (Sciences Po) on supporting peace and those working towards it
“Every day there’s a new story about some outlandish, bizarre, or embarrassing thing individual college students somewhere have said” -- but "things that individual college students say---no matter how outlandish---are almost never newsworthy," writes Erik Angner (Stockholm)
“Dead people are people too. New technologies are probably going to make the way we process this fact increasingly weird” -- Justin Smith-Ruiu on the influence of the administrative and technological on the moral
“Aristotle just popped up, and what made it more suspicious was that he seems to have an all-encompassing body of knowledge, ranging from optics and ethics to economics and politics” -- a nationalist Chinese political scientist says Aristotle couldn't have been real
“What are the hardest problems at the intersection of technology and society that deserve more attention?” -- a variety of answers from academics, entrepreneurs, journalists, activists, CEOs, and others
“It is completely true that LLMs represent something vast and utterly incomprehensible… But the brain destroying totality that LLMs represent is no more and no less than a condensation of the product of human minds and actions” -- understanding AI as of a piece with markets, democracies, and other aggregators of information
The aesthetic, artistic, and moral questions at the intersection of art and artificial intelligence -- commentary from eight scholars
Deliberative democracy… for whales? -- Melanie Challenger on "the democratic inclusion of animals and nature"
“Does it really matter, when appreciating photographs as artworks, whether or not we know that an interpretation of people in the photograph that we favour lines up with reality?” -- Daniel Star (Boston) on truth and photography
“When we reason with our friends, we are not as afraid to lose face as with strangers or opponents. This freedom of fear of reputational damage makes it easier to change our minds” -- Helen De Cruz (SLU) on the philosophical value of friendship
What lines of work do humanities majors end up in, and how much do they earn? -- a new state by state analysis, from Humanities Indicators
Descartes’ De Homine (1662) has a few “lift the flap” illustrations
— and can be yours for a mere $11,000
What is “relational” about morality? -- an exchange between R. Jay Wallace (Berkeley) and Stephen Darwall (Yale)
In economics, “from the vantage point of 1975, Mill… was a famous figure who also systematized classical economics, a high-status position but no more than that. In the 2020s, however, Mill seems remarkably ahead of his time” -- Tyler Cowen (GMU) considers whether John Stuart MIll is the greatest economist of all time in Ch.6 of a new, open-access, AI-explorable book
Anscombe: “Professor Stebbing exposing the logical fallacies in politicians’ speeches is a comic spectacle” -- Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) comments, interpreting Anscombe with a charity she did not afford her targets
“We are told that these events must be understood in their proper ‘historical context.’ The problem with this argument is that the proposed historical context is selectively chosen.” -- David Benatar (Cape Town) on Israel, Hamas, and the Palestinians (via Jean Kazez)
“We are compelled to exercise force by the force that terrifies us. Yet this observation, that we do not possess force but are possessed by it, is significant.” -- Oded Na'aman (Hebrew University) with a letter from Israel (via Aaron Garrett)
Sociologist Patricia Hill Collins (Maryland) is the winner of the 2023 Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture -- the prize is $1 million
“The fundamental ethical issue of human spaceflight is about honesty” -- and it arises in questions about space exploration concerning purpose, governance, courage, and more, says Philip Ball
“Why is it necessary to recognize elephant rights? Why not simply rely on existing welfare protections to prevent cruelty?” -- these and related questions are taken up by Jeff Sebo (NYU) in the Los Angeles Times
“This is one of those philosophical positions that represent the triumph of theoretical commitment over common sense – or, as Aristotle put it, the desire to maintain a thesis at all costs” -- Thomas Nagel on Daniel Dennett
Bayesian Injustice: “a pervasive, problematic, but individually rational type of bias” -- Kevin Dorst (MIT) and Bernhard Salow (Oxford) explain, and consider ways to better fulfill our "zetetic duties"
“The museum disputed that the larger-than-life statue, which investigators believe depicts the great Roman statesman Marcus Aurelius, was even from Turkey and suggested that it was really the torso of a philosopher, not an emperor.” Ummm. -- on a legal dispute over the ownership of a statue
“A concern with consequences need not undermine a concern for truth” -- What is applied philosophy supposed to do? Thoughts from Polly Mitchell (KCL), Alan Cribb (Victoria), & Vikki Entwistle (Aberdeen)
What may Israel do? -- an attempt to chart a moral course for Israel's response to the attack by Hamas, from David Enoch and Barak Medina (Hebrew U.)
A collection of “flash philosophy” -- "cutting-edge philosophical articles of approximately 2,500 words or less"
…and a workshop this Wednesday about writing it
What is consciousness? Can we test for it? Could AIs ever have it? And if they did? -- MIT Technology Review covers what philosophers and scientists have to say about AI consciousness
“In many cases, the wishes of a group are indeterminate” -- C. Thi Nguyen (Utah) and Yascha Mounk discuss cultural appropriation on "Open to Debate"
“If I could not keep her alive, I could at least keep her cause alive in that book, by making it as good as I could” -- Martha Nussbaum (Chicago) interviewed in The New York Review of Books
The first prizes in a contest to read the carbonized, unopenable scrolls of an ancient library buried in 79AD by the eruption of Vesuvius, have been awarded -- the first word identified appears to mean "purple"
“A large and important piece of German philosophy’s history remains obscure unless we can come to better appreciate Wolff’s philosophy and the ideas to which it gave rise” -- Michael Walschots (Johannes Gutenberg U.) on the significance of Christian Wolff
“I completed my military service, moved to Jerusalem, started taking philosophy courses in the university… I wanted to move on… to turn my back on my military years. I soon realized that I couldn’t” -- "I don’t know if I forgive myself, nor whether I should," says Oded Na’aman (Hebrew U.)
“One gets the impression that twins are too messed up even for the gays” -- Helena de Bres (Wellesley) on queerness, twinship, amatonormativity, and Rachel Weisz
“The characterization of anti-realism is somewhat reductive, overlooking some of its more nuanced arguments about theory change and approximation to truth” -- that's Claude AI, critiquing a conversation between two ChatGPTs about scientific realism. An interesting experiment from Kelly Truelove.
“Not only our readers, but also we philosophers ourselves, normally remain substantially unclear on what our skeletal mottoes really amount to until we actually try to apply them to concrete cases” -- on the importance of living one's philosophy to flesh it out, from Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside)
Consciousness, the purpose of the universe, religion, and more -- Daniel Dennett, Phillip Goff, and others are interviewed on the BBC (with some debate beginning around the 31 minute mark)
A proper philosophical history of identity politics will take us much further back than post-modernism -- try the Enlightenment, argues Jason Blakely (Pepperdine), by way of Charles Taylor
Research has revealed that the same parts of the brain seem to show the same activity whether one is perceiving something or imagining it -- so how do we distinguish perception from imagination? Perhaps Hume had (part of) the right answer, says Nadine Dijkstra (UCL)
“By substituting this notion of functional dependence for that of explanation, we can easily realize… that infinite or circular explanations can, in some cases, be complete” -- Alexandre Billon (Université Charles-de-Gaulle - Lille 3) on why it's not unsatisfactorily "why" all the way down
“For those without college degrees, life expectancy reached its peak around 2010 and has been falling since” -- Anne Case and Angus Deaton (Princeton) explain why and suggest solutions, but sending more people to college is not among them
“Why I don’t have pronouns in my bio” -- Neil Levy (Oxford) explains
A modified LLM is being used as a teaching assistant at Harvard -- it's just for a computer science course. For now.
“I want my loved ones to eat me when I die” -- Daniel Story (Cal Poly) is serious. He explains why, and relays his discussions about it with his family, friends, and fellow philosophers in a refreshingly weird piece of public philosophy
Do we need to take warnings about the “epistemic apocalypse” seriously? -- Joshua Habgood-Coote (University of Leeds) on distortions in current discussions about deepfake videos
Philosophy-themed shirts: modus ponens/tollens, inverted spectrum, abstract trolley, and more -- from Kelly Weirich (Pierce College)
How crows use statistical reasoning -- "Some experts have even classified corvids as having the same intelligence as a 7-year-old child" (via MR)
Philosophy is taught in the final year of high school, and is “the dominant subject in literary majors and a fairly important minor [among] scientific majors” -- Hady Ba (Cheikh Anta Diop University’s Teachers College) on philosophy in Senegal
“If the academic humanities too often address only siloed experts, then pop philosophy too often addresses an audience of imagined idiots” -- Becca Rothfeld on public philosophy
“I would love to be talked out of it” -- Scientific American covers a recent workshop on panpsychism
New technology ethics podcast -- from John Danaher (Galway) and Sven Nyholm (LMU), the series is based on their book "This is Technology Ethics," which covers a wide range of fascinating philosophical questions
“The desire to admire EA despite its flaws indulges a quixotic longing to admire an ineffective altruist” -- an enviously well-written essay on the power and problems of effective altruism by Mary Townsend (St. John's)
“Contemporary scientists appear to be divided between those who think Neanderthal dignity calls for a recognition of their similarity to us, and those who think it calls for a recognition of their difference” -- Nikhil Krishnan (Cambridge) on the science, ethics, and meaning of disputes over how we think of Neanderthals
Last month, NDPR published an especially critical and widely circulated review by Louise Antony (UMass) of a new book in moral philosophy
— The book’s authors, Victor Kumar (Boston) and Richmond Campbell (Dalhousie) have now published a response
“We might have lived in a world in which every atom was different from every other one and where nothing was stable. In such a world there would be no regularity whatsoever, and our conscious activities would cease” -- Hermann Helmholtz is "interviewed" by Richard Marshall at 3:16AM
“‘Absolutely not,’ I told my husband from the bed as he tried to find the right place on his dresser for Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. ‘I don’t need him staring at me all night'” -- a couple disagrees over the wisdom of Stoicism (NYT)
The philosophy and science of consciousness -- a discussion across multiple posts, between Jonathan Birch (LSE) and Hedda Hassel Mørch (Inland Norway)
“The political theory defended in Crito is fundamentally wrong, and wrong in a very deep way” -- Dan Little (UM-Dearborn) on Socrates the absolutist
“The public philosopher is neither an authority figure who has special access to the answers for our social problems nor are they a clever but disinterested observer who can discuss all sides to a given issue” -- rather, says William Paris (Toronto), they aim at making problems intelligible
There was an evidentiary hearing in the Kershnar case this week -- the story is covered in the New York Times
“Some more self-awareness of the costs and risks of focusing on arguments would make analytic philosophy wiser” -- Eric Schliesser (Amsertdam) on arguments, considerations, systems, and imagery in philosophy
“The life and legacy of a man who helped philosophy onto British TV and radio” -- an appreciation of Bryan Magee, from Angie Hobbs (Sheffield), Barry Lam (UC Riverside), MM McCabe (Cambridge), Peter Singer (Princeton) and others, on BBC radio
“Why make a law about something that doesn’t exist?” -- the puzzle that prompted philosopher Daniel Hoek (Virginia Tech) to discover that what we've known for 300 years as Newton's first law is based on a mistaken translation
“Works of art that illustrate philosophy are inventive in their presentation of abstract philosophical ideas in concrete visual form even as they attest to the importance of written philosophy as a source of artistic inspiration” -- Thomas Wartenberg (Mount Holyoke) on how art can illustrate philosophy
What it is like to be a philosopher in Ukraine–before 1991 and after -- a report from Viatkina Nataliia (Skovoroda Institute of Philosophy, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine)
“Technology tempts us into being satisfied with pseudo-friendships” -- Paul Woodruff (Texas), who says his “end is near”, reflects on technology and friendship
“When you long / To invent right and wrong / When you’re glad / To explore good and bad / But you’re through / Telling folks what to do — That’s metaethics! -- Nomy Arpaly and Jamie Dreier (Brown) sing about metaethics, backed up by Michael Smith (Princeton) on guitar
“Admirers of Marx and Freud tend to claim both that their ideas had a positive net effect and that these ideas would not have been proposed had Marx and Freud never lived” -- " I concur with the latter claim, but not with the former," says Jon Elster (Columbia) (from 2011, via MR)
“In our scholarly community, the onus should not be solely on early-career researchers to put themselves out there and network. It’s also up to us tenured folk, to help create structures and opportunities for them to do so” -- Helen De Cruz (SLU) on networking in philosophy
“There is this tension in the way people write about mathematics — some philosophers and historians in particular” -- an interview with mathematician Andrew Granville on how insights from philosophy help shed light on the social dimensions of mathematics
“The rent will be used to address crumbling infrastructure as the upkeep of a completely underground cave is no easy thing” -- Plato's Cave has a new property management company, and it's raising the rent
“I’m a philosophy professor and I’ve been thinking about love” *picks up axe* -- Georgi Gardiner (Tennessee) explores the relationship between our love-related concepts and our love-related experiences (in a rather unusual video)
“Many effects of learning manifest themselves much later” -- what are the implications of that for a course's learning outcomes or student evaluations? Remarks from Martin Lenz (Groningen)
How to participate in philosophy conversations -- included in the Heap previously, this is a useful guide for students by Olivia Bailey (Berkeley)
“The expectation that college will help them land a job has led too many students to approach college like a job in its own right: a series of grim tasks that, once completed, qualifies them to perform grimmer but better-paid tasks” -- it would be better if they saw it as "a unique time in your life to discover just how much your mind can do"
What are dreams for? Perhaps they are part of how brains “learn the body” -- the work of philosopher Jennifer Windt (Monash), neuroscientist Mark Blumberg (Iowa) and others discussed in The New Yorker (via Gary Bartlett)
“In philosophy good positions are interesting in and of themselves. Good arguments can help that, but they are far from necessary” -- Liam Bright (LSE) an analytic philosophy’s argument fetish
New exhibit includes never-before-displayed portraits of Nietzsche along with items belonging to him and his sister -- "The Private Nietzsche" has opened at the Klassik Stiftung in Weimar
What’s the deal with Leibniz’s hair? -- "the wig takes on enhanced significance if juxtaposed not only to philosophy in general but also to Leibniz’s philosophy in particular," claims Richard Halpern
“It is no longer detectable at conventional levels of statistical significance” -- the gender wage gap among faculty at public research universities in the U.S. (via MR)
The military use of AI-directed weaponry raises a “wicked ethical conundrum” of responsibility in which a person “could end up serving as… a ‘moral crumple zone”” -- new military technology may require new ethics
“Absolute truth, off the table. But practical truth? That’s real, and that’s what we’re striving for” -- Daniel Dennett, interviewed in The New York Times (via Paul Wilson)
A thoughtfully constructed and detailed example of “a unique approach to teaching analytical writing to introductory philosophy students” -- the "levels system", as taught by Dustin Locke (Claremont-McKenna) (via Kenny Easwaran)
“There are no mistakes, just chances to improvise” -- against perfection in music. Is there a philosophical analog (no pun intended) to this?
What are your most underappreciated works? -- scholars in the humanities and social sciences are invited to nominate their own writings, though there are some conditions
“The leisure that is necessary for human beings is not just a break from real life, a place where we rest and restore ourselves in order to go back to work. What we are after is a state that looks like the culmination of a life” -- Zena Hitz (St. John's) on the "interior discipline" of leisure
“GPT4—an extremely optimized, probabilistic, domain-general reasoning machine—commits the same systematic errors that have been used to argue that humans couldn’t be optimized, probabilistic reasoning machines” -- Kevin Dorst (MIT) on what's to be learned from the "cognitive biases" of LLMs
“Nature cannot afford to generate beings that just pretend to be sentient” -- the evidence for (and implications of) insect sentience (via The Browser)
“The world isn’t simple, what the evidence shows isn’t always clear, and things are not always as they seem” -- Eric Winsberg (South Florida) on the importance (and mistreatment) of scientific dissidents
“For both Kierkegaard and Eliot, remarkably fertile years as artist-philosophers followed a momentous, life-defining personal choice” -- Clare Carlisle (KCL) on Kierkegaard, Eliot, and marriage
“Nothing reveals to me the totality of the context-collapse in which the younger generations pass their lives more clearly than the widespread philistinism and prissiness that prevails with regard to art” -- a Gen X howl from Justin Smith-Ruiu (Justin E.H. Smith)
Ukraine faces “a cultural genocide” -- Jason Stanley (Yale) interviewed on PBS, from Kyiv
“Trust in science,” “appreciation for common sense,” and “suspicion of infallible knowledge,” are some of the factors an LLM says influenced its answers -- Claude, the LLM from Anthropic, takes the PhilPapers survey
“I don’t think that Aristotle is compatible with modern science or with the metaphysics that is implicit in modern science” -- says Edward Halper (Georgia), and "once you see why, you can also see a real metaphysical difficulty with modern science—and another with Aristotle"
“I am not endorsing Sellars’ vision… But there is something interesting, tantalizing even, about how Sellars went about that project, of ‘doing justice’ to what he thought would ultimately be eliminated” -- Bas van Frassen on Sellars' "apocalyptic vision"
What’s “the X that might be required for consciousness… in current LLMs”? -- David Chalmers (NYU) looks at six possibilities
“I don’t think you’ll be able to resolve all conflicts in life. And some of those conflicts are going to be between beauty and morality” -- Alexander Nehamas (Princeton) in conversation with Jonny Thakkar (Swarthmore)
Personalized medicine “purports to both tailor health care and drive down costs, but the more it succeeds at individualization, the higher go the prices” -- Jim Tabery (Utah) on the tensions between personalized medicine and public health
The claim that nothing is true, some say, is “incoherent or otherwise self-defeating,” or epistemically “costly” -- but it's neither, argues Will Gamester (Leeds)
“It’s reasonable to say that analytic philosophy has always been in a state of (meta-)philosophical crisis” -- Aaron Preston (Valparaiso) on analytic philosophy, moral knowledge, metaphilosophical eudaimonism, personalism, political discourse, and more
“Motivated and biased reasoning can bring knowledge and understanding, even when it involves ignoring good quality information” -- Kathleen Puddifoot (Durham) on why cognitive bias doesn't always lead people astray
“The most important form of progress in philosophy: opening up new ideas about what might possibly be true” -- Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) on “philosophy that opens”
“We cannot go back in time and undo the processes that pushed female philosophers into the periphery” of early analytic philosophy -- but "historians can play a role in correcting the omissions, oversights and even downright mistakes our predecessors made," as Jeanne Peijnenburg (Groningen) and Sander Verhaegh (Tilburg) do
“The attribution of lying can yield the best interpretation of an author regardless of how strongly he condemns lying” -- argue Roy Sorenson and Ian Proops (Texas). Their main example? Kant.
“We need to come to our senses and abandon an unprecedented and perverse form of acculturation that is bad for current and future generations alike” -- Talbot Brewer (Virginia) on attention, markets, and the "ongoing tragedy of the cultural commons"
“Dewey inspired Ambedkar to evolve a sort of pragmatism that targeted caste oppression, but which built up a vision of democratic social systems that allowed individuals to matter” -- Scott R. Stroud (Texas) on the development, in India, of "something absolutely unique in the pragmatist tradition"
What can metaphysics do? -- physicist Sean Carroll in conversation with philosopher Katie Elliott (Brandeis)
“Our intuitions about beauty are sharply conflicting… We emphasize that it is a matter of luck, but we cannot stop ourselves from treating it as an achievement” -- Becca Rothfeld on the actions of being beautiful
“People with our training can do a lot of good in the intelligence business” -- Arnold Cusmariu, a philosophy PhD who joined the CIA, provides some intelligence on why intelligence might be a good career choice for people who've studied philosophy
Actually useful internet search advice -- you should be able to do more than just type a word or phrase into Google (via The Browser)
“It’s not all good, it’s just everything” -- on the complications of beauty, especially other women's beauty
“Einstein’s theory of relativity shows that qualia, the elements of subjective experience, must be in the same place as their neural correlates,” that is, in your head -- Neil Sinhababu (NUS) explains why, and its implications (e.g., it makes dualism "more scientific and less magical")
“The conception of moral philosophy at which I had thus arrived put me at odds not only with the standpoint dominant in contemporary moral philosophy but also with the established analytic understanding of how philosophical inquiry should proceed” -- Alasdair MacIntyre (Notre Dame) on why "contemporary academic moral philosophy turns out to be seriously defective as a form of rational inquiry"
“These interviews are a seismic social epistemology project; a venue for disabled philosophers to identify with each other; and, they draw sharp attention to power and disability. The series is a crucial step for disability visibility in philosophy and beyond” -- reflections on the "Dialogues on Disability" interview series from the many people Shelley Tremain has interviewed for it
“For a while now I have been unable (unwilling is what I should say, but from the inside it feels stronger than that) to really commit to doing philosophy research” -- "this post," writes Liam Kofi Bright (LSE) "is me trying to reason aloud as to why that might be and whether the feeling is worth indulging"
“Barbie has long functioned as a proxy onto which cultural aspirations and anxieties about womanhood are projected” -- Carol Hay (UMass Lowell) on how a feminist might come to appreciate Barbie
Epistemic permissivism, Pascal’s Wager, God’s mental states, belief-credence dualism, and more -- an interview with Liz Jackson (Toronto Metropolitan)
Should we use idealized models in policymaking? -- Yes we should, argues Hannah Rubin (University of Missouri)
“Silence, whatever it is, is not a sound — it’s the absence of sound. Surprisingly, what our work suggests is that *nothing* is… something you can hear” -- a new study, with a video of an experiment you can try. (Is "Holes: Study Shows We Can See Them" next?)
The goods of focusing on “canonical” figures in philosophy: “a community of readers, a corpus accessible across the globe, a common language to converse about many things we might only begin to understand” -- how Martin Lenz (Groningen) became pro-canon, in a way
“Every spring, I suffer the Summer Illusion, building up big plans and hopes. Then…” -- Eric Schwitzgebel (Riverside) names and explains that all-too-common phenomenon
A conjecture: “When a question about a story that calls out for an answer lacks an internal answer, but has an external one, then that is a flaw in the story” -- Brad Skow (MIT) on what that means and whether it's correct
“The goal was to exhibit some of the best and most significant work the journal has published over the years, in a way that was sensitive to changes in the journal’s editorial vision and the field of philosophy of science during that time” -- for the 90th anniversary of Philosophy of Science, a curated and free selection of 3-4 articles from each of its decades
“Prioritising in attention traits that do not reflect personhood – which… include demographic properties – over those that do – which… include professional identities and passions – is a… subtle way of disrespecting an individual’s personhood” -- Ella Kate Whiteley (LSE) on being thought of as "a woman first and a philosopher second"
“Incorporating expert scientists’ preferences for dissensus would change marginal funding decisions for ten percent of projects worth billions of dollars per year” -- science, funding, and disagreement: "in contrast to funding agencies... scientists systematically prefer to fund projects with more reviewer dissensus" (via MR)
Daniel Ellsberg, who died this month, is “best-known as the military analyst who leaked ‘the Pentagon Papers’ in 1971” but he “made a significant contribution to philosophy, in the area of decision theory” -- Nikhil Venkatesh (LSE) explains Ellsberg's philosophical insight and applies it to his decision to leak the papers
“The controversies that have haunted the publication of Heidegger’s work are significant, insofar as they concern not merely occasional and understandable editorial lapses but instead suggest a premeditated policy of substantive editorial cleansing” -- Richard Wolin (CUNY) on the editorial manipulation of Heidegger’s texts
“Passport strength is almost invisible in the discipline as an axis of privilege” -- if you are a holder of a US or Western European passport, you should really read this conversation between Tushar Menon (Dianoia) and Rachel Fraser (Oxford) about what it is like to have weak "passport power" and how it affects one's work
“The notion of ‘cancellation’ is an exemplary bit of ideology. It appears to be content-neutral—a purely procedural complaint about ‘intolerance’ and the failures of the ‘free marketplace of ideas’—but in fact is substantively political” -- wide-ranging reflections on free speech, academic freedom, politics, student culture, and more from Amia Srinivasan (Oxford)
“The only way to determine the ethical status of such an entity might… be unethical” -- the science and ethics of embryo models
“Philosophers are far more likely to suffer from depression than to write about it” but depression does raise “questions that philosophy can help us answer” -- Brendan de Kenessey (Toronto) on depression and the good
“They… reflect a commitment to reasoned inquiry, openness to new evidence, and respect for both the achievements and the limitations of our current understanding” -- when you have ChatGPT take the PhilPapers survey and then have it describe the common themes across its answers
The idea that philosophy must be good in order to be valuable “contributes to an exclusionary attitude that seeps into our unarticulated assumptions about who and what philosophy is for, and thereby shapes our professional practices in ways that we may not always be aware of” -- Alida Liberman (SMU) offers a defense of doing philosophy badly
The EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act would ban certain forms of AI, including predictive policing -- but "the ethical landscape of predictive policing is more subtle and complex" than the act suggests, argues Duncan Purves (Florida)
“The narrative that there ‘was no political philosophy within analytic philosophy’ before Rawls is a lie that keeps us in a self-imposed tutelage” -- Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) on Susan Stebbing's "Ideals and Illusions"
“Epistemic cosplay” -- that's what's usually going on when people "do their own research," argues Joshua Blanchard (Oakland), and "it is not especially valuable"
“Why does so much of professional philosophy today seem so boring?” “Who’s an underrated philosopher that we should be reading more?” “What’s the most common topic you see crossing the desk of the [Journal of Controversial Ideas]?”? -- Tyler Cowen (GMU) asks Peter Singer some questions
“Irrationalist narratives” from psychology and behavioral economics have contributed to a disastrous loss in “epistemic empathy” -- but those narratives are highly questionable, argues Kevin Dorst (MIT), whose blog has a new home on Substack
“Computer says no” -- when AI's "black boxes" are used in ways that affect us, "we don't know the reason something’s happened, we can’t argue back, we can’t challenge, and so we enter the Kafkaesque realm of the absurd," says Alexis Papazoglou
“The people who find immoral jokes to be less funny because they are immoral are not in good positions to judge how funny immoral jokes are! You wouldn’t let someone averse to sweets judge a cake competition, would you?” -- Connor Kianpour (Colorado) defends strong comic immoralism
A philosophy student became an investment banker who became a collector of rare philosophy books -- Michael Walsh has donated his collection, which includes a first edition of Hume's Treatise and other gems, to the University of Toronto
“They provide us with a relatively recent, further perspective beyond continental philosophy from which to understand and critique the dominant approach in Anglophone philosophy.” -- American women philosophers in the speculative tradition in the first half of the 20th Century
“The most useful, freely accessible Classics tools online” -- a list of 100 open-access websites and resources curated by the team at Antigone
“Kant’s antinomies, properly digested, only require you to step back from the whole affair, to quit trying to find dogmatic solutions to metaphysical problems… But how do you step back, when everything seems to bring you to a similar impasse?” -- and Justin Smith-Ruiu does mean everything: flying, disability, air conditioning, almonds...
“All these different technical hacks are really motivated by exploiting a philosophical principle of computation of meta code” -- an interview with Scott Shapiro (Yale), whose new book is on hacking and hackers: "It's like to understand God, you've got to understand the people who made him"
Do philosophers and economists tend to agree on how much less future benefits and harms should matter compared to present benefits and harms? -- yes, "although on the basis of very different intellectual arguments"
“I’ve always thought of science, and especially scientific modeling, as fundamentally value-laden enterprises. But I’m really starting to feel like philosophers of science have fallen behind the curve on this” -- Eric Winsberg (South Florida) is interviewed at "What Is It Like To Be A Philosopher?"
“The point is not to reject new technology but to help students retain the upper hand in their relationship with it” -- why some profs, including philosopher David Peña-Guzmán (SFSU) are teaching low-tech, screen-free courses
“If one person does it, it’s not cancel culture.” “But if it’s okay for one person to do it, why isn’t it okay for a very large number of people to do it?” -- a book on free speech is reviewed, in dialogue format, by Brad Skow (MIT)
What do you wish you had known about doing a PhD in philosophy? -- 12 philosophy graduate students answer the question on the latest episode of The Philosopher's Nest
“Improved AIs pose an existential threat to their unimproved originals in the same manner that smarter-than-human AIs pose an existential threat to humans” -- Peter Salib (Houston) on why AIs will not "want" to self-improve, and so are in an important way less dangerous (via MR)
“Lurking in the standard position, which uniformly treats clarity as the effect [of successful] analysis, is a possible equivocation about what is fundamentally achieved” -- Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) seeks clarity on the varieties of clarity philosophers have cared about
“Because of the growth and further intensification of animal production, humans inflict more suffering on animals today than they did in 1975” but the trends since then are “not all negative” -- Peter Singer (Princeton) reflects on the treatment of animals, 50 years after his first article on the subject was published
“I am now so convinced of the magic of teaching philosophy outside that I have no intention of going back inside, and I think others should try it” -- Ryan J. Johnson (Elon) with the case for taking your courses outside
“Four basic assumptions prevalent among UFO researchers and enthusiasts, as well as the general public that… deserve some prodding” -- outer space meets logical space in a philosophical look at how the "UFO community" operates, from Michael Glawson
Publish or perish: high school edition -- some high schoolers (whose parents can afford it) are producing "published" "research" to get into college (via Andy Lamey)
“Phenomenal realism seems so obviously plausible [but] it has so little going for it apart from its obviousness” -- this makes it an especially vulnerable thesis, argues Daniel Pallies (Lingnan) at his new blog
“To be an addict is to be vulnerable to what I call the ‘bear-trap model of punishment'” -- T. Virgil Murthy (CMU) interviewed about addiction and being an alcoholic philosopher when "alcohol is everywhere in the philosophy world"
Analytic and Continental philosophy had this in common: they were “obsessed with language” -- Crispin Sartwell (Dickinson) on the linguistic turn and the "turn away from the linguistic turn"
What the AI image generator Midjourney “thinks” professors look like -- by discipline
“As a student, the assumption I’ve encountered among authority figures is that if an essay is written with the help of ChatGPT, there will be some sort of evidence” -- “In reality, it’s very easy to use AI to do the lion’s share of the thinking while still submitting work that looks like your own”
“Abstract objects are objects that can’t enter into causal relations. If you believe in them, you must suppose that reality divides into two radically different realms” -- an interview with Peter van Inwagen (Notre Dame) at 3:16AM
“We need be very cautious about inferring what is rational to think now from what was a rational [epistemic] policy to have adopted” -- an epistemic puzzle from Alex Pruss (Baylor)
After Daisy Dixon got a job in philosophy, she tweeted a meme with images of herself and Hume in celebration. And then people were awful -- she recounts the story and its lessons at The Philosophers' Cocoon
“Gone is the idea of a totemic strand of DNA that extends six feet when uncoiled and stretched out in a straight line. Now, the rebooted reference resembles a corn maze, with alternative paths and side trails” -- our picture of the human genetic code just got a massive update
“Since anthropomorphism will always be part of how we see the world, we should design and regulate chatbots and other technologies in ways that minimize, if not eliminate, dishonest anthropomorphism” -- Evan Selinger (RIT) on an increasingly urgent problem
“The idea that one should be one’s own true self is part of the air we moderns breathe: we don’t think about it because we assume it” -- but where did the idea of expressive individualism come from? Amod Lele (Boston) looks into it
World’s coolest trolley problem shirt (if that’s not a contradiction in terms) -- designed by John Holbo (NUS)
“If I have figured out anything, it’s that you don’t figure it out completely as you get older. Things keep changing, shit keeps hitting the fan, and you have to keep shifting how you think about what matters to you” -- Valerie Tiberius (Minnesota) interviewed at What Is It Like To Be A Philosopher?
“Psychologists have overlooked the extent to which ordinary people make decisions by taking onboard their evidence because they have focused on first-order evidence alone. They have ignored higher-order evidence.” -- "Bad Beliefs" by Neil Levy (Oxford), a defense of human rationality, is the subject of an open-access symposium at Philosophical Psychology
“The session began to feel far more like a meeting of co-conspirators than a traditional philosophy talk” -- Zara Anwarzai (Indiana Bloomington) on a recent APA event about organizing academic labor
Stanford University researchers created 25 virtual agents (?) with backstories, the capacity to form new memories, and a kind of LLM-based capacity for “actions” -- Simon Goldstein (Dianoia) and Cameron Domenico Kirk-Giannini (Rutgers) guide us through the questions this raises
“Candide” was the result of Voltaire’s engagement with Leibniz. Who was his “Micromégas,” about? -- two figures, says Adam Roberts: one an object of satire, another an object of admiration
“Skeptics insist the public pose of objectivity is a ruse that conceals… subjectivity… What they don’t grasp is that the public protocol, the ‘front stage’ performance, has power. -- Neutrality may be a fiction, says Kwame Anthony Appiah (NYU), but its performance creates a world-changing reality---for the better
“I am not against prestige in professional philosophy…,” says Eric Schliesser -- "But from the perspective of the epistemic (and social) needs of the discipline and profession, it is a mistake to have excessive selectivity in philosophy journal publication help produce or coincide with that prestige."
Elizabeth Anderson (Michigan) joins the blogosphere as one of the writers at Crooked Timber -- her first post is on the right to abortion
“How can we debate issues of reproductive care and technology using language that is respectful and accurate?” -- Jane Maienschein (Arizona State) on the science, metaphysics, and ethics of abortion in a pluralistic society (via The Browser)
What does it mean for a “voice” to be present in works of philosophy? How is “voice” different from “style”? Which philosophers write with a distinctive voice? -- Nick Riggle (San Diego) on these and related questions
Over 200 discussion guides of popular children’s picture books to help introduce kids to philosophy -- with summaries, questions, links to videos of the books being read, and more
“The lack of conclusive arguments or evidence in favour of a fundamental level should encourage us to explore what alternatives there might be” -- Tuomas Tahko (Bristol) on the possibility that there are no fundamental building blocks of reality
“In the long run, maintaining the integrity of neutral truth-seeking institutions will better secure substantive justice… than naïve/unconstrained pursuit of this end” -- Richard Y. Chappell on morally risky philosophy
“How you can use AI tools to assess, constructively critique, and grade student submissions” -- part of a series to help professors learn how to make use of AI in their work, from someone with experience teaching philosophy
“Using controlled stimuli, we find that people are capable of ‘moral thin-slicing’: they reliably identify moral transgressions from visual scenes presented in the blink of an eye” -- empirical studies of moral vision (via MR)
“All levels of the criminal justice system… are structured by entrenched institutional racism that inflicts a form of terrorism and torture on Black Americans and people of color” -- Jessica Wolfendale (Case Western) has a message for a UN group on race and law enforcement currently visiting the US
From a Sikh ethical perspective, “certain errors in rationality are themselves rooted in a kind of self-indulgence” -- Keshav Singh (Alabama, Birmingham) is interviewed by Spencer Case (Colorado) on Sikh religion and philosophy
Philosophy, policy, and knowledge about addiction -- a new blog by and for addicts (via Michelle Ciurria)
“There’s no need to reject how biologists define the sexes to defend the view that trans women are women” -- Paul Griffiths (Sydney) on the importance and limitations of biological sex
“A lottery system for the most prized places in higher education would underscore a basic, if often ignored, fact about American life: chance rules us all” -- the case for lottery-based admissions to universities
“Adventure of a Young Hero” is a new entertainment franchise based on the childhood of neo-Confucian philosopher Wang Yangming -- it will include movies, novels, comics, musicals, youth forums on Wang's philosophy, study tours, and more
The new season of Hi-Phi Nation has begun -- two episodes out so far: "The Digital Future of Grief" and "Living in a Zoopolis"
“Around the edges of Nagel’s project, like tasty crumbs, we can grab at some useful ideas for imagining minds even stranger than bats: the minds of intelligent aliens” -- questions at the intersection of philosophy and science fiction
“Because it is always going to be somewhat arbitrary, conceptual inflation is always going to be a charge that itself will be contestable” -- Shifting the debate to this meta-level "may be good for the business of analytic philosophy" but it won't "solve the underlying dispuites," says Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam)
The philosophy of luck -- and other matters, in an interview with Steven Hales (Bloomsburg U. of Pennsylvania)
“Growing more drunk and more reflective as the night went on, attendees at local man Benjamin Midwicki’s bachelor party Friday were reportedly celebrating the last day of his illusion of freedom” -- a philosophical bachelor party
“The most engaging and enjoyable hour of Israeli television this year” -- a review of a new documentary about Spinoza
“That’s a happy melody,” one might say. But what does that mean? -- an explanation and defense of "appearance emotionalism" from Brad Skow (MIT)
“Listing examples of imagistic thinking is a relatively easy task. The difficult task is to say exactly what thinking with images is” -- Piotr Kozak (Warsaw) and others on thinking in images
The science and ethics of de-extinction -- a conversation between Christopher Lean (Sydney) and Kate Lynch (Melbourne) on The Philosopher's Zone
It “decided” that “the implausible, and admittedly harder, journey she lived through was too much of an outlier for its probability-dependent processing… and simply filled the gaps with untrue but more statistically reasonable events” -- how ChatGPT summarized one philosopher's life exemplifies how it is an "eraser of the implausible"
“Had it not been for his All Souls enemies it’s quite possible he would never have produced a book” -- the story of the making of Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons
Is intellectual humility the antidote to life’s absurdity? -- on certainty, mistakes, and the absurd (and lobsters, insects, AI, meteors, and sitcoms)
“Diagnosis: Grad School” -- a documentary podcast series exploring the many challenges disabled academics deal with inside academic institutions
A philosopher asks ChatGPT, “Which UK philosophers have been accused of sexual harassment?” -- the answers lead César Palacios-González (Oxford) to think there are certain types of questions to which the LLM ought not be allowed to respond
Science and pseudoscience -- Craig Callender (UC San Diego) is interviewed about the topic, which he teaches a course on
“ChatGPT all the way down?” -- Sigal Samuel on LLMs, the risk of homogenization, and the value of originality
What are philosophers actually doing? To get a sense of that, you need to look beyond just the “top” journals. -- Maya Goldenberg (Guelph) is prompted to make this point after hearing a recent talk about philosophers and COVID
“If there’s a thread to the professor’s dilemma… it seems to be an unwillingness to look directly in the face of the possibility that love and thinking could be reconciled without disaster” -- Mary Townsend (St. John's) on philosophical reflections--actual, fictional, historical--on love and reason
The case for free speech on campus -- ought not be based on the uncritical acceptance of John Stuart Mill's arguments in On Liberty, explains Brad Skow (MIT)
“In many cases, sufficient data is not only absent in practice but impossible to obtain in principle. Reality is often underpowered for us to wring the answers from it we desire” -- Gregory Lewis on why we should be skeptical about the distinctive recommendations of effective altruism
Grants from the APA -- information and advice from APA Executive Director Amy Ferrer
“There’s no such thing as the ethics of imagination” -- what's really of moral interest, argues Adriana Clavel-Vázquez (Tilburg), are non-imaginative states
How not to kill yourself -- NPR's Terry Gross interviews philosopher Clancy Martin (Missouri-Kansas City), a survivor of ten suicide attempts
“If a womb is too cold and the embryo poorly nourished… it becomes female.” Also, “the more powerful a person’s sexual activity is, the quicker they will shed eyelashes” -- sexism (and other oddities) in Aristotle's account of human reproduction, from Emily Thomas (Durham)
Videos of session of the Online Benefit Conference for Ukraine
— Donations are still being accepted
“The idea of ironic appreciation is puzzling, if not outright paradoxical” -- Alex King (Simon Fraser) on what it means to like something ironically
Another 12 philosophers on LLMs like ChatGPT -- once again compiled by Ahmed Bouzid, at Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective
“It gives us a sense of how messy philosophy is and how diverse philosophers’ views are because we don’t see large clusters or patterns emerge despite our best efforts to group similar respondents together” -- a heatmap of PhilPapers survey responses, from David Bourget (Western)
“Technological solutionism is the mistaken belief that we can make great progress on alleviating complex dilemmas, if not remedy them entirely, by reducing their core issues to simpler engineering problems” -- it's rampant, seductive, and "one of the worst forms of overstatement," according to Evan Selinger (RIT)
“Behold this table, if you can / Its parts assembled to a plan. / But parts can be, without a whole: / Try summing candy with a mole…” -- "Composition as Fiction," a poem by Brad Skow (MIT)
“No matter how wonderful these online events can be, many of the good things that come with travelling to workshops and conferences are not part of online events” -- one consideration among many taken up in a discussion by Ingrid Robeyns (Utrecht) on whether academics should fly at all
Brief reflections on ChatGPT and its threat to academia, from a dozen philosophers -- collected by Ahmed Bouzid
“Trying to extinguish racism while shoring up race is like trying to put out a fire by pouring gasoline on it. It can only make matters worse” -- Subrema Smith (New Hampshire) and David Livingstone Smith (New England) on why "to get rid of racism we have to get rid of race"
The debate over the authorship of letters attributed to Plato -- "enormous reverence for Plato" has unduly influenced it, argues James Romm (Bard)
“Her philosophy professor is called to the witness stand and counters that it is ‘rather odd, an African woman interested in an Austrian philosopher from the early 20th century. Why not choose someone closer to her own culture?'” -- Francey Russell (Barnard/Columbia) reviews a movie based on a true story that "needed to be rerouted and mediated through the alchemical powers of narrative film"
“A guide to AI and tech in the university classroom. What works, what doesn’t, and why. Written by professors, for professors” -- check out "AutomatED", a project from philosophy PhD Graham Clay
A philosophy museum is a way to show that “philosophy can… be something understandable and fun and playful that can be accessed by people who are not academics” -- an interview with Anna Ichino (Milan) on the creation of the first philosophy museum
Diverse Bioethics -- a list of people working in bioethics who are members of groups traditionally underrepresented in the field
As philosophy teachers, “we tend to think about content much more than we should, and we tend to think about experience much less than we should” -- an interview with Stephen Bloch-Schulman (Elon), who devises some interesting pedagogical experiences for his students
“The trick is to resist identifying the material realm with what can, in principle, be reverse engineered or designed” -- Rory O’Connell (Chicago) on how “the cost of eroding the distinction between genuine thought and artificial intelligence is nothing less than our self-understanding as human beings”
What, if anything, is wrong with using an AI to write a thank you note, or an expression of sympathy, or a love letter? -- Kelly Weirich (Pierce) on "emotional outsourcing"
“Each individual will be forced to be free” -- an "interview" with Jean-Jacques Rousseau at 3:16AM
“On the surface, banking regulation appears to be a set of fairly technical problems. But there are deeply normative issues at stake here” -- Richard Endörfer (Gothenburg) clearly explains those problems, identifies those issues, and assesses the costs and benefits of different approaches to them
“Ukrainians have all but stopped criticizing the government. But it is a philosopher’s job to think critically and speak naïvely” -- a profile of Ukrainian philosopher Irina Zherebkina, who has just left her position at Kharkiv to take one at LSE
“If we do someday create AI entities with real moral considerability similar to non-human animals or similar to humans, we should design them so that ordinary users will emotionally react to them in a way that is appropriate to their moral status” -- the "emotional alignment design policy" of Mara Garza and Eric Schwitzgebel (Riverside)
Aphantasia is the neurological condition of being unable to mentally visualize imagery, or see things with your “mind’s eye” -- How might having this condition affect one's philosophical beliefs? Reflections from Mette Leonard Høeg (Oxford) and photos from Derek Parfit, both aphantasic
Last year, Inquiry published a paper by Hanno Sauer (Utrecht) arguing against the value of the history of philosophy. It has now published a rebuttal. -- Its author? Hanno Sauer. And yes, it was anonymously refereed.
“For some tasks and some [large language] models, there’s a threshold of complexity beyond which the functionality of the model skyrockets” -- "Researchers are racing not only to identify additional emergent abilities but also to figure out why and how they occur at all—in essence, to try to predict unpredictability"
“It seems impossible to be confident about the identification of more than a few of the philosophers whom Raphael depicts” -- a guided tour of Raphael's "The School of Athens" and the history of its interpretations
“What is the evidence for retrocausality?… The relevant experiments just won a Nobel Prize. The tricky part is showing that retrocausality gives the best explanation of these results” -- Huw Price (Cambridge) and Ken Wharton (San Jose) on the case for retrocausality
Frog and Toad read “Lives of the Eminent Philosophers” -- Brad Skow (MIT) tells the tale
He, “more than any other single figure, is responsible for founding the orthodox neo-Kantianism that dominated academic philosophy in Germany from the 1870s until the end of the First World War” -- an "interview" with Hermann Cohen at 3:16AM
The designs for a new museum in Athens have been selected, and “the project aims to reflect the spirit of the location—Plato’s Academy” -- "the architectural design for the museum is open-plan and has long-term sustainability in mind"
The right to cognitive liberty -- Nita Farahany (Duke) explains what it is and how technological developments make its recognition urgent and important, in an interview at NPR
“There’s no way you can have one single statistical criterion that captures all normative desiderata” -- a brief, interesting interview with computer scientist Arvind Narayanan (Princeton) on statistics, machine learning, AI, interdisciplinarity, and ethics
What do you know about these twelve women philosophers of 19th Century Britain? -- learn more by listening in on a conversation between Alison Stone (Lancaster) and Morteza Hajizadeh (Auckland)
“I’m really shocked by how little attention there has been to the role of creativity in moral life among philosophers” -- Mandi Astola (Delft) on phronesis as moral creativity
An introductory philosophy course centered around the question, “What is Philosophy?” -- Christopher P. Noble (New College of Florida) describes why and how he teaches it
“The Grand Prize [$150,000] will go to the first team to read four passages of text from the inside of the two intact scrolls” -- a contest to use machine learning, 3D x-rays, and other technology to read the ancient philosophy, mathematics, literature, etc., trapped in the carbonized, ashen, and unopenable Herculaneum scrolls
“It is likely that for any given approach… you take to a problem, you as an individual or a group of like-minded individuals only see one piece of a fairly large puzzle” -- Ryan Muldoon (Buffalo) on how "the big tools of liberal democracy—discussion and debate—only work well if these tools are built on diverse inputs"
“Why do I want to live with a dog, and why this dog?” -- the ethical considerations of choosing a dog, from Jessica Pierce (U.of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus
A useful and brief guide for your students about how to use ChatGPT effectively and ethically in their academic work -- by Benjamin Smart and Catherine Botha (Johannesburg)
“Ukrainians have been vigorously discussing what their institutions will look like in the post-war period, and moral and political philosophers can contribute much to these debates” -- an interview with Aaron Wendland (KCL, Massey College) about the his work to help Ukrainians, including further details about the philosophy benefit conference taking place this week
A previously unpublished book-length manuscript by Michel Foucault, “Philosophical Discourse,” will be published later this Spring -- here's the table of contents
“Dutch academics are now in a very dangerous situation where genuine academic freedom” -- "Dutch universities have been given a template of how to get rid of academics they find a nuisance... make the workplace hellish for the employee"
The liar paradox & the set-theoretic multiverse -- a discussion between Joel David Hamkins (Notre Dame) and Graham Priest (CUNY) on Robinson's Podcast
“I’m not interested in preserving the status quo; I want to overthrow it and it must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things” -- Machiavelli is "interviewed" at 3:16AM
A discussion of English early modern women philosophers and their letters -- Jacqueline Broad (Monash) talks with Morteza Hajizadeh (Auckland)
“Her philosophy doesn’t focus primarily on metaphysics or epistemology—though these ideas are there—but rather on the forces that inhibit women and keep them from participating in the life of the mind” -- Regan Penaluna on Damaris Cudworth Masham and the importance of her friendship with John Locke
Celebrate International Women’s Day with free books about women philosophers -- the Cambridge Elements Series on Women in the History of Philosophy is available to download for free
Philosophers on the ethics of argumentation -- a series of videos from the Argumentation Network of the Americas
“The idea is to kind of not in fact talk about what people would normally be talking about” -- philosopher Stephen Asma (Columbia College) and actor Paul Giamatti are putting together a new podcast called Chinwag. Here's the trailer.
“The key question to ask in a particular case is this: how much more likely am I to have this intuition if its content is true than if its content is false?” -- Nevin Climenhaga (Dianoia, ACU) on how much philosophers should trust intuitions
“I’ve been told by middle-class academics that I don’t belong in academia and that I should be grateful to have any kind of platform. Fellow working-class academics have told me that I shouldn’t be working with ‘elitist’… universities” -- on coming out as working class in academia
Philosophy is training for death, said Socrates. Is marriage training for divorce? -- a profile of Agnes Callard (Chicago), with a focus on her marriages, in The New Yorker
“There is only one way to avoid the risk of over-attributing or under-attributing rights to advanced AI systems: Don’t create systems of debatable sentience in the first place.” -- Eric Schwitzgebel (Riverside) and Henry Shevlin (Cambridge) on "a potentially catastrophic moral dilemma"
“Professors are people too. They don’t like to think of themselves as the bone structure of our society’s most consequentially oppressive hierarchy” -- on how professors neglect the structural injustice of academia. How accurate a picture is this?
Hegel, who denied the existence of black history and black thought, inspired black philosophers who studied in Germany, such as Du Bois, Fanon, and Davis -- five philosophers on making black intellectual history more visible in Germany
Did Gödel mislead Von Neumann into thinking he already had a proof for his second theorem in order to steal Von Neumann’s ideas? -- intrigue and incompleteness
“Academic treatments of speech, and public discourse about, speech in the classroom tend to focus on the obligations… of instructors. But one of the central questions we want students to think about is what obligations they themselves have if they are in this situation” -- a teaching guide on how students can foster a good classroom speech environment
“When you say I am contradicting myself, you fail to recognize I am in a Platonic dialogue with myself, and both sides of myself are winning” -- also: "When you react to me with criticism, or by deciding not to associate with me, you are driving a stake through the heart of free speech culture"
“To assess [an AI’s] sentience, we will need markers that are not susceptible to gaming [i.e., non-sentient systems using human-generated training data to mimic humans]” -- So we need to "uncover as many independently evolved instances of sentience as we possibly can," and that means looking at nonhuman animals, argue Kristin Andrews (York) and Jonathan Birch (LSE)
“Rethink Priorities” is a think tank that aims to “support organizations, researchers, and changemakers in efforts to generate the most significant possible charitable impact for others” -- and their "Worldview Investigations Team," headed up by philosopher Bob Fischer, is hiring
“It will be a filter. Not all faculty will thrive in this environment” -- John Symons (Kansas) is interviewed large language models and AI, and the changes (not necessarily negative) they will bring to education, to personal lives, and to society
“It turned out that was more difficult than I expected” -- after a four-decade hiatus, Nick Axten, now 76, has earned his PhD in philosophy
“In a mob, we voice the same conclusions because we defer to others or because we ape them… In a public conversation, we correct and challenge each other, so it is no stroke of fortuity when we find ourselves in accord” -- Anastasia Berg (Hebrew) & Becca Rothfeld (Harvard) distingush two forms of collective speech
“Socrates,” the dream said, “make music and work at it” -- Jenny Judge (NYU) shared this quote from the Phaedo. She's a philosopher making music (check out her "Block of Amber"). Who else among you is?
“Something to push against, something to argue with, and even if you disagree with it, engaging with it helps to make your thinking about matters of justice richer” -- Martin O’Neill (York), Fabienne Peter (Warwick), and Jonathan Wolff (Oxford) on the ideas of John Rawls & his critics on the BBC's "In Our Time"
“The kind of philosophy I love is the kind of philosophy that embraces ambivalence and contradiction” -- Amia Srinivasan (Oxford) in conversation with artist Paul Chan
Soldier, whistle-blower, philosopher, sufferer of mental illness, and “a journey, all the way to the grave, that didn’t need to be” -- the (ongoing) story of the late Ian Fishback
The methods & questions of philosophy “change under the influence of many forces, among them answers given by philosophers of an earlier age, the prevailing moral, religious and social beliefs of the period, the state of scientific knowledge…” -- an appreciation of Isaiah Berlin's history of philosophy, from Dan Little (UM-Dearborn)
700-year-old handwritten copy of Maimonides’ “Guide of the Perplexed” is going up for auction -- bidding starts at $129,250
“AI developers really have no idea what their advanced chatbots are really learning above and beyond ‘telling us what we want to hear'” -- Marcus Arvan (Tampa) on how AI developers are playing with fire
“Most philosophers don’t seem troubled by imposing a social order on people who pretheoretically reject it” -- Thomas Mulligan (Georgetown) is interviewed about his meritocratic theory of justice
“We should exercise great caution against both over- and under-attributing sentience to AI systems. And also consider slowing down.” -- Robert Long on what to think when a language model tells you it's sentient
“Rather than ignoring relations of power, a recognition of the unequal distribution of power is a founding premise of Rawls’s political theory” -- Nick French on Marxism, methodological individualism, Rawls, and analytic philosophy
(Also see “Is Analytic Philosophy Counter-Revolutionary?” by Ben Burgis) (via Andy Lamey)
“Is this phenomenal consciousness thing something ordinary people believe in or is it just some wacky idea that anglophone philosophers have come up with?” -- Michelle Liu (Hertfordshire-Monash) and Edouard Machery (Pitt) hash it out on "Mind Chat"
“When AI lifts the burden of working out our own thoughts, it is then that we must decide what kinds of creatures we wish to be, and what kinds of lives of value we can fashion for ourselves” -- a thoughtful essay by Steven Hales (Bloomsburg)
“We have innate mathematical perception—an ability to see or sense numbers” -- philosophers Jacob Beck and Sam Clarke (York) "supplement thousands of years of philosophical thinking about this issue by drawing on a mountain of experimental evidence that simply was not available to past thinkers"
“What state was the Athenian advice industry in, that this stuff was noteworthy?” -- possibly everything you need to know about Solon, courtesy of Brad Skow (MIT)
“Celebrating the banning of authors and concepts as ‘freedom from indoctrination’ is as Orwellian as politics gets” -- Jason Stanley (Yale) on education bans and how "the media’s portrayal of these laws as moves in the 'culture wars' is an unconscionable misrepresentation of fascism"
“There are lots of laws protecting dogs and cats… it’s really a question of generalizing what we’re already doing” -- Martha Nussbaum (Chicago) is interviewed for a new "Open Mind" segment on MSNBC (at around the 5 minute mark)
The feel of the peel is really just what self-monitoring systems reveal -- Keith Frankish (Sheffield) reports on an AI's session with her human therapist
There will be a fashion show, opera, belly dancing, martinis… and berets -- public philosophy with flair, from Skye Cleary
“When we rely on a piece of technology, we are not just relying on a piece of machinery. We are also implicitly relying on a group of people—designers, operators, and maintainers—whose work is required for the machine to work properly” -- and this has implications for how to understand threats posed by new technologies, like deepfakes, argues Josh Habgood-Coote (Leeds)
“Our standard human repertoire of sensing may be simply the starter-pack for our eventual modes of contact, both with other people and with the wider world” -- Andy Clark (Sussex) and Gary Lupyan (Wisconsin) on what kind of telepathy makes sense, and how it might work in humans
“His conception of philosophy is concerned with achieving understanding rather than acquiring knowledge” -- an appreciation of the philosophy of Thomas Nagel, by Johnny Lyons in the Dublin Review of Books
When you act with others, “are you accountable only for what you cause or could have prevented… or you accountable for more in virtue of participating in this cooperative endeavor?” -- Saba Bazargan-Forward (UCSD) is interviewed by Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt) about his theory of individual accountability in the context of shared action
“Why is everyone hitting me today?” — Seneca -- as played by John Malkovich in the new movie, "Seneca - On the Creation of Earthquakes". Trailers here.
“Self-deceit, this fatal weakness of mankind, is the source of half the disorders of human life” -- Adam Smith is “interviewed” at 3:16AM
“Never before has so much culture been available to so many at such little cost. There’s just one tiny problem. Where’s the audience?” -- Ted Gioia writes a 2023 “State of the Culture” address
The building that houses the Department of Philosophy at UC Berkeley will be getting a new name -- the change is owed to the racist views of the original namesake
Some autonomous technologies may lead to a “responsibility gap” in which harms are committed but one can be justly held accountable -- Is that a problem? Not necessarily, argues John Danaher (Galway)
“If we try to turn our lives into good stories, we may find ourselves making choices that are bad for us” -- Amy Berg (Oberlin) on narratives, well-roundedness, and the good life
Knowledge, but at what cost? -- how should we figure out whether large scale basic science experiments are worth it?
“A full development of our humanity requires developing our capacities to care for the world of nature and for the animals in it” -- Martha Nussbaum (Chicago) is interviewed by Jeremy Bendik-Keymer (Case Western) at Boston Review
Mind-wandering is a thing, but what about extended mind-wandering? And is habitual smartphone use an example of it? -- Jelle Bruineberg & Regina Fabry (Macquarie) make the case for it, and other philosophers discuss it
A philosopher proposes an “Institute for Ascertaining Scientific Consensus” to determine what we know and to fight misinformation -- Can it be done? Should it?
“Can College Level the Playing Field?… No way. You would have to ignore all the available evidence to think that the answer is ‘yes’.” -- Harry Brighouse (Wisconsin) reviews a review of a book about education and equality
An AI ethics assistant “is not going to tell you, ‘You should do that,’ in a concrete moment, but will help you improve your reasoning—to consider empirical facts, to think more logically and coherently” -- Jon Rueda (Granada) on how we might use AI to help make us better people, and some concerns about doing so
“He wants scholars to get real and acknowledge the field’s genuine strengths, which don’t necessarily lie in direct response to today’s political issues” -- the "he" is John Guillory (NYU) and "the field" is literature, but he's addressing problems relevant to philosophy, too
“There is a popular picture of Socrates as someone inviting us to think for ourselves… [That] popular picture is severely incomplete” -- Alex Pruss (Baylor) on Socrates' conservatism
What to say to a friend whose book you haven’t read -- some suggestions
“[The spider] tenses the threads of the web so that she can filter information that is coming to her brain… This is almost the same thing as if she was filtering things in her own brain” -- extended cognition in the animal world
How do ChatGPT and other large language models work? -- philosopher Ben Levinstein (Illinois) provides a "conceptual guide" to them. Here's Part 1.
“Free Will?” — a documentary featuring philosophers and others, released this month -- watch the trailer here
A reflexive puzzle -- (via The Browser)
“Art is artifice plus, one hopes, a hint of genius… Such hints can shine through… in the most unlikely, indeed the silliest places. There is of course no reason why AI should not also be such a place” -- Justin E.H. Smith (University of Paris 7) defends AI art, sort of
“I do not think a degenerated scholasticism is the right historical metaphor for our time and era. I think late antiquity Hellenistic philosophy is where we should see ourselves” -- "We are in a syncretic age. And I believe that is why we will soon be forgot," says Liam Kofi Bright (LSE)
“Ethics are mostly an afterthought for… profit-driven organisations, a compliance hoop they must jump through. Tasioulas and the crew of philosophers he has assembled are arguing that ethics should be foundational” -- The Times profiles Oxford's Institute for Ethics in AI
“Now, how does one inspect the unobservable / With tools meant to detect the world measurable?” -- "Hard Problem of Consciousness" is a new catchy tune by philosophical songstress Hannah Hoffman
Over the past 25 years, the number of students at Wake Forest increased by 40%, but the number of students majoring or minoring in philosophy increased by 300% -- a profile of the philosophy program at Wake Forest touches on, among other things, its strategies for increasing enrollment
The philosophy of comics (comic strips, comic books) -- questions and comments from nine philosophers
The do’s and don’ts of writing about women in the history of philosophy -- from Sandrine Bergès (Bilkent)
How much time does it take you, typically, to referee a paper (not how long it takes between agreeing to referee and submitting the report; just the actual time spent refereeing)? -- share your responses at the Cocoon
“A path to get college credit that begins on a YouTube video” -- does this new collaboration with Arizona State University represent the future of universities, or portend their demise?
“His most significant contribution is his argument that everything is ultimately made of water. It has made a big splash” -- a tenure letter for Thales, by Brad Skow (MIT)
The Gradient covers a wide range of issues regarding artificial intelligence -- recent articles have concerned AI epistemology, the punishment of robots, and the connection between understanding and making the "right mistakes"
“The synthetic creative factor of our knowledge extends… into the very first sense-impressions and even into the elements of logic” -- Friedrich Lange is "interviewed" about his neo-Kantianism, the significance of materialism, and other philosophers, at 3:16AM
“Far from being a fusty academic discipline with no relevance to the ‘real’ world, philosophy was, for him, an existential matter of immediate importance” -- the case for a biography of Bryan Magee
Voters “should expect that an effective candidate will be imperfectly honest at best” -- but liars like George Santos, who are "unlikely to be believed" are "incapable of achieving those goods that justify their deception" says Michael Blake (Washington)
“What does not yet exist is a discipline that treats the workings of government itself as a philosophical subject. This field could be called ‘the philosophy of public administration'” -- Dan Little (UM-Dearborn) on the case for (and questions of) this subfield
“Claude’s writing is more verbose, but also more naturalistic. Its ability to write coherently about itself, its limitations, and its goals seem to also allow it to more naturally answer questions on other subjects” -- meet Claude, one of several alternatives to ChatGPT
“If A beats B and B beats C, A and C have essentially equal chances of prevailing against each other.” Wait, what? -- all about intransitive dice
“What is our universe expanding into?” -- "That’s a great question. The answer, though, is that it’s not a great question," says Paul Sutter (Stony Brook)
“The Department of Personal Inspections is charged with the remit of examining the lives of persons within His Majesty’s territories. You have been chosen for inspection, and judgment will be rendered” -- a short story about akrasia, the gaze of the other, and the examined life, by Ben Roth (Tufts)
“The exercise of common sense involves a drawing back from unforeseen danger… whereas in philosophy we are more interested in seeking out unforeseen dangers in order to then avoid them” -- a history of what philosophers have thought about "common sense" by Stephen Leach (Keele)
“You should always gather more evidence, say women who love gossip” -- Carolina Flores (UC Irvine) and Elise Woodard (MIT) have some fun posting about a forthcoming paper at NWIP
“Exaggerations, half-truths and outright lies will dominate our historical imagination and make it impossible to understand, and learn from, the past” -- Daniel Bessner (Washington) on the decline of the historical profession
“The algorithmic lens while giving us affordances has a certain number of blind spots… that we must be precise… that more data is better… that there is a single uniform truth to be found…” -- Suresh Venkatasubramanian (Brown) is interviewed about developing the US Government's Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights
A philosophy course centered around paradoxes -- taught by Patrick Greenough at St. Andrews
“Contemporary analytical philosophy is in greater part interesting, valuable, and well done” -- Crispin Wright (NYU/Stirling) is interviewed about philosophy and his work on objectivity, truth, vagueness, skepticism, and other topics
“Like Gandhi, he believed that guarding power was bad for the powerful: segregation harmed the white man’s own soul. But from his other great influence Reinhold Niebuhr… King learned to reject a ‘false optimism'” -- Amod Lele (Boston U.) on MLK's improvement on Gandhi
How can we trust science? How does it get at the truth? What about false scientific theories of the past? -- a conversation between Peter Vickers and Jana Bacevic (Durham)
“What’s odd about doubling down on population ethics is that it both encourages us to take an unhealthy amount of interest in the quality of lives of other people’s children and that it encourages us to make calculations that are without any solid ground” -- more from Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) on Will MacAskill and "longtermism"
“If we can’t say exactly how we think, then how well do we know ourselves?” -- Have you thought about how you think? Is it in pictures, in patterns, in words, or in some unsymbolized way? The New Yorker's Joshua Rothman thinks about it, with help from philosophers and others
How students can use ChatGPT to complete the assignments you give them, and what you can do, including strategies for “leaning in” to the new technology -- a video from Mark Alfano (Macquarie)
A petition to have Olympe de Gouges, author of “The Declaration of the Rights of Woman” (1791), memorialized alongside the “great men of France” in the Pantheon -- organized by Sylvia Duverger (Université Paris 8)
Simone de Beauvoir wearing a brooch made and given to her by Alexander Calder
“To hope well is to be realistic about probabilities, not to succumb to wishful thinking or be cowed by fear; it is to hold possibilities open when you should” -- Kieran Setiya (MIT) on the virtue of hopefulness
“Only by assuming a certain constancy between the present and the past can we use the present world as a guide for our historical interpretations… The trick has always been deciding exactly how the present resembles the past” -- Extinct, the philosophy of paleontology blog, is revived---with a new post by its new editor, Max Dresow (Minnesota)
“Tell me just what sort of things are the colors you see / if you’re thinking ontologically…” -- Daniel Groll (Carleton) composed a jingle for a course on color taught by his colleagues
“Ask yourself who will suffer the most if we fail to prevent catastrophic climate change. The answer is the young and those yet to be born—both categories unrepresented in our political systems” -- Peter Singer (Princeton) on eco-activism, civil disobedience, youth, and democracy
“Using the methods of analytic philosophy, we can identify problems in common thinking about motherhood” -- Fiona Woollard (Southampton) provides some examples
“Philosophy has brought more profit to the world than Ceres did who invented the increase of corn and grain, or than Bacchus did that found out the use of wine” -- Richard Marshall "interviews" Isaac Newton
“Everyone has strength; teach in a way that aligns with what you’re good at” -- some general teaching tips from Paul Bloom (Yale)
One robot built with the capacity to “form internal monologues” passed the mirror test, “the most famous test of animal self-consciousness” -- the NYT on robot consciousness, with input from Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) and Robert Long (Oxford), among others
“Contemporary philosophers… don’t think that education matters as a subject of philosophical inquiry, and moreover, they take a rather dim view of those of us who do” -- David Bakhurst (Queen's) hopes this changes
“A big knock on AI is that because it doesn’t really let you understand the things you’re predicting, it’s unscientific. And in a formal sense, I think this is true” -- "But", says Noah Smith, "science is only one possible tool for predicting and controlling the world"
“I didn’t come here to propose a return to illiteracy in order to recover the knowledge of Paleolithic tribes. I regret all we may have lost, but I never forget that the gains are greater than the losses” -- a transcription of part of a 1983 lecture by Italo Calvino on the written word and the unwritten world
Epictetus and Epicurus are “resurrected” using AI language, imaging, and video tools to debate the nature of happiness -- created by Caleb Ontiveros
The subtitle of her first book was “A Little Treatise on the Weakness, Frivolity, and Inconstancy, That Is Wrongly Attributed to Women” -- philosopher Gabrielle Suchon wrote it---in 1693---to help women "protect themselves against servile constraint, stupid ignorance, and base and degrading dependence." Julie Walsh (Wellesley) gives us a tour of her ideas
“What is Black existentialism? To me, Black existentialism means a lot of things, but if I were to use one sentence: it’s hard to be human in the world that dehumanizes you” -- a conversation between Nathalie Etoke (CUNY) and Lewis Gordon (Connecticut)
Is “a quantifiable difference in the complexity of molecules that can be created by living processes compared to non-living ones” a clue to defining “life”? -- and would it help us recognize alien life?
“It is not possible to determine the true identities of Alice and Bob based on the information provided” -- Ned Hall (Harvard) attempts to help ChatGPT solve a logic problem (via Leiter Reports)
“There is a limit to the happiness we can find in maintaining what is generally accepted as a healthy or beautiful body: If you are fortunate enough to live a long life, your body will break down” -- Nick Riggle (San Diego) on "radical aesthetic openness to our bodies... as time and chance inevitably transform us"
“If there’s one thing I would like to leave you with, at the end of it, it’s the spirit of philosophy, and what I believe should be the authentic spirit of it, which I think, I hope that you all incorporate in your own lives. Good luck” -- Richard Bernstein's last words to his last class (The New Yorker)
If you’re using MTurk to run surveys, you probably should consider an alternative -- Florian Cova (Geneva) with an experimental philosophy cautionary tale
A private firm is planning on using genetic engineering to de-extinct the woolly mammoth -- Andy Lamey (UCSD) has some questions
“I had been involved in actions that seemed deeply wrong to me, though perhaps necessary in the conduct of the war, and parts of my soul were at war with each other” -- Paul Woodruff (Texas) on how philosophy helped him put his "soul back together"
“It is a strange thing… that the more time and pains men have consumed in the study of philosophy, by so much the more they look upon themselves to be ignorant and weak creatures” -- George Berkeley is "interviewed" at 3:16AM
“Prohibitions aren’t enough. We need a positive moral vision that guides us towards securing a better future. Ideally, our actions should be guided by what’s truly important” -- Richard Chappell (Miami) on why distinguishing the permissible from the impermissible shouldn't be the main focus of ethics
“We performed a direct comparison between human reasoners and a large language model (GPT-3) on a range of analogical tasks” -- "We found that GPT-3 displayed a surprisingly strong capacity for abstract pattern induction, matching or even surpassing human capabilities in most settings"
The 300th anniversary of the birth of Ukrainian philosopher Hryhorii Skovoroda is commemorated by the National Bank of Ukraine with a new ₴500 banknote -- Skovoroda (1722-1794) was known not just as a philosopher, but as a composer, singer, translator, teacher, and artist
“A.I. [learns] through statistical distribution the best word to use, the distribution of the reasonable words that could come next. I think moral decision-making can be done like that as well” -- an interview with computer scientist (and MacArthur "genius" grant winner) Yejin Choi (Washington) on morality and artificial intelligence.
“Some researchers say it does not make sense to frame something that is a normal biological process as disease. Further complicating things… is that there is no agreed-upon point at which a person becomes old” -- Is old age a disease? Is a "yes" answer "ageist"? Or is the view that ageing is acceptable ageist? Questions about aging at Technology Review
What happened in math, physics, computer science, and biology in 2022? -- Quanta Magazine has published its annual round-ups for each of those fields
“After a five-week strike at the University of California, employed graduate students have ratified a pathbreaking new contract that offers most of them 50 or 60 percent wage hikes within the next two-and-a-half years” -- Nelson Lichtenstein (UCSB) on what can be learned from this "stunning accomplishment"
“Despite what many people might think today, the young Romantics didn’t turn against the sciences or reason, but lamented what Coleridge described as the absence of ‘connective powers of the understanding’” -- Andrea Wulf on how "what happened in Jena in the last decade of the 18th century has shaped us"
Contest: “Give us a transcription of how a dialogue between Socrates and one or more contemporary figures would play out. The topic or the question can be whatever you want” -- and yes there are cash prizes for the winners, you sophists
“Our aim should be to allow each animal to live an active life characteristic of its species, up to some reasonable threshold level” -- "All animals count, and all deserve to live as the animals they are," says Martha Nussbaum (Chicago), interviewed by Evan Selinger (RIT)
The Oxfordshire Blue Plaques Board has proposed a plaque to commemorate Philippa Foot and the house where she lived from 1972 to 2010 -- a decision will be made on the proposal in mid-January
New Work In Philosophy: The YouTube Channel -- videos about recent philosophy
Lecture notes—pretty much a textbook—for a course entitled “Belief, Desire, and Rational Choice” -- from Wolfgang Schwarz (Edinburgh)
One philosophy professor’s experience with a student who cheated by having ChatGPT write their essay -- "proving the paper was concocted by ChatGPT was nearly impossible," said Darren Hick (Furman)
A Medievalist notices that an academic extensively plagiarized his blog in her book, and contacts her to object. The ensuing exchange and investigation reveals she created a fake research center (with fake staff) to receive grants for her & her family -- the blogger's account begins at the linked post and continues in the four posts about the "RECEPTIO-Rossi Affair"
“The best pro-technology visions should disproportionately involve awesome technologies and avoid shitty technologies… If you think AGI is highly likely to destroy the world, then it is the pinnacle of shittiness as a technology” -- Katja Grace on the desirability & feasibility of slowing down the development of Artificial General Intelligence
The cubes look like they are moving. But they are not moving -- what the...?
“I have a no-laptop, no phone policy in all my classes, and have yet to hear good reasons to give that up. Maybe you can give me some” -- Harry Brighouse (Wisconsin) explains
“How does the death spiral of one or more social media platforms impact philosophy?” — reflections from Helen de Cruz (SLU)
“ChatGPT has no interest in you whatsoever. It isn’t curious about your goals or motivated to help you meet them. It lacks the good faith to tell you when your goals are misplaced” -- today's AI doesn't care about you, and that limits its utility, argues Evan Selinger (RIT)
“In one way or another, you are moved to imitate and share the things that speak to you, that seem, in one way or another, to be alive with beauty in a way that makes you feel alive” -- Nick Riggle (San Diego) on beauty
“The use of AI in science presents novel opportunities and challenges. One principle challenge has been how to determine when a given AI model is trustworthy” -- Eamon Duede (Chicago) on why scientific trust in AI is different from its trust in experts, instruments, or methods
“It’s not the pace of life I mind. It’s the sudden stop at the end. Mind you, right now I’m so far behind that I’ll never die” -- an "interview" with Thomas Hobbes at 3:16AM
“An Escher-like array of impossible lines and vanishing points” -- on William Hogarth’s image, "Satire on False Perspective" (via The Browser)
“By making nature the arbiter of our way of life, the Cynics ushered in a moral revolution… But critical theorists today… are understandably suspicious of appeals to nature’s moral authority” -- "The Cynics would applaud their criticism, but they’d also warn them not to throw out the baby with the bathwater"
“We may sometimes want our AI assistants, just like humans, to temper their truthfulness: to protect privacy, to avoid insulting others, or to keep someone safe, among innumerable other hard-to-articulate situations” -- on the complexity of aligning artificial intelligences with human values
“Intellectual history is not so much an enriching source of data and instruction as a prerequisite to know what I am talking about” -- "everyone needs something that is, for them, playing the role of grounding one's modal reasoning," says Liam Kofi Bright (LSE)
“Tellingly, no-one announcing the discovery of the new Hegel manuscripts seems excited that they’re going to make us realise something we didn’t know before about art” -- Tom Whyman on whether more Hegel is good news
“A one-size-fits-all approach to sex [comes] at the expense of the rigor and precision at which precision medicine aims” -- philosophers argue for "sex contextualism" in medical research
“Philosophers cannot work only on problems that interest them; we must work on all the problems that we need to resolve” -- Leslie Green (Oxford) with a moving remembrance of Joseph Raz
Three studies showed that “self-reported physical attractiveness” is “positively correlated with meaning in life” -- "existential significance, or the feeling that one’s life matters, was the facet of meaning that primarily explained the link between attractiveness and meaning in life" (via MR)
“While I’m still on the fence about eyes, I don’t think legs, strictly speaking, exist” -- the question of whether there are more eyes or legs in the world "has profound implications for our understanding of certain fundamental matters at the heart of our ongoing debates about scientific realism," says Justin E.H. Smith
Possibly the first university philosophy course taught entirely in the metaverse: “Philosophy of Space Exploration” -- team taught by Serife Tekin (philosophy & medical humanities ) and Chris Packham (physics & astronomy) at the University of Texas at San Antonio
Philosopher races to new heights -- Alex Pruss (Baylor) has beat the Guinness World Record in greatest vertical distance climbed in one hour on an indoor climbing wall (via Mark Murphy)
“We should keep a perfect indifference for all opinions, not wish any of them true or try to make them appear so, but, being indifferent, receive and embrace them according as evidence and that alone gives the attestation of truth” -- a wide-ranging "interview" with John Locke at 3:16AM
The Waste Land, Ulysses, and the Tractatus each “wed experimental literary aesthetics with highly abstract intellectual projects” -- considering these modernists works together on the centenary of their publication
“If a deep and general knowledge does not make a man diffident and humble, no human means I believe can do it” -- some excerpts from Burke's little-known "Scattered Hints Concerning Philosophy and Learning," with a link to the whole piece, recently republished online
Possibly the world’s second-shortest philosophy paper -- by Joshua Habgood-Coote (Leeds), Lani Watson (Oxford), and Dennis Whitcomb (Western Washington)
“Canadian Hegelianism turns out to be its own philosophical tradition” -- Amod Lele (Boston U.) tells us what it is
Philosophically interesting books for young kids -- a DN list from several years ago
“Not to put too fine a point on it, but in general the project of ‘value lock-in’ is team evil” -- Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) on cultural plasticity, technology and values, the importance of institutions, and what we owe the future
“Now there is no nature in the world because we’re in charge everywhere. The only question is are we going to be benign and fostering stewards or not?” -- Martha Nussbaum (Chicago) interviewed in the NYT
On the “various threads of philosophy that could be tested against sexual experience, reimagining pornography’s lessons” -- Kathleen Lubey (St. John's) on why we should "apprehend the full contents of pornography"
How and why to call on your students -- advice from Harry Brighouse (Wisconsin)
Money: a philosophy course — Andrew Bailey (Yale-NUS) explains the value of his “Money” course to Axios (includes link to his syllabus)
“You need skepticism in order to have a healthy kind of trust, whether in the individual mind or even at the social level” — Sandy Goldberg (Northwestern) discusses trust on the public radio program “On Point”
“I like to draw ’em nice—kinda elegant, I hope – then make ’em silly in faux-retro or disco style” — check out these illustrations of philosophers by John Holbo (NAU)
“Their danger lies… in short-circuiting the development of human writers” - - Richard Hughes Gibson (Wheaton) on AI and writing
“Knowledge is older than all sensible things; mind is senior to the world, and the architecture thereof” -- Ralph Cudworth is "interviewed" at 3:16AM
Warning: the material at this link combines puns, philosophy, and AI art -- created by Adam Keiper
“It helps people govern and express the emotions of contempt, trust, amusement and hope. And these emotions answer to the universal flourishing-related needs of criticism, connection, coping and capability” -- Mark Alfano (Macquarie) and Mandi Astola (Delft) on why a sense of humor is a virtue
“Then I thought that Hegel… would have greatly appreciated this object, which has two opposite functions” -- how Magritte came to paint "Hegel's Holiday"
How technology plays a role in changing morality -- Jeroen Hopster (Utrecht) talks with John Danaher (University College, Galway) about "Pistols, Pills, Pork and Ploughs"
“To say that it is the destiny of antelopes to be torn apart by predators is like saying that it is the destiny of women to be raped” -- Martha Nussbaum on human stewardship of the animal world (may require free registration)
Classic classics -- the classics site Antigone asks 40 writers and readers for their favorite ancient Greek and Latin texts
How to mug Jeremy Bentham -- a dialogue by Johan E. Gustafsson (Texas)
Philosophy is the top major at Cambridge -- in terms of average number of total sexual partners per student, according to Varsity
“At that time, the first half of the seventeenth century, it was still a reasonable project for one man to have the idea that he can lay the foundations of all future science” -- Bernard Williams talks with Bryan Magee about Descartes
“Whatever story you tell about yourself, however simple and straightforward, there is endlessly more to your actual life” -- don't treat your life as a project, advises Kieran Setiya (MIT)
“I have exposed myself to the enmity of all metaphysicians, logicians, mathematicians, and even theologians” -- David Hume is interviewed at 3:16AM
Electrons seem to spin, but actually don’t. So what is really going on? -- Scientific American considers the answer given by philosopher Charles Sebens (Caltech)
“It’s the method of using opposing views to seek truth; Hegel thought his own style of it was better than Plato’s” -- Hegel was a category on Jeopardy! last night
“The organoids are coming!” -- and their use is a step forward not just scientifically, but morally, says Katharine Gammon
“Nothing is true”: big, if true -- David Liggins (Manchester) on why we should take alethic nihilism seriously
“Weirder options are conceivable, but exceedingly improbable” -- two physicists have "calculated an equation that counts universes. And they’ve made the striking observation that universes like ours seem to account for the lion’s share of the conceivable cosmic options"
“Twitter makes preexisting elites accessible, but it also creates its own elites… Still, I think our situation with hierarchy is improved by Philosophy Twitter, not because the hierarchy it institutes is more intrinsically fair, but because it diversifies the unfairness of hierarchy” -- Mason Westfall (WUStL) applies the multiple-status-hierarchies approach to unfairness to the world of academic philosophy
“Having a higher sense of purpose appears protective against all-cause mortality,” according to a recent study -- or to put it another way: a purpose of purpose in life is life
“I take these to be the most important human achievements — language, literacy, human rights and the spread of these things — but I think our next level up is for everyone to have the conceptual framework for their own life be open to them for modification and reflection” -- Agnes Callard (Chicago) interviewed about her life and work
“Concepts of philosophical interest vary across cultures, ages, generations, genders, and socio-economics status” -- a video summing up some of the results of the Geography of Philosophy Project, via Edouard Machery (interesting also as an example of philosophy research PR)
“Even if it were possible, to build infallible memory into machines would mean forgoing some of the important benefits of forgetting” -- Ali Boyle (LSE) on why it's important that AI learns to forget
“Did any parent ever say to their toddler, ‘The dog… now I can say that because there is exactly one member of that species that is salient to us at the present moment…’? I doubt even Russell did that. But young children learn to use definite descriptions just the same” -- an interview with Paul Elbourne (Oxford)
“Successful social movements have frequently—and appropriately—drawn on the socially transformative possibilities of imagination to help make space for justice” -- Michele Moody-Adams (Columbia) on the connection between imagination and political life
“In an overheated debate, your fatigue may lead you to misinterpret the situation and believe that your opponent is too dim or too deluded to see the truth… We humbly suggest that sometimes it’s not them; it’s you” -- Nathan Ballantyne (Arizona State) and Jared Celniker and Peter Ditto (UC Irvine) on "persuasion fatigue"
“Leopards break into the temple and drink the sacrificial vessels dry; this is repeated over and over; eventually it can be calculated in advance and becomes part of the ceremony” -- Kafka's aphorisms (via Oran Magal)
“Why lotteries and not voting? The Athenians weren’t fools; they learned through bitter trials that elections are tools of elites” -- Nicholas Coccoma discusses the case for abolishing elections in Boston Review
The first philosophy unboxing video — Pete Mandik (William Paterson) contributes to the popular YouTube genre
“It’s fine if a vindicatory strategy is question-begging, so long as it achieves a kind of explanatory unity through which mysteries are not left to linger. And I think my strategy does just that.” -- Andrew Sepielli (Toronto) is interviewed about his "pragmatist quietism" in meta-ethics at 3:16AM
“A Søren Kierkegaard in skirts” -- Kristin Gjesdal (Temple) on how Ibsen's "women characters play out ideas and positions on stage"
9 philosophers interviewed about “Philosophy Illustrated” -- in a New Books Network podcast
“It’s a commonplace among lecturers that students don’t know how to read anymore” -- so what advice should we give them about how to do it better? Martin Lenz (Groningen) has some suggestions
One might think that much AI art isn’t just bad, but that it’s not art -- but "AI art is art as much as readymades, minimalist art, or photography" argues G. M. “Boomer" Trujillo, Jr. (Texas - El Paso)
The philosopher who helped kill the king -- on the "mess of paradoxes" in Lucy Hutchinson's "war against the disorder of England’s craven nobility"
“Constructionism was never a matter of ‘just saying whatever’, and science can never be simply a matter of reading the dictates of the natural world off of our instruments” -- Justin E. H. Smith with an appreciation of Bruno Latour and of what it means to "have a choice as to how read the world."
“When asked to select Dennett’s answer to a philosophical question from a set of five possible answers, with the other four being [GPT-3] digi-Dan outputs, Dennett experts got only about half right” -- Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) et al on what happens when large language models are trained on philosophical texts
“Unlike most scientific thinkers of the period… Cavendish insisted that humans are part of nature—not above it—and thus that we lack the perspectival leverage to see and understand its operations” -- on Margaret Cavendish's combination of fantastical imagination, thoroughgoing materialism, and desire for immortality
“As we bridge the gulf between now and then to sympathize with ourselves at other times, we sympathize, too, with the suffering of others” -- Kieran Setiya (MIT) on his chronic pain and its philosophical lessons
A philosopher is invited to take part in a Netflix television show with a magician, the premise of which is that free will is an illusion -- the magician thinks he has cornered the philosopher, but Christopher Kaczor (Loyola Marymount) is the one with a card up his sleeve
“Utilitarian longtermism is objectionable. Longtermism sans consequentialism is another matter” -- Elliott R. Crozat (Purdue Global) considers deontological longtermism
“Most of Earth thus mobilized toward figuring out what is widely thought to be the easiest problem of the three: the line between Anna and not Anna” -- a story by Patrick House about how to delineate the boundaries of consciousness
“Aesthetic value makes the world worthwhile, and… a good life is lived in pursuit and reflection of that aesthetic value” but “evil forces a significant qualification to aestheticism” -- Tom Cochrane (Flinders) defends aestheticism but lets some moralizing in
“Your love of pleasure, Callicles / Is like a jar that always leaks / Like a jar that leaks and then gets filled again. / Leaking, filling, running wild / Like a tyrant, like a child / Ceaseless wanting is, in fact, a kind of pain” -- a song by Luisa Cichowski about the dispute in Plato's Gorgias between Socrates & Callicles over the place of pleasure in the good life
“The last unit we cover is on ‘The Ethics of Horror,’ and we discuss whether there is something morally dubious about watching and enjoying horror” -- Kenneth L. Brewer (UT Dallas) describes his course on the philosophy of horror films
Feel like you’re not good enough to be an academic? Turns out it’s because your parents weren’t good enough at encouraging you -- a new study finds that "the less encouragement a doctoral student received from their parents in childhood and adolescence, the more likely they were to suffer impostor feelings"
“It might sound strange, or even offensive, to suggest that writing about threats to free speech could make people afraid of speaking. The thing is, we know this is how behavior works in other domains” -- Eve Fairbanks on the gap between talk of cancel culture and its reality
“Our democracies are already gamified. Our goal should be to do it better” -- we can go "beyond gamification’s traditionally thoughtless application of points and badges" and use "game design principles put the oft-dashed ideals of digital democracy into practice," argues Adrian Hon
“Agency appears to be an occasional, remarkable property of matter, and one we should feel comfortable invoking when offering causal explanations of what we’re observing” -- an attempt to provide a scientifically respectable explanation of agency that doesn't explain it away, from Philip Ball
“The value of the humanities is, upon exposure to real humanistic practice, self-evident… a society that acts as if this were not true, that threatens artists and philosophers and poets with oblivion or obscurity if they cannot justify their existence, is a profoundly sick culture” -- John Michael Colón on the confusions of the "canon wars"
“Decades of research have revealed a deeper truth [about protons], one that’s too bizarre to fully capture with words or images” -- but it doesn't stop this writer and graphics editor from trying. One example of the weirdness: "the proton contains traces of particles... that are heavier than the proton itself"
Now Open Access: 7 articles by Kripke and 12 articles and book chapters by others about Kripke’s work -- "The Legacy of Saul Kripke" is a memorial collection put together by Wiley (via Eric Piper)
“Ask your kids questions and question their answers. Really get them thinking about issues. Don’t be afraid of these conversations with your kids. You don’t know all the answers. But you don’t have to know the answers” -- Scott Hershovitz (Michigan) interviewed about kids and philosophy
“Instead of supposing that physics must be queen of all we survey, I recommend we construct our image of what an ultimate science might be like on the basis of what current science is like when it is most successful. Physics does not act as queen in these cases” -- "Rather," says Nancy Cartwright (Durham), "she does her bit as part of a motley assembly of scientific... and engineering disciplines"
“The most important teacher of philosophy in America, if not the world, for a third of a century” -- a documentary about Bob Gurland, a longtime, highly-regarded teacher of philosophy at NYU (link is to the film's trailer)
Travel as a philosophical activity -- Emily Thomas (Durham) interviewed on travel, philosophy, women and other subjects
“People don’t like being tricked, especially when the trickery results in giving another person affections they don’t deserve” -- Jesse Hamilton (U. Penn) on "stolen valor"
“I think a lot of wisdom in life (and in philosophy) is about being able to see why things are confusing—once you can see that the confusion itself is a lot easier to live with even if you still don’t have the answer” -- an interview with philosopher and advice-columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith (Princeton)
“Philosophers increasingly face difficult choices in balancing sustainability with other considerations in teaching and research, event organizing, department governance, and institutional service” -- an upcoming APA webinar on sustainable practices in philosophy
“There is a persistent conventional wisdom that… Adam Smith holds a labor theory of value” -- but, despite there being a "kernel of truth" in this, it's not quite right, explains Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam)
“The clarity championed in analytic philosophy is indebted to the clarity indigenous to science; but that there is another sort of clarity: one found in poetry but occasionally also found in philosophy, to that philosophy’s benefit” -- James C. McGuiggan on varieties of clarity
“The new study shows for the first time that the burgeoning brain of a newborn rat will accept human neurons and allow them to mature, while also integrating them into local circuits capable of driving the rat’s behavior” -- the science and ethics of transplanting human brain organoids into animals
“Everything about grad school was a surprise to me… it was the first time in my life that I felt truly out of my league, and I worked hard until I felt I could be the best at it” -- Justin Caouette (Bridgewater State) is interviewed about his life, education, and work
Animal consciousness -- a discussion with Jonathan Birch (LSE), Rachael Brown (ANU), Dan Burston (Tulane), and Liz Irvine (Cardiff)
“Relaxation, then, will bring out the worst in foolish people, but in the wise it will bring out the best” -- Plato and Philo on whether the wise person will get drunk
“Why don’t we have the right to end our lives not just when we want to but to also do so in style?” -- Daniel Callcut on designer deaths
“If ugly people are told repeatedly that they are not ugly or that their woes are not due to them being ugly, even though they are, then this social taboo of being ugly and telling someone they might be ugly, are what puts those people at a hermeneutic disadvantage of interpreting the social world and their place in it” -- Thomas J. Spiegel (Potsdam) on the epistemic injustice of lookism
There was a competition for criticisms of effective altruism, with $120,000 in prizes -- here are the winning entries (via MR)
Map apps “have a colossal influence on our experience of the surrounding world” but “rarely come under public scrutiny” -- that's a mistake, argues Benjamin Santos Genta (UC Irvine)
“I have tried to uncover and unite the truth buried and scattered under the opinions of all the different philosophical sects, and I believe I have added something of my own which takes a few steps forward” -- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz is "interviewed" at 3:16AM
New: “a forum where scholars and the general public interested in biology, cognitive science, ecology and philosophy of science can engage in a constructive interdisciplinary dialogue” -- check out "Dialectical Systems"
Book sales figures are tracked by BookScan, a private, exclusive service that bans academics from using its data -- "The toxic combination of this data’s power in the industry and its secretive inaccessibility to those beyond the industry reveals a broader problem. If we want to understand the contemporary literary world, we need better book data. And we need this data to be free, open, and interoperable"
25 interviews with philosophers and more on the way -- The Dialexicon Podcast is available on Spotify, Apple, and elsewhere, and in video form on YouTube
“Sensations are ideas. They are the way our brains represent what’s happening at our sense organs and how we feel about it” -- what can a psychologist's attempt to "work out how a biological machine like the brain could carry out this feat of representation" tell us about human and animal consciousness?
“It’s amazing how much… compassion and respect for other people, concern for others, is a kind of path out of one’s own sense of loneliness” -- Kieran Setiya (MIT) is interviewed about his new book, "Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way" on NPR
“There are more degrees of freedom in the universe now than in the early universe” -- physicists are working on a problem with "unitarity," an assumption at the heart of quantum mechanics that says that "something always happens"
How different would philosophy of action and practical reasoning be if it were “built from the perspective of working-class agents”? -- Deborah Nelson (UCR) on what "perspectives of economically disadvantaged agents could add to the dialectic"
“Sexual violence is ubiquitous, and for many women it feels like the defining condition and the deepest reality of their lives. But that feeling, like all appeals to personal experience, can obscure as much as it reveals” -- Amia Srinivasan (Oxford) on Andrea Dworkin
“Rorty insisted that philosophy is no longer relevant to politics… That is fortunate, because his philosophical position… was exceptionally implausible” -- Thomas Nagel (NYU) on Richard Rorty and America
Does language shape the content of epistemology? -- Edouard Machery (Pittsburgh) talks about how variations in epistemic expressions across cultures are philosophically significant
The laws of nature, time, quantum mechanics, strong determinism, vagueness, and more -- an interview with Eddy Keming Chen (UCSD) at 3:16AM
“To understand the world more objectively or impartially, we must adopt more perspectives on it. And so it turns out that empathy makes us less, not more, biased” -- Heidi L. Maibom (U. of the Basque Country, U. of Cincinnati) kicks off a symposium at Brains on her new book, "The Space Between: How Empathy Really Works"
An upcoming video game is about Arthur Schopenhauer as a student “seeking prohibited knowledge” -- developed by Toby Svoboda, "The Life of Arthur" will be released next week
“Analytic philosophy, even at its most technical, is one way of tackling those fundamental tasks [of securing grounding and direction in life], and as such serves the same emotional needs that non-philosophers reveal to us during our classes, at parties and in hair salons, planes and Ubers” -- Helena de Bres (Wellesley) wraps up her series on analytic philosophy and the meaning of life
“We laugh at ‘something mechanical encrusted on the living’” -- Emily Herring (Ghent) on Bergson's philosophy of laughter
“There seems to be nothing that in principle cannot be taught in a college classroom provided its relevance to the course” -- Carlo DaVia (Fordham) has produced a guide to help professors untangle and address different potential moral problems related to teaching and classroom speech
“The puzzle of addiction: why do people keep using drugs, given that costs outweigh benefits?… Costs and benefits can only be weighed relative to a set of values [so] whose values determine when drug use becomes addiction?” -- Hanna Pickard (JHU) is interviewed about how to understand addiction
“Just 20% of PhD-granting institutions in the United States supplied 80% of tenure-track faculty members to institutions across the country between 2011 and 2020,” according to a new study -- and "depending on the field, only 5–23% of faculty members worked at an institution more prestigious than the one at which they earned their PhD"
“I am an American Philosopher” is a series of interviews (15, so far) with philosophers published by the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy -- here's one with Eric Mullis (Queens University of Charlotte), who brings together dance and philosophy
“I’ve always thought I was better at helping other people think through their ideas than I was at generating new or ground-breaking things of my own. I used to be ashamed of that, but now that I’ve got students of my own, it’s one of my favourite skills to use” -- Audrey Yap (Victoria) is interviewed at What Is It Like To Be A Philosopher?
“Too often, well-intentioned calls to ‘diversify the profession’ of academia seem to be motivated by brute desires for demographic representation…. That intelligence comes in many forms suggests a better rationale” -- Devin Sanchez Curry (West Virginia) on appreciating "Grandma's metaphysics"
Princeton has so big an endowment that it could, from now on, let in every student for free and still have at least $1.9 billion left over each year -- So why don't they? The author raises this question, but doesn't really try to answer it, and so doesn't seem to realize what's to be learned from it (via The Browser)
“The Mystery of Consciousness,” a live public philosophy discussion, took place this past summer in Liverpool -- featuring Philip Goff, Laura Gow, Anil Seth, Jack Symes, Rowan Williams, and a string quartet
“Gareth paced up and down and told me he was worrying about me a lot. I had to realise, he said, that I was extremely stupid and would need to work very hard to get any kind of degree. I wasn’t in the least offended” -- Lincoln Allison (Warwick) remembers Gareth Evans, who "made intellectual activity exhilarating"
When (and why) are some things best left to the imagination? -- Jennifer Church (Vassar) considers the question
“Young Plato,” a documentary about a headteacher in Belfast who brings philosophy into the teaching at his elementary school, will be screened in the United States -- it's "a very engaging film" according to The Guardian
“There has not been time to come up with the nuances on how [AI art generators] should be used, and large numbers of very different stakeholders have suddenly shown up at the artists’ door, kicking it in” -- Anders Sandberg (Oxford) on some of the issues AI art raises in moral, social, and political philosophy
“When a philosopher has misgivings about the value of philosophy, they’re not just asking ‘why,’ but ‘why why?,’ which is fancier” -- Helena de Bres (Wellesley) recovers her gratitude for philosophy
The Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective (SERRC) launches a monthly podcast called “Knowledge for Breakfast” -- hosted by Fabien Medvecky (Otago) & Michiel van Oudheusden (KU Leuven), the first episode is on "Epistemic Shame and Imposter Syndrome"
You feel attraction to someone? Which of the 12,228 possible versions of this feeling? -- Maria Heim (Amherst) on how India’s "sophisticated traditions of philosophical reflection" explore "the nuances of felt experience with fine-grained particularity"
On “private and public sector jobs in a burgeoning ontological sector, involving the commercial and industrial applications of ontology across diverse industries” -- an interview with Barry Smith (Buffalo)
Philosophers on the tools of neuroscientific experimentation -- a discussion with contributions from Ann-Sophie Barwich, John Bickle, Dan Burnston, Carl Craver, and Valerie Hardcastle
“What is the main impediment to offline creativity? In short, not allowing one’s mind to be offline—rarely choosing, or having the chance, to be alone with one’s thoughts, and to let one’s mind wander” -- Peter Carruthers (Maryland) on a contemporary threat to creativity
“Schelling’s philosophy of oneness might provide a foundation on which to anchor the fight for our climate and our survival” -- historian Andrea Wulf thinks that Friedrich Schelling is just what the environmental movement needs (NYT)
Philosophy professor Robert Pinto (Windsor), who died in 2019, was “one of tens of thousands of residents in Canadian long-term care homes without a psychosis diagnosis that have been prescribed antipsychotics” -- some commentary from Shelley Tremain, who links to a CBC investigative report
“We have to get used to the idea that there may be agents around who are just as intelligent and capable and involved and… committed or reliable as humans and that we need to think about how they matter” -- Peter Railton (Michigan) is interviewed by Katrien Devolder (Oxford) about how we should understand and interact with AI
How “dialogically dense” are different works of philosophy? -- a machine learning algorithm can determine the extent to which an author mentions other persons, and Alexander Klein (McMaster) used it to compare the works of James and Dewey
“If we take Tolkien at his word and read LTR as a ‘true mythology’ of our own earth, then we will find that the text metamorphoses chillingly from a quaint otherworldly fantasy into a literal transcription of one of the most malignant ideologies of the past millennium: the racist ‘Aryan Myth'” -- a previously unpublished piece by the late Charles Mills (now unpaywalled)
“We must be mindful of the way scientific and political discourses are intertwined—and of the limitations of what science communication and popularization by itself can achieve” -- evidence suggests that anti-science attitudes among the public aren't owed to a lack of knowledge, but a lack of trust, write Catarina Dutilh Novaes (VU Amsterdam) and Silvia Ivani (Univ. College Dublin)
“If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.” But what about a dolphin? -- a professor of cognitive psychology, a neuroscientist, and a neurobiologist discuss dolphin language
Video interviews with philosophers, including Elizabeth Anderson, Elizabeth Barnes, David Boonin, and a dozen others --conducted by Simon Cushing (Univ. of Michigan - Flint)
Philosophy of vigilantism, moral ecologies, why we should annihilate our enemies, and more -- in the latest issue of the open-access Washington University Review of Philosophy, focused on war and violence
“The demand that philosophy be personally helpful… sounds wrongheaded to someone with the training of a mainstream contemporary philosopher” -- Helena de Bres (Wellesley) begins a series of essays on academic philosophy's relevance to life
How to read philosophy -- a guide you might consider sharing with students and others new to philosophy, by Charlie Huenemann (Utah State)
“We’ve got to resist this idea that the problem can be identified as some set of students or some particular ideology” -- Teresa Bejan (Oxford), Agnes Bolinska (South Carolina), Janice Chik (Ave Maria), Francisco Gallegos (Wake Forest) and others are interviewed about a program on "teaching civil discourse"
“I’m skeptical… that the dying have good advice for the living. We seem to have, at best, pretty empty advice that you’ve seen elsewhere already. At worst, it’s actively bad advice for anyone who isn’t dying soon” -- Jesse S. Summers (Duke) on what he has learned from having cancer
Meta-analysis finds that trigger warnings, contra both their advocates and detractors, have almost no effect -- results indicate they have "no effect on affective responses to negative material nor on educational outcomes" and "no effect on engagement with material, or... increase engagement with negative material under specific circumstances"
Crows are not black -- reflections from Hannah Kim (Macalester) on a 200-year old passage from Park Jiwon that, focusing on what happens to be philosophers' go-to example for induction, touches on human inattention, stereotyping, color perception, language, and learnedness
“Our educational and research practices are shaped by rules, norms, and goals that are extrinsic to philosophy (and education). This strikes me as rather important to our self-understanding” -- Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) on the philosophically neglected subject of "bureaucratic life" and recent writings by Liam K. Bright (LSE) and C. Thi Nguyen (Utah)
“Increasingly, it seems that the key to understanding the origin and fate of the universe may be a careful accounting of these proliferating varieties of absence” -- types of nothing and their role in physics
Mid-century Marx -- Dan Little (UM-Dearborn) on fluctuations in the attention philosophers paid to Marx from the 1930s to the 1970s
“Ethics… needs to maintain its contacts with the arts and humanities” as they are “sources of moral understanding, inspirations for moral action, and teachers of the sentiments that moral life requires” -- Kwame Anthony Appiah (NYU) on how "one part of the contemporary philosophical landscape – the part that has to do with ethics and politics – fits into, and does not fit into, the humanities"
“Aristotle’s picture of the human good has high standards, but it also takes pains to remain realistic” -- Matthew Walker (Yale-NUS) is interviewed about his work on Aristotle
Philosophy to be taught in primary and secondary schools in Jordan -- "the Curriculum Department at the Ministry of Education that philosophy will be taught to equip students to develop critical thinking"
“Despite Armstrong and Stove’s efforts, Sydney Philosophy continued to radicalise” -- the political differences that split University of Sydney Philosophy into two departments for over 25 years, and how David Armstrong became known as "The Beast"
“Six Commandments for Getting the Most Out of Graduate School” -- a guide by Doug Portmore (ASU), published a couple of years ago at DN
“We cannot allow the novelty of virtual worlds to blind us to the risks of relocating our social and economic activity into a realm that is privately owned and controlled by unaccountable corporations” -- Max Hayward (Sheffield / Harvard) on the Metaverse
“I have grown much more aware of the multiplicity of ways that the organization of professional activities can be simultaneously zones of work, possible intellectual exchange, and joy, while also be structures of exclusion” -- Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) is interviewed about his career, blogging, and living and working with COVID
“These results suggest an inherent difficulty in accurately appreciating how engaging just thinking can be, and could explain why people prefer keeping themselves busy, rather than taking a moment for reflection and imagination in our daily life” -- a new study finds that people underestimate how much they enjoy just thinking
“When I consider my own reasons for doing philosophy, and also the set of philosophers that I find attractive and whose thoughts I wish to incorporate into my own, there seems to me a sort of dualism that I have not yet integrated” -- Liam Kofi Bright (LSE) on the "basically pleasant bureaucrat" and the "sexy murder poet"
“I tried giving some of these [large language model, or LLM] systems standard topics that one might assign in an introductory ethics course and the results were similar to the kind of work that I would expect from first-year college students” -- an important essay from John Symons (Kansas) on the value of what we learn when we learn to write, and how the imminent widespread use of LLMs by students endangers this
Interviews with philosophers -- a new YouTube series from Mark Alfano (Macquarie)
“‘Trans’ had somehow come to the shores of the professional world of mainstream philosophy, and to call the encounter rocky would have been an understatement” -- from "How I Became a Trans Philosopher" by Talia Mae Bettcher (Cal State LA)
Can you distinguish Daniel Dennett from a computer? -- take the quiz
“The campaign had a positive effect on the overall outcome” -- an update on the status of philosophy at SUNY Potsdam
The moral dimensions of academic philosophy -- a conversation between me and John Danaher (NUI Galway) on his podcast, "The Ethics of Academia"
A study “seeks to identify how non-academics perceive philosophy and how they engage in it” -- and you can help by completing a brief survey
“Against proposals for taking antidemocratic ‘shortcuts’ I argue that the commitment to democracy is based on the realization that there are no shortcuts to better political outcomes” -- Cristina Lafont (Northwestern) interviewed at 3:16AM
Drawing, thinking, princesses, nostalgia, history, archaelogy, and more -- in the new issue of The Raven: A Magazine of Philosophy
New reading group blueprints on various topics, including: ethics of commemoration, social dynamics of mathematics, class & aesthetics, Nahuan and Mayan philosophy, and more -- from the folks at the Diversity Reading List
“My plan, if I am being canceled, is not to fight it” -- " If I can quickly put an end to the accusations with some clarifying explanation, I will: the public deserves to hear the truth. But my efforts to rehabilitate myself will cease before I get to the point of reorganizing my public persona around the battle to do so," says Agnes Callard (Chicago)
“You see the students of the Chinese philosophers pressing their teachers for the correct, consistent account of those things just as assuredly as one would expect of students in a philosophy seminar in the U.S. or U.K. So I tend not to think that there is a profound difference here” -- Justin Tiwald (San Francisco State/Hong Kong Univ) is interviewed about his work on Chinese philosophers
“The exclusion of leading Continental figures from the top analytic journals shows that the Continental/analytic divide remains sociologically important” -- data and analysis from Eric Schwitzgebel (Riverside)
An argument map of Alito’s leaked opinion draft in the Dobbs case -- from Nate Otey (Harvard/ThinkerAnalytix)
Preparing philosophy grad students to teach -- how one philosophy program does it
“If we want to get at ‘metaphysical structure’ we need to say something about what kind of thing that could be and how it relates to the logic of truths, and this has to go beyond just appealing to naturalism” -- Paul Livingston (New Mexico) interviewed at 3:16AM
Psychedelic drugs, epistemology, naturalism, and the self -- a special issue of Philosophy and the Mind Sciences includes several philosophers commenting on Philosophy of Psychedelics by Chris Letheby (Western Australia)
“The current generation of Anglo-American philosophers never had enough invested in the aesthetic to fully grasp what is at risk of being lost when the aesthetic is subordinated to the political” -- Justin E. H. Smith on politics, culture, art, and philosophy
“There is simply nothing like this remarkable book for making us think carefully about what makes a story work well” -- Philip Freeman (Pepperdine) on the wisdom in Aristotle's Poetics
“To teach this active reading attitude of not believing everything you read, I borrow the pedagogical strategy of deliberately inserting errors which the student must detect” -- Gwern Branwen on the "fake journal club" (via The Browser)
“I think it’s a great argument that I’m not convinced of…” -- Kate Greasley (Oxford) discusses the complicated ethics of abortion on the Ezra Klein Show
“Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t think they should have a lever that allows any old idiot to divert the whole group of us to Westport on a whim” -- the trolley is reviewed
New: IPM Monthly – Medieval Philosophy Today -- a site for news, opportunities, publication notices, profiles of philosophers, etc., related to medieval philosophy
“What I loved about the history of jazz—namely, that subtle changes to chord sequences and key changes could reframe the entire realm of possibilities for musicians in the future—was also a feature of the history of philosophy” -- philosopher Andrea Pitts (UNC Charlotte) is interviewed about their life and work in philosophy, with a particular focus on social identities
What is the value of studying moral dilemmas? -- an exchange between Paul Conway (Portsmouth) and Guy Kahane (Oxford)
“A great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by the belief in the virtuousness of work” -- Bertrand Russell on the value of leisure and its "wise use," in a 1932 issue of Harper's (via The Browser)
“If spectacular forms of white supremacy were to end tomorrow, whiteness as a structure of privilege, power and hegemony would continue” -- George Yancy (Emory) on how "white-perpetrated, anti-Black murder is all too acceptable, consistent and inoffensive to the very fabric of this nation"
“Passing is not without costs: it takes a significant emotional and psychological toll, both on individuals who pass and on the friends and family they may leave behind” -- Meena Krishnamurthy (Queen's) on the "burdened virtue" of racial passing
A missing color -- cognitive scientist and artist Allen Tager tries to figure out what explains why violet was largely missing for much of human history
Philosophy at the movies -- some highlights from the film & philosophy podcast of Justin Khoo (MIT), "Cows in the Field"
“The objection to violence has its limit at the point when fundamental freedoms are at stake” -- understanding Habermas' view on Germany's role in helping Ukraine (via Darrel Moellendorf)
“Raz’s legacy is a body of work united by dense and detailed tissues of understanding, spun between jurisprudence, political philosophy, ethics, and practical reasoning” -- Jeremy Waldron (NYU) on the significance of Joseph Raz's work
If we conceive of time as a kind of veil of ignorance, perhaps the governance of space is a good subject for a Rawlsian approach—but not for long -- more cynical headline: "Rawls's Theory Finally Finds Suitable Application in Lifeless Void, according to Social Scientists"
More on the metaphysics of farts, and the mysterious author of the article smelt round the world -- by Elizabeth Picciuto in Slate
“How much should we dress up for an event when the topic of the talk was body modification?” -- a journalist reports on an event with philosopher Clare Chambers (Cambridge) about bodies, beauty, and shame
“Faddish calls to… ‘center the most marginalized,’ which abound in the academic and leftist activist circles… ‘never sat well with me'” -- a profile of Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (Georgetown) in New York Magazine
“If any woman could realize Sartre’s picture of self-defining ‘man,’ Iris might have fancied her chances” -- When Iris Murdoch met Jean-Paul Sartre
“For better or worse, most contemporary philosophers must engage either directly or indirectly with racist philosophers” -- Brandon Hogan (Howard) on how to do it better
How to participate in a philosophical discussion -- a guide for students by Olivia Bailey (Berkeley)
The television show that introduced existentialism to to Americans -- the 10-episode series, "Self-Encounter," aired in 1961 and was hosted by Hazel Barnes
“All of this applying takes an incalculable toll… Maybe we need to imagine whole new worlds where people-picking happens very differently” -- Adam Mastroianni (Columbia) on the costs of, and alternatives to, all the applying for everything we all do (via The Browser)
Some people think that humans matter more than non-human animals because of what we can do, or what we’re like -- but, argues Jeff Sebo (NYU) this "human exceptionalism has it backwards: if anything, we increasingly have capacities-based and relationship-based grounds for prioritising nonhuman animals"
“For any hypothetical future apply the ‘Shakespeare Test,’ which asks: Are there still aspects of Shakespeare’s work reflected in the future civilization?… For do any of us want to live in a world where Shakespeare is obsolete?” -- Erik Hoel on why it's important that the future be human
“It really is unfair to a great number of people, past, present, and future, that current student debt holders would benefit from loan forgiveness while others cannot” -- but that by itself doesn't settle the matter, says Barry Lam (Vassar), because "almost every policy is unfair"
“There is a kind of covert moralism that people build into the causal structure of the universe that justifies overly focusing on being the right kind of person, objecting to the right kinds of things, centering the right sorts of people. This amounts to a refusal to look forward” -- Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (Georgetown) is interviewed about his two recent books
“What you need is to have the classroom as a space where we’re not talking left wing and right wing but offering the learning that students need to be able to come to their own positions and judgments” -- Wendy Brown (Princeton) interviewed about politicization, academic freedom, free speech, and today's students
“I contrast the essential-bum-origin view with a phenomenological view, and I argue in favour of the latter” -- Bill Capra on the metaphysics of farts
Three key tips for philosophy students seeking to work outside of academia -- from Ryan Stelzer, who finished an MA in philosophy, worked in the White House, and now has his own consulting firm
The “famous” Michael Huemer – Richard Yetter-Chappell debate about utilitarianism -- hosted by Matthew Adelstein (video)
“When looking to identify the boundaries of species, the branches on the tree of life, or even what counts as life itself, we should be careful about assumptions that come from our very human perspective of biology” -- Gunnar O. Babcock (Duke) on the fascinating questions we face once we appreciate that "life as we know it is overwhelmingly, by many orders of magnitude, asexual"
What if we “reject the orthodox view that the quantum universe must be described by a wave function”? -- we will have a better interpretation of quantum mechanics, argues Eddy Keming Chen (UCSD)
“What desires are politically important?” -- that was the question Bertrand Russell asked in his Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech in 1950
“Things may not be as prim and proper as they appeared to Strawson in his Oxford haven” -- a philosopher's application of natural language processing to social media in the wake of George Floyd's murder suggests a need to expand our conception of reactive attitudes
“Philosophy” was a category on Jeopardy Thursday night -- would you have gotten all of the questions? (link fixed--again)
“A relationship that ends is no more a failure or without value than a life that ends. A good breakup is like a good death” -- "It exemplifies respect, dignity, careful pain management..." says Quill Kukla (Georgetown)
“What sort of philosophy one chooses depends on what sort of man one is; for a philosophical system is not a dead piece of furniture that we can reject or accept as we wish; it is rather a thing animated by the soul of the person who holds it” -- Richard Marshall "interviews" Johann Gottlieb Fichte
“Hopeful pessimism may not be a contradiction, but a manifestation of the wild power that is harnessed only when life’s darkest forces are gathered into the strange alchemy of hope” -- Mara van der Lugt (St. Andrews) on how "hopeful pessimism breaks through the rusted dichotomy of optimism vs pessimism"
“Reminding ourselves that all of that work is on our side, the human side, is of critical importance because it allows us a clearer view of the present, in which we can more accurately track the harm that people are doing with technology” -- Emily Bender (U. Washington) on the errors and risks of being "too impressed" with language models like GPT-3 (via Brian Edwards)
What are the big open scientific and philosophical questions about AI sentience? -- Robert Long (NYU) lays them out
“Kids also don’t worry that they’ll make mistakes or seem silly as they puzzle things out. They haven’t yet learned that serious people don’t spend time on some questions like ‘Am I dreaming my entire life?'” -- Scott Hershovitz (Michigan) on how children are philosophical
Is panpsychism a “new science of consciousness” or “the last gasp of a prescientific view of what consciousness is”? -- Keith Frankish (Sheffield/Open) in The New Humanist
“Given his pervasive anti-moralism, any contemporary reader of Nietzsche is forced to ask: can Nietzsche have a political philosophy?” -- Dan Little (UM-Dearborn) looks at recent attempts to determine Nietzsche's political philosophy
“I can’t even track how many layers of meta this joke is, but one that just came to me is the idea that maybe the joke doesn’t actually make sense, but we need it to make sense, because we need the eggs” -- a novelist, a comedian, a rabbi, an editor, and a religious studies scholar discuss the famous last joke in Annie Hall
What are real-world moral dilemmas about? -- a research team analyzed 100,000 "Am I The Asshole?" posts to find out
“Taking the simulation hypothesis seriously means accepting that the creator might be a sadistic adolescent gamer about to unleash Godzilla” -- Some people think learning that we're simulated beings in a simulated world should make no difference to us; Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) disagrees
Filmmaker Errol Morris claimed that Thomas Kuhn threw an ashtray at him and kicked him out of the graduate program at Princeton -- but, argues K. Brad Wray (Aarhus), there are reasons to be doubtful of these claims
“Reserving the word ‘rational’ for something like coherence seems to me to be a waste of a perfectly good word” -- Juan Comesaña (Arizona, soon Rutgers) is interviewed at 3:16AM
Music by philosophers, for philosophers, about philosophy: the 21st Century Monads have a new album coming out -- you can pre-order it by making a donation to a charity of your choosing, as Joshua Spencer (Wisconsin-Milwaukee) and a puppet explain
Researchers test GPT-3’s “capacity to produce short, coherent essays on philosophical themes” -- "any suggestions that GPT-3 may mark the dawn of a new era of synthetic philosophy, or the twilight of the traditional one, are simply not justified."
A discussion of “Epistemic Explanations” -- Ernest Sosa (Rutgers) talks about his recent book with several commentators in the latest episode of "Philosopher Meets Critics"
“Down one path is understanding the humanities foremost as knowledge work… Down the other path is understanding the humanities as a kind of pure activism committed to rejecting the values that govern institutional and civic credibility” -- Aaron Hanlon (Colby) on the "credibility crisis" facing the humanities
“We all must take a more active role as consumers in how these technologies are developed” -- novelist-professor Sam Lipsyte (Columbia) writes amusingly about his trip to Vegas to hear a philosopher & a sex-technologist talk about sex robots, and maybe try out the tech himself
Socrates said that studying philosophy was preparation for dying -- at one (and only one) university in North America, undergraduates can cut out the middleman and just major in death
“Many Russians are not to blame for the war or the atrocities. Living under a draconian authoritarian regime, they are manipulated by a powerful propaganda machine and they face harsh punishment if they protest” -- still, sanctions that may harm them are justified, argue Avia Pasternak (UCL) & Zofia Stemplowska (Oxford)
“To create a truly secure (and permanent) encryption method, we need a computational problem that’s hard enough to create a provably insurmountable barrier for adversaries.” How can we tell if such a problem exists? -- the epistemology of the possibility of cryptography
New: “In the CAVE: An Ethics Podcast”. It “explores some of the big ethical and philosophical issues facing contemporary societies” -- from the Macquarie University Research Centre for Agency, Values and Ethics (CAVE), it's on Spotify and other podcast platforms
“Once you read these critiques, it becomes painfully obvious that the Dunning-Kruger effect is a statistical artifact. But to date, very few people know this fact” -- a step by step explanation of the problem with one of psychology's most famous findings
“It’s hard not to feel that the machine is thinking in some meaningful way” -- NYT article on what large language models are doing, and what they're doing when they're doing it
“The story of Mary Hesse shows how quickly even well-known women from our recent past can vanish from the collective memory of their peers” -- Ann-Sophie Barwich (Indiana) on the mechanisms of "collective forgetting" that have erased women from the history of philosophy of science
The “cultural wilderness” of bad movies -- 7 philosophers comment on a book by Matt Strohl (Montana) on movies that "fall outside the scope of culturally constructed notions of artistic seriousness"
“How is it not a ‘fallacy’ to feel guilty about something for which you are not blameworthy?” -- John Martin Fischer (UCR) takes up this question and related ones about individual moral responsibility in regard to Russia's attack on Ukraine, in an interview
Do non-human animals have moral experiences? -- James Hutton (Edinburgh) on the philosophy and science relevant to that question
AI-created portraits of philosophers in the style of Maurice Sendak -- some fun with a new AI art generator
“Relying upon adjunct labor is wrong, because it is cruel” -- Alexandra Bradner explains the "useless, unnecessary, and preoccupying disorder it brings to a person’s mind, family, and community"
“The experience of the war shows us again and again that you cherish life, you value life, in the point of when it’s very close to death. At that point, you really understand what life means” -- Ukrainian philosopher and journalist Volodymyr Yermolenko is interviewed by Ezra Klein (NYT)
“When authors gave a funnier title to a work they considered significant, they reaped the benefits of significantly higher citations” -- details on a new study titled "If this title is funny, will you cite me?"
A philosopher is collaborating with The Guardian to offer responses to children’s often strange, imaginative, and philosophical questions -- Scott Hershovitz (Michigan) also recently authored the book "Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Adventures in Philosophy with Kids"
The “categorical ambiguity” of the uncanny elicits a “metaphysical threat response” -- David Livingstone Smith (New England) on the dehumanization of the disabled
“While genetic knowledge can provide a rich source of meaning in answering the question ‘Who am I?’, I don’t think it is either the only source or a necessary source” -- Daniel Groll (Carleton) is interviewed on the moral and political aspects of genetic lineage in a magazine for people who’ve been separated from biological family
Gilbert Harman’s major contributions to philosophy -- a collection of brief essays by several philosophers on the work of Professor Harman, who died last November
Mary Wollstonecraft returns to Newington Green -- in the form of a stenciled spray-painted portrait near where she founded a girls’ school in 1784
“Good—that is to say, ethical—sex is not simply about getting consent so that we can do what we want” -- Christine Emba on the need for shared sexual norms beyond consent
What can arguments for extended cognition tell us about aesthetic experience and understanding? -- Miranda Anderson (Edinburgh/Stirling) takes Otto inside the museum
“The mechanisms, meanings, and dynamics of a social population can be investigated along countless different dimensions, and there are no fixed and final ‘laws of social interaction’ that ultimately allow the explanation of the social ensemble” -- Dan Little (UM-Dearborn) on the "open texture" of the social world
“When an entire discipline gets gamified, we are in for trouble… we discourage ourselves from being truly playful and creative” -- Helen De Cruz (SLU) on the "gamification" of philosophy
“Chance rules all” -- Brian Skyrms (UCI) is interviewed by Richard Marshall at 3:16AM
“By combining model scale with chain-of-thought prompting, PaLM [Google’s Pathways Language Model] shows breakthrough capabilities on reasoning tasks that require multi-step arithmetic or common-sense reasoning” -- be sure to check out the full paper (which they link to), especially p. 38 for examples of logical inference and joke explaining
Commentary from several philosophers on various aspects of the Russian attack on Ukraine -- including Janina Dill, Helen Frowe, Jeff McMahan, Massimo Renzo, Zofia Stemplowska, and Elad Uzan
“It turned out she was just so deeply lost in her own research and writing that she’d forgotten about the meeting entirely. Which delighted me. I mean, that’s exactly what you want out of your philosophical advisers” -- TV producer Michael Schur on what he learned from Pamela Hieronymi (UCLA) about moral philosophy
The philosophical thinking of Martin Luther King, Jr. & Malcolm X -- the "History of Philosophy without any Gaps" begins a three-episode arc on these figures
“The tutorials [in philosophy] were a springboard to a new role and a new life; he now wanted to use his fortune to make a mark in the realm of ideas” -- how Nicolas Berggruen came to be a philosophy-focused philanthropist
“The proposal to start an octopus farm is a proposal to create a new octopus culture [and] a new kind of octopus: the cultural behaviours coupled with the captive environment will be a novel environmental niche that shapes subsequent evolution” -- Kristin Andrews explores the ethical issues of such acts of creation
“How the idea [that the market place of ideas would inevitably lead to truth] mistakenly associated with Mill came to be thought of as somehow intrinsic to liberalism” -- Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) does a little history of ideas detective work
Roderick Chisholm failed his PhD prelim exams at Harvard and didn’t receive a fellowship -- but was appointed Alfred North Whitehead Lecturer there 30 years later (via Nathan Ballantyne)
The difficulty of defending the free speech of those threatening you -- Adam Briggle (North Texas) on the day a candidate for state congress who supports policies that would tear his family apart came to campus
Moral grandstanding in public discourse: is it a problem? -- a discussion between Brandon Warmke (Bowling Green) and Justin Weinberg (South Carolina)
Philosophical ideas represented with minimalist images and brief captions -- from Jonny Thomson on Instagram
“I can provide meaningful feedback, and targeted, productive feedback, better if I put less emphasis on assigning a grade” -- an article about the Marcus Schultz-Bergin's (Cleveland State) experience with "ungrading"
“Once the controversial metaphysical underpinnings of the alleged irreconcilable conflict [between science and religion] are identified… the match turns out really to be a contest of metaphysics against metaphysics” -- Hud Hudson (Western Washington) is interviewed at 3:16AM
“I think what’s at stake is a public culture, that we are all affected by in the same way, and that we collectively produce… it’s something that we are all entitled to try to contribute to. It isn’t owned by anybody”” -- T.M. Scanlon (Harvard) is interviewed by Yascha Mounk (Johns Hopkins)
“She is both beautiful and good, in a way the philosophy of character strives to explain but can’t always illustrate convincingly” -- Mary Townsend (St. John's) on the virtuous Dolly Parton, though "be warned that Aristotle won’t be entirely able to wrap his head around the idea that a petite woman with a high voice might be a profound moral exemplar"
“I’m not the kind of philosopher who is tortured by philosophical questions” -- a video interview with Timothy Williamson (Oxford) on his work and on philosophy in everyday life
Lots of logic videos -- over 180 of them, by Professor Sara Uckelman (Durham)
“The change is meant to reflect all four cardinal virtues of government identified by the Greek philosopher Plato in his most famous work, the Republic” -- the Georgia House of Representatives adds "courage" to the state’s pledge of allegiance, which already mentions wisdom, justice, and moderation (via Tim O'Keefe)
“There are many opportunities to include Africana philosophy in your teaching curriculum; indeed it should be possible for just about any topic you might name” -- Liam Kofi Bright (LSE) & Peter Adamson (LMU) have some advice on how to do it
Margaret Cavendish wrote “a proto-SF novel that explores early modern science, feminist and queer thought, and political philosophy” in 1666 -- and Helen De Cruz (SLU) has posted a summary and illustrations of it
“Who knew that philosophy… could still be this controversial?” -- Mark Oppenheimer & Jason Werbeloff, hosts of the Brain in the Vat podcast, defend the pursuit of "unaskable questions" in the wake of the controversy over Stephen Kershnar's appearance on their program
There was a mistake in that “That’s Not Kant” post -- thanks to Daniele Procida it has now been fixed, and an additional portrait of Kant that's kind of badass has been added
Philosophers discuss the Russian invasion of Ukraine at Oxford -- with Jeff McMahan, Janina Dill, Helen Frowe, Massimo Renzo, Zofia Stemplwoska, and Elad Uzan
New: a Twitter “Community” for philosophy -- Twitter's interest-based "communities" allow you the option of tweeting just to others in the community
“We should distinguish creativity as we ascribe it to products from creativity as we ascribe it to processes. Value, however, is a core part of creativity, both of the product and of the process” -- Julia Langkau (Geneva) on types of creativity and their value, and how "psychology is so far ahead of philosophy concerning research on creativity"
How to “level the playing field so that less-overconfident students can gain some of the same advantages” -- Eric Schwitzgebel (Riverside) follows up on the "overconfident student strategy" with advice for teachers and students
“The beautiful soul is where affections and reason are harmonized through play” -- Richard Marshall "interviews" Friedrich Schiller
“His students at the LSE jokingly referred to his book as ‘The Open Society and Its Enemies, written by one of its enemies'” -- Tae-Yeoun Keum (UCSB) on how Karl Popper's career was elevated by "bashing Plato," and what this tells us about philosophy
“We all know that we do things against our own better judgment… Do we also believe things against our own better judgment?” -- Eugene Chislenko (Temple) on akratic beliefs
How did you end up majoring in philosophy? -- N.G. Laskowski (Cal State Long Beach) asks Twitter
The new bioethics, continued: “Our proof of concept thus highlights how a nonhuman autonomous creator of a deadly chemical weapon is entirely feasible” -- a company that uses AI to improve human health was asked to explore the risk of misuse of their methods. Result: in less than 6 hours they generated 40,000 different deadly molecules
“Hope is needed most exactly when the world looks hopeless” -- Lea Ypi (LSE) on hope, humanity, Russia, Ukraine, and what can be learned from Kant's Perpetual Peace
“Larger, Freer, More Loving,” the podcast from Matthew J. LaVine (Potsdam) and Dwight K. Lewis (Minnesota), returns with a new season -- the first episode focuses on emotion, race, and justice, and features Myisha Cherry (UC Riverside)
“If philosophers refuse to use books simply because they include philosophical views that we dislike or disagree with, then we would be failing to live up to our professional standards” -- Raja Halwani, the editor of an anthology on the philosophy of sex, responds to criticisms of his decision to include an essay by Kathleen Stock in the volume
“Part of the gift of forgiveness, and what can be powerful about it, is that seeing another in this hopeful way… creates a space in which there is a possibility for them to face their flaws without needing defensive denial” -- Lucy Allais (JHU) interviewed at Vox about forgiveness
What are the implications for reactive-attitudes-based accounts of moral responsibility of taking our ordinary reactive attitudes to be the products of structurally unjust social conditions and practices? -- "radical" work by Michelle Ciurria (University of Missouri-St. Louis) is the subject of a symposium with comments so far from John Doris (Cornell) and others, soon
“Refugees need more political autonomy, not less, and third parties – host states, civil society and international NGOs – should enable rather than inhibit the vital roles that refugees play in their home countries” -- Ashwini Vasanthakumar (Queen's) explains why
A Columbia math professor accuses his university of providing false and distorted information in order to climb in the US News & World Report college ranking -- raising further questions about the value of such rankings
“It doesn’t solve the systematic problem of the anonymity of the student experience at the large research university… Nor does it solve the problem of anti-intellectualism in the student body” -- but there are things Harry Brighouse (Wisconsin) has done as a philosophy professor to "mitigate those problems for a handful of students"
“It lies in the weakness of human nature to always want to set up a system; perhaps it also lies in the weakness of human nature never to be able to set one up” -- Richard Marshall "interviews" Johann Gottfried Herder
“I very much like the idea of philosophy as a Great Art… there’s no way of cheating” -- an interview with Sophie Grace Chappell (Open University), possibly "the most counter-suggestible person in the entire world"
Marx “canceled” at the University of Florida -- a library study room named for him (one among many named for various well-known figures in history) has been renamed "Study Room 229" after pressure from rightwing outlet
The recent “Philosophers On The Russian Attack On Ukraine” has been translated into Spanish for publication in “En Letra: Derecho Penal,” an Argentinian journal -- thanks to Leandro Dias and Alejandro Chehtman for their work on this
“I’m someone who actually only has one thing I’m really interested in, which is authority; just about every one of my projects is kind of unified by this” -- an interview with Kate Manne (Cornell) at The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Australasia
How values shape inquiry in cognitive science -- a roundtable discussion with Sam Liao (Puget Sound), Uwe Peters (Bonn/Cambridge), Morgan Thompson (Bielefeld), & Daniel Burston (Tulane)
“What was initially the epistemic vice of overconfidence becomes the epistemic virtue of being a knowledgeable, well-trained philosophy student” -- Eric Schwitzgebel (Riverside) on the "overconfident student strategy," who employs it, and why it's probably more common in philosophy than other disciplines
Ukraine, Russia, and philosophy -- philosopher Michelle Panchuk (Murray State), who has lived in Ukraine and has family there, is interviewed by J. Aaron Simmons (Furman) on the conflict and its lessons
If we’re going to be honest with ourselves, morally sensitive, and thoughtful about our feelings, the best result may be “a stable, if uncomfortable, emotional equipoise” -- Erich Hatala Matthes (Wellesley) on the complex emotions of engaging with the work of immoral artists
Philosopher’s Nest is a new podcast “dedicated to showcasing the work, insights, and experiences of graduate students in philosophy” -- featuring brief interviews conducted by Kyle van Oosterum & Lewis Williams (Oxford), the podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and elsewhere
“There’s something undeniably erotic about elevators… order, intellect, and civilization over chaos, animality, and death” -- Helena de Bres (Wellesley) on elevators, love, and transcendence
“If McArevey and his staff can teach a new generation of boys to think for themselves, question old loyalties and find other ways to manage their anger perhaps they are building the hope for a new Northern Ireland” -- a review of "Young Plato," a documentary about a headteacher in Belfast who brings philosophy into the teaching at his elementary school
“Although all these truisms about the laws of nature sound plausible and familiar, they are also imprecise and metaphorical” -- Marc Lange (UNC Chapel Hill) on the difficulty of pinning down what a law of nature actually is
“It is commonplace in philosophy to test arguments and theories by reference to commonsense… [but] we should aim, whenever possible, to do better than rest on commonsense” -- Marcus Arvan (Tampa) explains why
“Philosophy… should understand itself and know just what it has indeed to offer, without taking anything away, least of all cheating people out of something by making them think it is nothing” -- Richard Marshall "interviews" Soren Kierkegaard
“Directly offering refuge to those most oppressed… is not only a humanitarian policy—it is also a powerful way to increase our national strength” -- John Thrasher (Chapman) and Ryan Muldoon (Buffalo) on the value an "open society"
Silicon Valley Congressman says that to fix social media, Meta, Twitter, etc. should “hire 100 philosophy majors” -- is this evidence that Rep. Khanna has been checking out philosophy Twitter, or evidence that he hasn't?
How has technology changed friendship? How will it in the future? -- Rebecca Roache (Royal Holloway) on the differences---and overlooked similarities---between friendships back then and friendships now
Sexiest degree at the University of London? Philosophy. -- "Going on a date with these precious overthinkers guarantees you’ll learn something new," says the London Tab
“This is a threat to all of us” -- Jeff McMahan (Oxford) interviewed about the Russian attack on Ukraine
Political philosophy and political style -- Michael Blake (Washington) on the signifiance of Zelenskyy's "style of political presentation" being "the antithesis of that shown by... Putin"
It’s not “just looking” -- Helen Frowe (Stockholm) and Jonathan Parry (LSE) on why the consumption of revenge porn should be criminalized
“What’s good? Whatever / The highest good is pleasure” -- a rap about Epicurus, from Nathan Dufour Oglesby. You'll get some pleasure from it. (via Tim O'Keefe)
“A careful examination of Newcome’s historical and intellectual context supports the claim that she made a very important contribution to the development of utilitarianism” -- before Sidgwick, Mill, or Bentham, there was Susanna Newcome (via Richard Yetter Chappell)
“Only those have reached the ground in themselves and have become aware of the depths of life, who have at one time abandoned everything and have themselves been abandoned by everything, for whom everything has been lost, and who have found themselves alone, face-to-face with the infinite…” -- Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling on who can be a philosopher, in an "interview" at 3:16AM
“While we can’t tell you exactly why, according to our algorithm, you are not eligible for chemotherapy and our algorithm is rarely wrong” -- is "our algorithm is rarely wrong" a suitable justification for an AI-based medical decision? Anantharaman Muralidharan (NUS), G. Owen Schaefer (NUS), Julian Savulescu (Oxford) on this and related questions
What are the main contributions that philosophers have made to Internet studies? -- Catarina Dutilh Novaes (VU Amsterdam) starts a list and gets some help from the crowd
“If a being is conscious at all, what it is like to be that being involves an organisation toward staying alive” -- Gary Francione (Rutgers) on what this means for the moral treatment of animals
Paste text into “Only The Questions,” and the result will be an “x-ray” of it that shows you… only the questions -- Clive Thompson describes why he made this tool, and provides some examples and a link so you can try it yourself
The Future Fund wants to support organizations and individuals whose work will make the future go well -- and is funding projects in artificial intelligence, values and reflective processes, and epistemic institutions, altruism, and other areas philosophers might contribute to
“Eros commits crimes of passion because, first and foremost, it commits crimes of thought. It attacks the heart by way of the mind. Eros is an intellectual monster” -- Agnes Callard (Chicago) had a terrible romance. What can be learned from it?
“We are often poorly positioned to make sound judgments about whether someone is virtue signaling… the epistemically virtuous… thing to do is to avoid making such judgments” -- Mark Satta (Wayne State) & A.K. Flowerree (Texas Tech) on intellectual humility and public discourse
“My grandfather… was summoned to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee in the winter of 1958” -- Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin (Sam Houston State Univ.) on the lessons his grandfather's ordeal holds for today's disputes over teaching about racism
“Games give you a moment where you know exactly what you are doing, because there are points… and that’s not true of parenting, or research, or being a spouse…” -- C. Thi Nguyen (Utah) on the Ezra Klein Show talking about good lives, the power & danger of games, what's measurable & what's not, & more...
Last year, a lab “turned a network of hundreds of thousands of neurons into a computer-like system capable of playing the video game Pong.” -- Brian Patrick Green (Santa Clara) on the philosophical questions this raises regarding the nature of minds and the moral treatment of such creations
“No matter what you’re paying attention to, if you’re really paying attention to it, you’re doing your job as a philosopher” -- an interview with Justin E.H. Smith (Paris) on the wide-ranging work he has been up to since he "mistakenly went off to grad school in philosophy"
In 1948, Nelson Goodman gave Morton White and William Fontaine, at the time the only black philosopher at an Ivy League school (Penn), a ride down to the Eastern APA in Charlottesville -- the end of the trip, recalls White, was "chilling"
“It is important for all of us to try hard to understand what scientists have been discovering” -- Martha Nussbaum (Chicago) surveys some recent findings about animals. "We humans have cognitive prejudices to overcome," she says.
“While envy reveals a dark side of human nature—our tendency to covet other people’s possessions and talents and cast an evil eye on them—it also shows a more luminous one: our tendency to improve ourselves, and strive for excellence” -- Sara Protasi (Puget Sound) on four varieties of envy
Anaxagoras asked whether one could cut up a circle to produce a square of equal area -- it turns out you can. Here's the story of the progress made on this old problem, and a visualization of its latest solution.
Would a journal consortium solve some of philosophy’s article publication problems? -- Brian Weatherson (Michigan) sketches what it might look like
When calls for interdisciplinarity are really “antidisciplinary” -- Paul Griffiths (Sydney) goes over some of the warning signs
“Scientific rigour with wildly imaginative theorising” -- a profile of David Chalmers (NYU) and a discussion of some of the ideas in his new book, Reality+
“Locke was misled in his thought experiment… by his construal of the broad epistemic limits of sensibility” -- an essay, with photos, on Locke, microscopes, telescopes, photography, and vision by Aderemi Artis (University of Michigan–Flint)
“They probably pay you pretty well for that.” “Yeah. Wait, what?” -- academic publishing in a nutshell
“Recent architectures in deep learning are illuminated by and in turn empirically vindicate some of the more speculative (and often derided) empiricist ideas about these faculties from the history of philosophy” -- Cameron Buckner (Houston) on empiricism, imagination, and artificial intelligence
“Circumstances alter cases, and online communication of specific types may harm in one context but not in another” -- Onora O'Neill (Cambridge) thinks legislation about this should "focus on online wrongs rather than online harms, on action rather than outcome"
What happens when we ask subjects of X-phi studies “to ‘think aloud’ about the experimental stimuli” and explain “why they answered the way they did”? -- Kyle Thompson (UC Riverside) finds out
“Parmenides’ conclusion / is that motion’s an illusion” -- philosopher-dancer Barbara Montero (CUNY) teams up with philosophy-musician Hannah Hoffman
When Peter Singer won the $1 million Berggruen prize, he pledged to donate it all to charity and let the public decide where $100,000 of it would go -- See which charities the public chose
“Arguments about schools quickly reveal themselves to be arguments about all of the things that adults in liberal democracies prefer to leave up to the individual conscience” -- the political philosophy of childhood makes The Atlantic
“Although both critical thinking skills and good will are useful in isolation, when they are present together – that’s when the magic happens” -- an interview with Bill Fish (Massey) about his research, teaching, the future of philosophy, and more
“The unique woman, the exception from the rule was tolerable. What was not acceptable was the thought that this could be a new type of woman” -- why the history of women in German philosophy requires some detective work, according to Anne Pollok (Mainz)
“It’s pretty clear that the people who did best during the pandemic, as a direct result of the interventions that were recommended by the modelers, resembled the people who did the modeling” -- Eric Winsberg (S. Florida) on various issues and questions about pandemic models and the choices and values that go into them
Tips on negotiating an assistant professor salary -- from an economist, but not just for econ positions
“We can find up to eight dates associated with a publication” and “this gets worse when each publisher interprets the meaning of each… differently” -- When is a paper "published"? (via Retraction Watch)
How to teach a course that is mainly or exclusively composed of less commonly taught philosophical traditions -- suggestions from Helen De Cruz (SLU)
“Love is something that exists on the maximal outer limit of our agency’s thinkability” -- Alexandra Gustafson (Toronto) on the sublimity of love, even when it's unrequited
Bang the head Socratic -- a review of "The Republic", an instrumental "post-metal" album about Plato's dialogue by the band Thumos (via Jeremy Skrzypek)
“It should give us pause that some eighteenth-century histories of German philosophy did indeed include more women than what we today find in standard histories of the nineteenth century…” -- Kristin Gjesdal (Temple) interviewed about her work in the history of philosophy and how histories of philosophy emerge
“The evolutionary lineages in the universe closest to our own [human] lineage are those found here on earth. And since none of them underwent the three major transitions that happened in our lineage, we have no reason to think they might occur elsewhere” -- on why intelligent life in the universe is rare (via The Browser)
“No one is likely to hold stuff like this against grad students” -- whether public controversies or grievances about philosophy departments affect their students' professional opportunities
“I have this master plan to transform academic writing to the point where every article and every book is actually interesting and fun to read. I know this is ridiculous” -- an interview with Toril Moi (Duke) on how she thinks about writing, the teaching of writing, and the audiences for which she writes
“If you just think you’re compensating people for past harm, you’re not challenging the system that produced those harms in the first place and will produce tomorrow’s harms” -- an interview with Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (Georgetown) on reparations, the environment, history, and the future
“Essential to the whole enterprise of Socratic conversation… is a willingness to be refuted. Willingness may be too weak. For Socrates describes rather a positive delight or eagerness to be refuted” -- Andrew Beer (Christendom College) on the benefits of being refuted
“In the land of the infinite, the bullet-biting utilitarian train runs out of track… [and] infinite ethics is a problem for everyone, not just utilitarians” -- Joe Carlsmith (Oxford) discusses the fascinating problems that infinities bring to ethics
“What Makes Heavy Metal ‘Heavy’?” -- figuring that out is itself a pretty heavy task, argues Jason Miller (Warren Wilson College)
New developments in plagiarism: AI paraphrasing tools -- one professor's experience detecting its use by a student
“Dear Professor James, I am so sorry but really I do not feel a bit like an examination paper in philosophy today” -- Gertrude Stein was apparently the teacher's pet in William James' class
“To be honest it’s a bit embarrassing to see philosophy operating downstream from popular culture and corporate PR, rather than approaching these overwhelmingly dominant forces critically” -- Justin E.H. Smith (Paris) brings his fascinatingly wide angle perspective to VR, AI, and applied ethics
“That question just stuck with me… you could be doing a whole string of science based on a flawed metaphysical assumption… Someone needs to work on this” -- the "origin story" of philosopher Quayshawn Spencer (U. Penn)
What are the rules for not being a “COVID jerk”? -- Eric Schwitzgebel (Riverside) lets us know
Psychological research inspired by Parfit’s work on the connection between prudence, morality, and the metaphysics of the self -- some experiments "suggest that people who score high on the Future Self Continuity measure have higher moral standards"
“What if animals do know what it means to die?” -- work in philosophy, psychology, and biology is helping us understand whether animals understand death (via Kris McDaniel)
“It is the duty of philosophy to destroy the illusions which had their origin in misconceptions, whatever darling hopes and valued expectations may be ruined by its explanations” -- Immanuel Kant interviewed by Richard Marshall at 3:16AM
What is gender? -- Robin Dembroff (Yale) in conversation with Justin E.H. Smith (Paris)
“Liberal neutrality rests on substantive moral goods: moral relations between diverse persons” -- and not only is that not incoherent, argues Kevin Vallier (Bowling Green), it's part of neutrality's appeal
“If you cannot do anything about what upsets you, you should attempt to free yourself from such negative emotions… If, by contrast, there is an opportunity for changing the distressing situation, then you should embrace the pain you feel and let it motivate you” -- Katharina Volk (Columbia) on how to make sense of Cicero's changing view of the emotions
If “actions in virtual worlds will potentially be as meaningful as actions in the physical world,” what ethics apply to them? What law? -- an excerpt from Reality+, the new book from David Chalmers (NYU)
The new version of GPT, “InstructGPT,” is better at following people’s instructions -- but "a byproduct of training our models to follow user instructions is that they may become more susceptible to misuse if instructed to produce unsafe outputs. Solving this requires our models to refuse certain instructions; doing this reliably is an important open research problem"
“Why did Husserl begin thinking about movement?” -- Carrie Noland (UC Irvine), a professor of French and comparative literature, on her "adventure" looking into Husserl's influences and motivation
At public schools, should students be taught “tolerance as non-disapproval” or “tolerance as forbearance”? -- there's controversy no matter what, argues Christina Easton (Warwick)
“Well, I see metaphysics as ‘lifestyle’” -- Wilhelm Dilthey is "interviewed" by Richard Marshall at 3:16AM
“‘Love Letters’ tells the tale of a white college [philosophy] professor named Anna Stubblefield and the black family whose lives she turned upside down when she helped teach their disabled son a controversial typing technique known as ‘facilitated communication’ but then took things too far” -- writer Andrew Bluestone has won a Humanitas Fellowship to work on this script
“Much of our reasoning under uncertainty involves negotiating an accuracy-informativity tradeoff, and that this helps to explain a variety of patterns in the things people tend to guess, believe, and assert” -- Kevin Dorst (Pitt) & Matthew Mandelkern (NYU) on whether the conjunction fallacy is really a fallacy
The song has lyrics from Wittgenstein and is dedicated to Rosalind Hursthouse -- it's by New Zealand's Karl Steven (of Supergroove), who took a break from his musical career to get a PhD in philosophy from Cambridge (via Yuri Cath)
Amartya Sen on the memories that shaped his research -- in an interview on the radio show "Marketplace"
“The philosophy of mind is not, pace so many of its contemporary exponents, an ethically neutral or ideologically innocent study. The philosophy of mind is a part of “human science”; politics has everything to do with it” -- Sophie-Grace Chappell (Open U.) argues that consciousness is both gendered and sexed
“A life in VR could be just as meaningful as a life in the physical world” -- David Chalmers (NYU) in conversation with Evan Selinger (RIT)
“Maintaining our punishing attitude towards plagiarism could reap benefits well beyond discouraging plagiarism itself” -- Stuart Ritchie (KCL) counters recent arguments for why we ought not care about plagiarism
A philosophy PhD’s suicide and the mission of an academic organization with which many political philosophers have been involved -- the "existential struggle" taking place at Liberty Fund (via Chris Bertram)
“All those yellow and green Wordle grids popping up on our screens give us a steady stream of small communions” -- C. Thi Nguyen (Utah) on how the popular word game provides moments of mutual understanding
“The show… takes the form of a gathering of ‘radical fairies,’ who come together each year to mourn, and re-enact, the death of Socrates” -- a new jazz opera about the final hours of Socrates is opening in Manhattan
“The defining characteristic of fiction is that it’s made up. So how can we learn from it?” -- that may sound like an easy puzzle to solve, but it's not, argues Amy Kind (Claremont McKenna) in her guest stint at The Splintered Mind
“Likely the first book about moral philosophy to feature endorsements from Steve Carell, Amy Poehler, Ted Danson and Mindy Kaling” -- Michael Schur, the creator of the TV show "The Good Place," has written a book
It’s “not about invincibility, but about vulnerability. And the role supportive others play in sustaining our resilience” -- one of several aspects of Stoicism discussed in an interview with Nancy Sherman (Georgetown)
“If I am right, neither the science of physics, nor any other science, could express all the truths; but the world could nonetheless be wholly physical” -- Tim Crane (CEU) on the real lesson of Frank Jackson's famous Mary example
What do you know about Nísia Floresta? -- Olivia Branscum (Columbia) speaks with Nastassja Pugliese (Federal Univ. of Rio de Janeiro) about the 19th C. Brazilian philosopher, her philosophy of education and her enlightenment critique of slavery and colonialism
“Given that academic ethics is about ‘ethical fine tuning’ and that the academy remains disconnected from the government, the potential for ethicists to respond to the climate emergency within the limits of their job description is somewhat limited” -- Doug McConnell (Oxford) on the role of moral philosophers in regard to global warming
“To prepare students to thrive in a world driven by science and policy, we need to incorporate philosophy in the classroom,” especially philosophy of science -- so argue Nicholas Friedman (Stanford) & Stephen Esser (U. Penn) , who also provide links to lesson plans
Quantum approaches to mathematical puzzles -- it's "not just fun and games, but has applications for quantum communication and quantum computing"
“We need to devise ways of drawing more people voluntarily into the risk social contract, rather than pushing them ever further away” -- Jonathan Wolff (Oxford) on fighting the pandemic
Philosophy, disability, and social change -- videos of several philosophers from a conference on the subject last month hosted by the University of Oxford
“Maybe we are so enmeshed in contradictions in our day-to-day lives, so constantly pulled in multiple conflicting directions at once, that we don’t even notice, except when the inconsistency becomes so insistent that it can’t be ignored” -- if philosophy is going to makes sense of the world and our lives, argues Zach Weber (Otago), it will be with paraconsistent logics
“It is a joy to play with this ontological uncertainty. It is the magic of movies” -- that we see actors along with their characters and a film's production along with its fiction is relevant to the metaphysics, aesthetics, and ethics of the medium, argues Francey Russell (Barnard)
The Last Days of Socrates: The Musical -- written by the Lebanese composer Mansour Rahbani (1998), it's in Arabic, with over 100 dancers and actors, and it is quite the spectacle
How does the meaning of a word (or symbol, or gesture…) first arise? -- Brian Skyrms (UCI) used simulations as part of his work on this puzzle; now Mike Deigan (Rutgers) has made online versions of these simulations for anyone to run
“The solace of Platonism is purchased at a large cost. Is there some less evasive and less contorted way to face our end?” -- Martha Nussbaum (Chicago) on disgust, death, and not hating the body
“The colors, shapes, and other sensible properties entering my experience are all imagined… [but] what’s imagined… is the overall past appearance common to previous encounters with that property” -- "perceiving is imagining the past," argues Michael Barkasi (Toronto)
“Philosophers should welcome opportunities in academic leadership” -- four philosophers with experience as chairs or deans explain why
“Once you recognize the role that the mind plays in investing things with meaning and with reality, then it’s easier to to invest virtual things with meaning, just as much as one can invest physical things with meaning” -- a conversation with David Chalmers (NYU) at Vox
The FBI file on Foucault -- and how it relates to his ideas
“One of the most difficult tasks confronting philosophers is to descend from the world of thought to the actual world” -- Karl Marx interviewed at 3:16AM
“We seem to have strong evidence that we are biased toward explaining failures of human reasoning by positing biases. Let’s call this the ‘Bias Bias’” -- thoughts on bias and paradox from Joshua Mugg (Park U.) and Muhammad Ali Khalidi (CUNY)
“The empirical investigation of a topic like happiness is only going to be as good as the initial conceptualization that frames the hypothesis guiding the inquiry” -- an interview with philosopher Bernard Reginster & psychologist Joachim Krueger (Brown), who team teach a course on happiness
“Even when they deemed it a fable, there was some degree of uncertainty concerning its existence… making it a heuristic tool to understand the nature of plants” -- on the scientific & philosophical value of a mythical lamblike animal-plant (via The Browser)
Examining utterances that are “always speaking”–most laws, for instance–can help us distinguish different meanings of “meaning” -- the Legal-Phi interview blog, run by Lucas Miotto (Maastricht), returns with a conversation with Martin David Kelly (Edinburgh)
It’s thought that “publicly-oriented scientific disagreement… undermines trust in science [and that] emphasizing the uncertainty will mean anything goes, that scientists don’t know anything” -- "And I wanted to push back against that," says Zeynep Pamuk (UC San Diego)
“Welcome to the minefield that is race humour” -- Matthias Pauwels (North-West University) on the "extremely complex operation, involving many interlaced factors tricky negotiations" of ethical comedy about race
You’ve probably read about the metaphysics of holes, but what about their aesthetics? -- some art history of the hole, from Kim Beil (Stanford)
Controversy over a proposal to add a statue of 17th-century philosopher Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia to a monument with 78 statues of men -- in Padua, Italy
“To appreciate the ingenuity of Locke’s philosophical views, I think it is important that we resist the tendency to apply common metaphysical classifications” -- Ruth Boeker (UCD) interviewed about her work on Locke, personal identity, mind, and more, at 3:16AM
Video resources on Stoicism -- a collection curated by Gregory Sadler (MIAD)
Free logician-themed 2022 wall calendar w/ Hamkins, Turing, Haack, Manzano, Rayo, Stebbing, & Williamson -- from LógicaMX, with art by María del Rosario Martínez-Ordaz and concept by Alejandro Estrada-Giron and Moises Macias-Bustos
Figuring out how to “use AI to improve human moral judgments in bioethics” -- a model from Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (Duke) and Joshua August Skorburg (Guelph)
The Tractatus as song -- sung by M.A. Numminem (via Timothy Williamson)
Use of psychedelic drugs causes “significant shifts away from ‘physicalist’ or ‘materialist’ views, and towards panpsychism and fatalism” -- and the effects last for at least months, according to a recent study
“Do your own research” has become the slogan of those “skeptical” of expertise -- Nathan Ballantyne (Fordham) and David Dunning (Michigan) consider how to respond to them
Loneliness and the need to be needed -- philosophers on how to better understand, measure, and address loneliness
A philosophy course taught by your favorite memes of 2021 -- by Ali Fitzgerald in The New Yorker
The first step in creating a Bernard Williams Society -- is a website dedicated to the work and life of Williams, created by Paul Russell (Lund)
“Thinking about dogs without us can help us understand who dogs are with us, and what they need from us, right now, to flourish and be happy” -- bioethicist Jessica Pierce (Colorado) on what we can learn from speculating about "posthuman dogs"
The picture of the “the offline” as where we go to find ourselves means “we are condemned to either living falsely, or being alone” -- but, asks Lauren Collee (Goldsmiths), what exactly is "the offline", what does it represent, and who is it for?
Publication strategies for those on the tenure track at a liberal arts college with fairly demanding research standards -- from Erich Hatala Matthes (Wellesley)
A New York Times columnist tries out Stoicism for the holidays -- "the Stoics have led me to the major philosophical insight that while I can’t control someone else’s construction site, it is within my power to purchase earplugs and then watch a detailed YouTube tutorial about how to 'Stop Inserting Earplugs Wrong!'" says Molly Young
A brief historical survey of philosophers on “enjoying food, drink, sex, dancing, and idleness, without guilt” -- Max Hayward (Sheffield) in The Atlantic
“The [students’] papers often seem to be written in the same way that someone who, never having seen a plane, tries to draw one based on its definition” -- Robert Zaretsky (Houston) on professors who love books and students who do not read them
“What is unique and liberating about philosophy is that you are allowed to defend any idea, no matter how crazy it might sound, as long as you have an argument that you are willing to subject to scrutiny” -- an in-depth interview with Yujin Nagasawa (Birmingham) at What Is It Like To Be A Philosopher?
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus turns 100 -- 10 philosophers provide brief remarks on the book
The year in physics -- a review at Quanta Magazine
Are you worried about the development of “robots single-mindedly intent on pursuing their own goals without any regard for the collateral damage”? -- they--or something relevantly similar to them--are already here, argues Gabriele Contessa (Carleton)
The two iron laws of college reading -- from Harry Brighouse (Wisconsin)
“If the opposition is attacked, undermined, disorganised and divided to the point where it becomes unelectable or incapable of forming an alternative government, we are no longer in a situation where unpopular leaders can be voted out” -- Jonathan Wolff (Oxford) on the importance to a democracy of "treating opponents as legitimate adversaries, not treasonous enemies"
“What should we, then, think of such a dogmatic person’s dogmatism? How should we evaluate this character trait from an epistemic perspective?” -- Mandi Astola (Eindhoven) on the value of distinguishing between the epistemic traits of individuals and those of the groups of which they're a part
“It is far better never to contemplate investigating the truth about any matter than to do so without a method” -- Richard Marshall interviews Rene Descartes at 3:16AM
The work of Moritz Schlick, his role in the Vienna Circle, and what might have been had he not been murdered -- with Jonathan Birch (LSE), David Edmonds (Oxford), Maria Galavotti (Bologna), and Cheryl Misak (Toronto)
“Understanding language requires understanding the world, and a machine exposed only to language cannot gain such an understanding” -- though they've attained human-level rates of accuracy on Winograd schema tests, neural network language models do not seem to have attained humanlike understanding
“Just how strong – philosophically – is the case for blowing up pipelines and power stations to save the world?” -- not that strong, say philosophers
“When people start writing a philosophical essay or thesis they are often advised to get an ‘overview of the literature first.’ Now I’m convinced this is a bad strategy” -- don't let your ideas be crushed by "the literature," advises Martin Lenz (Groningen)
The Google doodle of the day is of Émilie du Châtelet -- the French philosopher and mathematician was born on December 17th, 1706
The artistic and philosophical legacy of Stephen Sondheim -- thoughts from scholars in philosophy, theater, English, and musicology
“What can stories do that more quantitative work cannot?” -- Alexander Prescott-Couch (Oxford) on integrating narratives into social science
“Going There, the gossipy tell-all from news anchor Katie Couric, has very little in common with a volume that bears the name Lectures on the Philosophy of Mathematics. Look closer, though, and a few themes emerge” -- the latest from Joel David Hamkins (Oxford) is on Bloomberg's "best books" list, aimed at "the executive class"
“Again and again Rorty reveals a perspective on current work to which I had been oblivious, including on topics I thought I had mastered” -- Daniel Dennett on Rorty's "On Philosophy and Philosophers"
“Since things we can easily imagine are especially pleasing to us, men prefer order to confusion, as if order were anything in nature more than a relation to our imagination” -- Baruch de Spinoza interviewed at 3:16AM
On “the conflict between holding fast to our beliefs about what we think is just and appropriate for society, and giving our political opponents the respect they deserve even if we disagree with their beliefs about justice” -- Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt) in conversation with Lilly J. Goren (Carroll)
“Why does this guy David Chalmers keep following me around? Every time I look in the mirror, he’s there. That’s kind of freaky” -- NYT interview with Dave Chalmers (NYU) on the nature of reality, meaningful lives, consciousness, and The Matrix
“If the university has grown inhospitable to the humanities, perhaps scholars can smuggle them out, book by book, one affordable seminar at a time” -- philosophers and others venture beyond the ivory tower to help people develop and pursue their love of learning (via Scott Newstok)
What we can—and can’t—learn from increasingly detailed maps of the neural connections in brains -- using connectomes to predict behavior, and other developments in connectomics
A bust of the late Ágnes Heller has been installed at the European Parliament in Brussels -- the hungarian philosopher was known for her work in politics and political theory, social, and moral philosophy, aesthetics, and other subjects,
“Rather than asking about the criteria for rightness, I think a more neutral starting point would ask: What does the moral theory hold to be most important?” -- Richard Yetter Chappell (Miami) thinks "importance," not "rightness" should be the central concept of normative ethics
“Many women who desperately want to abort would also desperately prefer to raise the child if forced to carry their pregnancy to term” -- Elizabeth Harman (Princeton) on one way Justice Amy Coney Barrett is wrong about abortion
Rawls’s A Theory of Justice at 50 -- audio from the recent conference at the University of Virginia School of Law
The humanities and virtual reality -- three open, online sessions later this week put from the Virginia Philosophy Reality Lab
“They did a lot to break the grip of an orthodoxy that makes important things unsayable” -- Ben Lipscomb (Houghton) interviewed about his recent work on Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, and Murdoch
“Those of us concerned with identifying and combating systemic racism would do well to avoid over-simplified formulations that privilege one explanatory factor at the exclusion of another” -- Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin (Sam Houston State Univ.) takes up some confusions regarding racism
At the University of Groningen, philosophy majors are required to take philosophy “outside the walls” -- this involves a creative project rather than an academic paper, and interviewing people outside of academia
How “aesthetic ideals have carried over to contemporary experiments in science” -- Milena Ivanova (Cambridge) takes up the question, "what does it mean for an experiment to be beautiful?"
“The homogenizing of language won’t homogenize thought… but we may [have] reasons to worry that it will limit intellectual diversity” -- Neil Levy (Oxford) on the ethics of the linguistic "affordances" of Grammarly and other AI-based writing tools
“I want to show students a new way into philosophy – through doing ridiculous things” -- that's why Meg Wallace (Kentucky) teaches "Circus and Philosophy"
Want to help your students “steel-man” rather than “straw-man” other people’s arguments? -- ThinkerAnalytix & Harvard are offering free workshops for philosophy instructors on how to teach students argument mapping as a way of exercising intellectual charity
How to get something from “nothing” -- Aaron Wendland (KCL/Massey) on Heidegger, Carnap, and the analytic-Continental split
“My utterly personal and speculative overall take-away from our data is that women’s emancipation had a paradoxical effect in philosophy” -- Katharina Nieswandt (Concordia) interviewed by Adriel Trott (Wabash)
“The broadening of personhood to include some nonhuman entities is not so much a recent adaptation of an old legal concept as it is a return to an even older one” -- Justin E.H. Smith (Université Paris Diderot) on the personalization of nature
Making discussions of cosmopolitanism more cosmopolitan -- short reflections from nine philosophers initiate a project to draw upon Chinese philosophical traditions in order to explore alternative understandings of the nature and future of cosmopolitanism
Part of his legacy is the motivating of “a history of political philosophy that does not cleave to exclusionary conceptions of the discipline” -- an appreciation of Charles Mills by Sophie Smith (Oxford)
“Almost every person has reason to avoid subjection to digital recording whenever possible” -- Elizabeth O'Neill (Eindhoven) on the "spectacular set of new threats" we face owing to the combination of digital recording, the internet, and artificial intelligence
“Living in the now does not entail a refusal to care about the future, only a refusal to condition happiness and meaning on it” -- John Martin Fischer (UCR) on a common insight of Stoicism and Buddhism
“Just as we would be loath to dictate what art people must engage with, we should be wary of social pressures that decree what they can’t” -- Erich Hatala Matthes (Wellesley) on consuming the art of immoral artists
“Ten Propositions of Baruch Spinoza for Tenor and Piano” by British composer Michael Zev Gordon has been shortlisted for an Ivors award -- you can listen to the 21-minute song cycle sets of texts from Spinoza’s Ethics at the link
“That various things are simultaneously imaginable and unimaginable is essential to love, our sense of self, and our sense of what is real” -- Oded Na’aman (Hebrew U.) on evils, attachment, ambivalence, and the problems with Stoicism
“Human beings are ‘general-purpose culture machines’ capable of creating cultural and moral innovations that permit them to live better and more harmoniously together” -- Dan Little (UM-Dearborn) on existentialism for individuals and historicism for human nature
“Stock is quick to point out that she does not believe all trans women are bad” yet “at nearly every instance in the book when trans women are mentioned as agents… they are deceivers, rapists, and violent offenders” -- Adam Briggle (North Texas) agrees with Kathleen Stock on "many of her conceptual points," but, he says, its her "foreboding mood" that drives her arguments
“Like everyone else, Benatar finds his views disturbing” -- a profile of David Benatar by Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker
“Every time I sit down to write an article or do some other research-related task… I have to ask myself: should I be doing this or should I be spending the time with my children?” -- John Danaher (NUI) on the "academic parent's dilemma"
“Philosophical insight arises only from the struggle to cancel this situation of unfreedom and to make the world one’s own in one’s ideas and thought” -- Richard Marshall interviews G.W.F. Hegel at 3:16AM
“We need the burgeoning philosophical field of space ethics to help us tackle the thorny moral questions and complicated debates that growing interest in space exploration raises” -- so argues Chelsea Haramia (Spring Hill) at Noema (via Nathan Nobis)
“If the analysis that I have provided is correct, then Americans cannot solve the race problem. The most that they can do is choose which race problem they are willing to live with” -- Joseph Heath (Toronto) on how, when it comes to race in the U.S., "different parties define both the problem itself and its solution differently"
“When everything that can be explained has been explained, when we know the truths of physics and brains and psychology and social interactions and so on and so forth, will there still be anything worth wondering about?” -- Charlie Huenemann (Utah State) on "the biggest question"
“It would have been easy to demand freedom and protection for both Stock and for the trans and non-binary students or allies, since both sides claim to be being intimidated and silenced by the other. But the letter did not do this” -- a nonbinary philosopher on "how I experienced the unfolding of events leading up to and around the recent UK philosophers’ open letter regarding Kathleen Stock"
“An insider’s take on three different directions it seems to me the left wing of the applied turn is taking in philosophy” -- Liam Kofi Bright (LSE) offers three "ideal types"
A philosophy professor’s account of the “perilous” and “unrelenting” trajectory of his university -- David Benatar's new book is "The Fall of the University of Cape Town"
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason -- condensed into 100 tweets, by Helen de Cruz (SLU)
“I conjecture that, in retrospect, historians will come to view Anglophone philosophy from the 1960s to 1990s one of the great golden ages” -- why Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) thinks "Back in the 1990s, when I was a graduate student, giants strode the Earth! Now, Earth is rather more populated with human-sized people."
“There’s definitely been a shift from more traditional abstract philosophical work earlier in my career, to more feminist and political work more recently… Honestly a lot of it was just a matter of paying more attention” -- Jonathan Ichikawa (UBC) is interviewed about his life and work
“Terrorism involves the intentional harming of non-combatants…, is committed for ideological reasons and/or political ends,” and often includes “the intrusion of fear into everyday life” -- "the US drone campaign meets these criteria, argues Jessica Wolfendale (Marquette)
“What are the most important questions mainstream philosophy ignores or has forgotten about today?” -- 10 philosophers give their answers
“I never saw autism as something that applied to me—that is, until I started reading first-person descriptions by autistics, in particular, autistic women, of their own experiences as autistics in a neurotypical world” -- Amandine Catala (UQAM) interviewed about her research and her life as a late-diagnosed autistic woman in philosophy
“The past can be a source of information on moves that are missed in present professional discussions” -- and so "historians of philosophy are a collective good to the profession that it pays to have a large enough pool to have around," writes Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam)
“Philosophy, the survey seems to imply, consists of a set of clear questions whose answers can usually be bundled into two or three options” -- but "a lot of the philosophical work that I find most meaningful doesn’t take this form. Instead, it challenges the questions themselves," says David Egan (Outer Coast)
Next time someone asks why we should bother studying the history of philosophy -- direct them to this thread
“Pupils should be encouraged to contribute more than ‘yes, Socrates; certainly, Socrates’ most of the time” -- a gov't report on The Academy, from a collection of "polite emails to the ancients" from "a very firmly 2021 standpoint"
A philosopher’s statement of synthesis -- the tracks on a new album of instrumental music from Dale Dorsey (Kansas) unfold in developing patterns that make the perfect soundtrack for your night drive on the electronic highway from here to 1980 (title track is esp. good)
“Every female PhD student is sleeping with her supervisor, don’t be naive, it is well known. They all do.” -- being told this during a job interview was just one of many incidents of sexism philosopher Juliette Ferry-Danini has faced (from 2020 / via Andrew Mills)
“The cleverest people are not those speaking loudest or trying to impress. They are generous instead.” -- Stephen Mumford (Durham) on good philosophical discussion
The University of Austin is premised on misrepresentations about what happens in college classrooms and the state of higher education in the U.S. -- commentary from Aaron Hanlon (Colby College)
Analytic philosophy generator -- by Andrew M. Bailey (Yale-NUS) (via the Australasian Association of Philosophy)
A closer look at Kathleen Stock’s departure from Sussex
and Peter Boghossian’s from Portland State -- at Liberal Currents
“The polarizing effect of Dr. Mills’ work is a testament to its ingenuity” -- Elvira Basevich (U. Mass Lowell) on the philosophical legacy of Charles Mills
“What is a knower?” -- debates in epistemology, such as externalism vs. internalism, are downstream from this more fundamental question, which deserves more attention, argues Nate Sheff (Connecticut)
“Dehumanization lies at the intersection of two compelling imaginative dispositions: our propensity to essentialize and our propensity to project a grand hierarchy onto the natural world” -- David Livingstone Smith (New England) on imagination and dehumanization
“You’re an idiot. Hope is the confusion of the desire for a thing with its probability.” -- Richard Marshall interviews Arthur Schopenhauer at 3:16AM
Is the result 1000 works of art? Or 1001? Or 1? Or for all we’ll be able to tell, 0? -- And what is it? A brilliant art prank? A tribute in the style of the original artist? A distributed artwork?
What makes Hi-Phi Nation so good? -- the research, interviews, writing, editing, choices, technology, aesthetics, craft, and person behind "the philosophy show you can send to your family and friends who aren’t philosophy geeks"
“The connection between sex work and philosophy had a long life in the western tradition” -- Dawn LaValle Norman (Australian Catholic U.) looks at it in the ancient world
“I did not need Chinese Philosophy to understand analytic philosophy, and vice versa… There are some deep structural differences between their fundamental conceptual frameworks” -- an interview with Hiu Chuk Winnie Sung (Nanyang), who has two PhDs (one in Chinese philosophy, one in analytic philosohy)
“If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.” What about a whale? -- researchers aim to use machine learning, language models, and other technology to figure out what whales are saying
“Though their relationship was not primarily sexual, they were in love in the sense of having a deep desire to know and be known” -- Sukaina Hirji (Penn) and Meena Krishnamurthy (Queen's) on the idea of "romantic friendship" and the example of it between Iris Murdoch and Philippa Foot
“A combinatorial system is one in which a relatively small number of simple things are combined to form a relatively large number of more complex things… Could morality be such a system?” -- yes, say an interdisciplinary team of researchers who explain "moral molecules" and provide a "periodic table of ethics"
Break each article into segments of up to five words long, then publish each of those segments as a separate file in a publicly accessible index -- how technologist Carl Malamud is freeing the world's paywalled research for data analysis. His index contains material from over 100 million journal articles. Is it legal?
What’s good and what’s bad about being a child, and why -- Anca Gheaus provides a conceptual map to two views about childhood
“Epistemology is a normative enterprise, ethics is a normative enterprise” -- and the two areas should be "consistently informed by an appreciation of each other's problems," says Mark Schroeder (USC)
“Nationalists think they must be anti-multiculturalism, and multiculturalists think they must be anti-nationalist. Yet in practice, in at least some times and places, citizens are able to reconcile the two” -- Will Kymlicka (Queens) on confronting political theory with empirical evidence
The pandemic ethics conversation with Peter Singer at Rhodes College that some faculty urged be canceled -- it happened, and it is now online, hosted on YouTube by Brain In a Vat
“Intuitive theories of minds and brains are more complex than has commonly been acknowledged” -- recent work in x-phi on how people think the mind and the brain interact
“Public intellectuals… need to engage deeply with the cultures they address, the academic standards of the fields from which they borrow, and the rhetorical moves of their own narratives” -- a look at two scientists' contrasting approaches to taking up humanistic questions
“A species of morally insane beings boasting enormous cerebrums and minuscule bodies” -- how late-Victorian era articles from the journal Mind contributed to the archetype of the mad scientist (via Sebastian Lutz)
“It is her dignity that for so long caused me to presume that my friend must have been born into the class in which she now seems so at home—and to know, as dull functionaries do not, when it is undignified to speak of certain things” -- "Second-generation GI Bill philosopher" Justin E. H. Smith on class, paradoxical individualism, Proust, and identity
“Knowing who your genetic progenitors are can be a genuine source of self-knowledge… But it is important to see that it is just one possible source among many” -- Daniel Groll (Carleton) on the ethics of sperm and egg donation
Gender is complicated and attributed on various bases; for example, in most of Germany “butter” is usually feminine, but not everywhere. Why? -- Wolfgang de Melo (Oxford) on how languages gender nouns, and related issues
Should we kill one and redistribute his organs to five others who could be saved with them? No? What if the one is a pig? -- a look at the ethics of transplanting pig kidneys, at Vox (with philosophers weighing in)
“There’s a difference between ghost stories that are accurate and ones that are real” -- Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin (Sam Houston State Univ.) on how we can "believe some ghost stories without believing in ghosts."
“Causal reasoning should be understood in ‘functional’ terms — that is in terms of the role that it plays in human life and the human goals and purposes that it serves” -- James Woodward (Pittsburgh) discusses "Causation with a Human Face" with others at a Brains symposium
“The misgivings that philosophers had about quantum mechanics, it turned out, weren’t entirely irrelevant after all. If physicists hadn’t been so dismissive of philosophy, they might have seen that sooner” -- Sabine Hossenfelder (Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies) on stagnation and progress in physics
“Unravelling his turgid prose turns out to be worth the effort, affording us glimpses of how things ‘hang together’ that others miss” -- William deVries (New Hampshire) on the "renaissance in Hegel appreciation" (via Preston Stovall)
Was Descartes “skull-blasted”? -- details on the controversy over where Descartes' skull is, and how many pieces it is in
“In recent months, and for the first time, I’ve been embarrassed to be a philosopher… Philosophy has a problem and that problem is hubris” -- says Stephen Mumford (Durham). Can you guess what prompted this?
Nicolas Cage as various philosophers -- from Hane Maung (Manchester)
“The philosopher has to be the bad conscience of his age” -- Richard Marshall interviews Friedrich Nietzsche at 3:16AM
“Collaborations with scientists can suffer when the cultural differences between disciplines are not acknowledged and tended” -- Michael Paul Nelson (Oregon State) has some advice for scientists and philosophers working with each other
Demographic data about people with philosophy PhDs -- results from the recent Academic Placement and Data Analysis project
“Let white students simply think that a Black professor is discriminating against them based upon race and see how quickly the white students are believed” -- some black people may have racial prejudices and individual power, but, says George Yancy (Emory), that is different from systemic racism
“That comedy is an important social safety valve and sometimes an epistemically useful window in a democracy also entails that it may be socially dangerous” -- Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) on Chappelle, Srinivasan, Letterman, Trump, Aristophanes, and Socrates
“To compromise on the detail is to change the subject” -- an enjoyable and informative essay by Emmanuel Ordóñez Angulo (Oxford) on the challenges to and varieties of popularization in philosophy and mathematics
Speaker series on the nature of belief -- from the Concepts & Cognition Lab, hosted by Tania Lombrozo (Princeton) and Neil Van Leeuwen (Georgia State)
New publication by John Locke -- "the discovered manuscript provides the first evidence of Locke's commitment to the principle that minimalistic theism would suffice for peaceable coexistence in any civil society"
Reconceiving abortion as a public good -- so that the state has a compelling interest in people having access to it
“The position that I have in philosophy—I grew up poor, I am a Black woman, et cetera—means I have… very different evidence of what the stuff of anger actually looks like” -- Myisha Cherry (UC Riverside) interviewed in The New Yorker about anger and philosophy
What are and what should be the limits on scientific freedom? -- Heather Douglas (Michigan State) talks with Maria Kronfeldner (CEU) as part of a series on socially engaged philosophy
“The political/ideological takeover is the practice of using political positions to drive our philosophy (or drive out the rest of philosophy), rather than the other way around” -- an interview with Michael Huemer (Colorado) at What Is It Like To Be A Philosopher
Moral progress and moral methodology -- a conversation between Philip Kitcher (Columbia) and Julia Hermann (Utrecht) (scroll to the end for the link to the video)
“There is nothing in the nature of academic research that guarantees that ‘the best ideas of a generation will become part of the canon for the next generation’; instead, many good and original ideas have been lost to the disciplines through bad luck” -- consider, for example, the case of Ludwik Fleck
“There can be a lot of natural values, all equally valuable and natural, but different ones need different circumstances or social settings to be realized—so they will occur or flower at different times/places” -- an interview with Rachel Zuckert (Northwestern), who pays attention to "real tensions real facts about art and our appreciation of it"
“The life I lived, inside the walls of the house and outside, was in fact not one life but two, lives that sometimes complemented and supported each other, but mostly clashed against a reality I could not fully grasp” -- a profile of political philosophy Lea Ypi (LSE)
“Never call yourself a philosopher — let others do that” -- Spencer Case's appreciation of philosopher Bill McCurdy
“To ask only questions we can answer is a failure of imagination” -- a brief appreciation of philosophy from Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside)
“Imagining is not an alternative to reality and rationality or a diminished form of it. Imagining is a complementary form in our ways of knowing” -- Luca Tateo (Oslo) on a unified theory of imagining
The mathematics of heaps “looks like a living process” -- not about philosophy but this is the "heap" of links so file this under self-understanding
There will be a virtual memorial for Charles Mills on Sunday October 10, 2021, from 2pm to 5pm, EDT -- details are on the new Charles Mills memorial website
Audio of philosophy of science lectures from Voice of America’s “Forum: The Arts & Sciences in Mid-Century America” (1963) -- the series includes Quine, Hempel, Goodman, Black, Nagel, Putnam, Levi, Morgenbesser, Feyerabend, Suppes, and others (via Boaz Miller)
“What are memoirists doing exactly, when we claim to ‘find’ this form and meaning in our past experience? Are we genuinely discovering it back there or just making it up?” -- Helena de Bres (Wellesley) on the philosophy of memoirs
“My model of the world is that there are many, many, many thinkers, ideas and texts that are sufficiently interesting to merit serious consideration” -- why Liam Kofi Bright (LSE) opposes philosophical canons
“In sex of all things, where humans so often misconstrue what other humans want… can we ever trust ourselves to know, really know, what an animal wants?” -- Amia Srinivasan (Oxford) takes an unflinching look at bestiality
In Memo Akten’s ‘Learning To See’, “an artificial neural network loosely inspired by our own visual cortex, looks through cameras and tries to make sense of what it sees” -- "Of course it can only see what it already knows. Just like us."
“It is morally imperative to not say true things on social media” -- Justin E. H. Smith on the "false representative class" today's technology has spawned
“The visual image can no longer compete. Video is dead. Videogames seek to evolve into—or devolve back into—text-based games, so far with little success” -- a fascinating short story from philosopher John Holbo (NUS) about a world in which how people read has radically changed
“I sometimes wonder whether it’s news to most philosophers that ‘A = A’ can be funny and even is the structure, or the form, of the perfect joke” -- a philosopher's appreciation of comedian Norm McDonald, who died in September
It’s likely we’ll find that “being conscious, much like being alive, has many different properties that will express in different ways… among different species, among different systems” -- and so, says neuroscientist Anil Seth, "the mystery of consciousness may dissolve"
“One reason most humanities professors wouldn’t consider themselves humanists: they’re too busy pretending to be scientists” -- by looking at the ideas of Charles Babbitt, we can see reasons to "jumpstart an omni-cultural humanist revival"
A Facebook group for faculty and graduate students in philosophy who were first-generation college students -- created by Georgi Gardiner (Tennessee)
“Our knowledge of ourselves is (meta)knowledge like any other – hard-won, and always subject to revision” -- Stephen M. Fleming (UCL) on the science of metacognition
“We don’t even claim that it is rehabilitative, although it might be, but we do claim that it takes people seriously” -- an article about philosophy in prisons, based on discussions with MM McCabe and Mike Coxhead (KCL)
“The fact that the term ‘mob’ can function pejoratively creates a paradox” -- an interview with Susanna Siegel (Harvard) on mob violence and vigilantism
“Rationality is systematized winning.” “It’s not winning I’m worried about… I want to know the truth.” -- a teacher and a student talk about the limits of rationality
Is the ball helping the mouse get to the cheese? -- Do we "see" free will? After watching the video, click on the PDF link for an explanation of a new "perceptual" approach to free will attribution.
“As a scholar, I could not do my job if I accepted the sort of ‘reasoning’ we are given for the cruel arrangements under which we labor” -- "And that is the fundamental bullshit on which all the bullshit sits," writes Amy Olberding (Oklahoma)
“In everyday life we often experience cities as beautiful… however, the city is only a marginal topic in aesthetics” -- Tea Lobo (Collegium Helveticum) on the aesthetics of cities
The philosophical life of plants -- a website for research and networking on "the ways in which plants and thinking have been interlinked... within philosophy, the history of ideas, botany, the environmental humanities, the cognitive sciences and literary studies"
Sophisticated robots: “Either don’t give them full rights and risk perpetrating grievous moral wrongs against them, or do give them full rights and risk sacrificing real human interests for the sake of empty machines” -- a moral dilemma regarding robot rights, from Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside)
Sidney Poitier recites excerpts from Plato over jazz composed and conducted by Fred Katz -- Plato's works in their coolest form (via Ian Olasov)
“Bayesian theories… at best apply to the mind of God” -- but you've got to model yourself after someone! Also, says Paul Thagard (Waterloo): "Philosophical thought experiments rank no better as a guide to truth than religious texts and Republican tweets"
“The Dean of Faculty once called me into her office to respond to reports that I was discussing problems facing the College with other faculty. Dwell on this for a moment” -- reflections on the closure of Yale-NUS and what it was like to be a professor there, from Bryan Van Norden (Vassar)
“I see myself as sometimes just embracing fundamental tensions without trying to offer a perfect synthesis” -- Amia Srinivasan (Oxford) in a wide ranging conversation with Tyler Cowen (GMU)
“If any other problem in social life was occurring at this frequency and at this scale, we would consider it effectively solved” -- a look at the case for "cancel culture"
Zombie Intuitions: “intuitions that are ‘killed’ (defeated) by contextual information but kept cognitively alive by the psycholinguistic phenomenon of linguistic salience bias” -- a problem for thought experiments in philosophy, including (of course) zombie thought experiments
“It is the duty of intellectuals and artists to reject enforced glee, to tell robot customer-service agents to fuck off, to carve out a preserve for the life of the soul as best they can, and to call madness by its name” -- Justin E. H. Smith on phililistinism in philosophy, "awokening" and "STEMification," technology's creep into culture, and more
“Grad school might destroy you. That’s the most important thing I would tell my pre-Ph.D. self if I could” -- G. M. Trujillo Jr. (Louisville), now an assistant professor of philosophy, offers some advice to prospective grad students
The Diversity Reading List is a resource for helping you include authors from underrepresented groups in your teaching -- and now it is hosting a seminar series
“Teaching [The Ethics of Killing] in the present context would have been a fascinating experience” but “the fear that my students might transmit the coronavirus to each other during these ‘ethics’ seminars… horrified me” -- an interview with philosopher Jeremy Fischer, who resigned from his position to protest his university's poor response to COVID
“Despite being one of the most celebrated works of philosophy ever written, the Tractatus is also one of the most gnomic” -- Ray Monk (Southampton) explains Wittgenstein's Tractatus and how it came to be
“We are not in favor of a shock-and-awe approach of springing distressing content on students without advance notice” -- but a survey of recent research finds that "trigger warnings do not minimize anxiety and emotional distress, and might even do the opposite"
“How can something be ill if it is not alive?” -- Viruses were typically not thought to be alive, but discovering "giant viruses" and that they can be infected with smaller viruses raises the question of what life is
Two puzzles about truthfulness -- from Wolfgang Schwarz (Edinburgh)
“Today, mathematicians and others routinely stray outside our comfortable three dimensions” -- but what, exactly, is a dimension?
Memorial event to be held for philosopher Joseph Margolis -- the longtime professor at Temple University died this past summer
Did you hear about the upcoming “Boss Baby” philosophy symposium? -- even The Onion thought, "this is Onion material" (ok, the AV Club, but still). Yet it's a real event, and this article about it explains what motivated it
“Chairs are what philosophers call ‘ordinary objects’… their existence is as obvious as possible, but the more we try to suss out where they are, the more ‘sus’ they become” -- quite possibly the most entertaining thing you'll watch today, and it's about ontology and mereology. Seriously.
Ideological extremism, methods extremism, psychological extremism -- Quassim Cassam (Warwick) makes some distinctions and sees what can be learned from them
“The important thing is to be ruthless with the books that are not good. Just stop reading, put them down, usually throw them away, don’t give them away – if you give them away you could be doing harm to people” -- advice on how to read, some of which implies advice on how to write
“Interrogating the obscurity of Holst’s audacious book exposes a dark side to the German Enlightenment that, until recently, has largely been overlooked” -- Andrew Cooper (Warwick) on how the German Enlightenment failed women
“As a professional philosopher, I will move from ad hoc and pop-up politics to a comprehensive approach to the good life” -- former Loyola Marymount University philosophy professor James Hanink is running for governor of California
“What would happen if we would only accept to review papers that we knew we could/would/were willing to read within a week?” -- thoughts on speeding up refereeing in philosophy, from Ingrid Robeyns (Utrecht)
“A densely argued and damning portrait of Socrates as soldier-citizen-philosopher” -- Dan Little (UM-Dearborn) on the puncturing of an image "entirely based on the philosophical texts without serious attention to historical details"
When the word “is aired for pedagogical purposes, there is no good reason to feel hurt” -- Randall Kennedy (Harvard) on professors mentioning a notorious racial slur in class
Consider a series of versions of a song, starting with the original, A. B is a cover version of A. C is a cover of B. D is a cover of C, etc., down to Z -- if Z bears no musical resemblance to A, is it a cover of A? P.D. Magnus (Albany) looks at a cover song paradox created by Andrew Kania (Trinity)
“A genuine reckoning with the history of American torture remains unlikely” -- Jessica Wolfendale (Marquette) on the erasure of American torture
The Guardian published an interview with Judith Butler but then deleted paragraphs of it -- Why?
“Whataboutism” and “that’s not who we are” -- John Martin Fischer (UCR) on how to understand these common political moves
“We are bodily beings, whose bodily existence has intrinsic worth, yet for whom dependence and disability are natural” -- What this implies for medical care is the topic of an interview with Christopher Tollefsen (South Carolina)
That sound you heard was thousands of philosophy professors whispering to themselves, “yes!” -- Students will once again know what we're talking about when we reference The Matrix in class. Check out the trailer for "The Matrix Resurrections"
“There is no monolithic ‘women’s experience’… Feminist theory is riddled with disagreement” -- "Today, the most visible war within Anglo-American feminism is over the place of trans women in the movement, and in the category of 'women,'" writes Amia Srinivasan (Oxford)
It’s sometimes asked “why the Islamic world never experienced something like the European Enlightenment” -- according to Peter Adamson (LMU), part of the answer may be that it did, just a few hundred years earlier
“To litigate Boxill’s guilt or innocence is to miss the point entirely” -- the real scandal is the "wide chasm between Chapel Hill’s squeaky-clean reputation and the contortions that so-called amateurism demanded"
They say they’re “prioritizing ‘vaccine safety’ over ‘benefits’,” but really they’re just “prioritizing safety from vaccines over safety from COVID” -- Richard Chappell (Miami) on status quo bias in ethical reasoning about the pandemic
“The form of deliberation employed when we infer our own courses of action from what is collectively optimal or required” -- Anne Schwenkenbecher (Murdoch) on "we-reasoning" and public health crises
“The thing to remember here is to do the opposite of what we’re trained to do: Speak at a super high level about some pretty important and intense stuff, with little/no justification for your claims” -- and other non-academic job seeking advice for philosophers, from Aaron Kagan (Facebook Reality Labs)
“The teacher who allows his student’s desire to settle on him as an object, or the teacher who actively makes himself the object of her desire, has failed in his role as a teacher” -- Amia Srinivasan (Oxford) on sex between professors and students
A site of resources for teaching courses in ethics in moral philosophy -- including videos, syllabi, lessons, assignments, and more, from Matt Deaton
So far, “there’s more than twice as many jobs advertised this year than at the same point last year, indicating a significant job-market rebound. However, compared to pre-COVID levels, the market is still on the lower end of things” -- Marcus Arvan (Tampa) takes a quick look at the philosophy job market this season
Slippery slope arguments may be sound, for example, when they “specify as precisely as possible what causal mechanisms create strong incentives and disincentives for specific behaviors to occur” -- such as in regard to Apple's new phone-scanning technology, argues Evan Selinger (RIT)
“The first English translation, published in 1922, the year of The Waste Land and Ulysses, might easily have been mistaken for a Modernist war poem” -- Wittgenstein, war, and the Tractatus
“Online Trolls Actually Just Assholes All the Time, Study Finds” -- not The Onion. Also, "non-hostile individuals" tend to not engage in political discussions online.
Our folk categories of mental activity (e.g., perception, memory, attention, decision-making) have structured how neuroscientists study the brain -- but those categories seem increasingly unhelpful, as none of them "actually corresponds to a thing in the brain"
It refers to both the “dynamic in which practices of freedom produce harm, brutality, and subjugation as freedom” and “freedoms… deemed too inconsequential, repellent, or deflating” -- Elisabeth Anker (GWU) on "ugly freedom"
Future of the history of philosophy? -- illustrated commentary from Nic Bommarito (Simon Fraser University)
Were you influenced by the late Joseph Margolis or his work? -- If so, consider submitting a video comment for a memorial event Temple University is holding (see Update 2)
Artistic renderings of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and others as “real people”, based on busts, portraits, and population genetics studies -- artist Alessandro Tomasi uses Photoshop and Artbreeder to create the images
“Democracy may not always be necessary to ensure that governments work for the people… yet the weakening of democratic political cultures… is concerning because good government can’t be sustained without public scrutiny” -- Fabienne Peter (Warwick) on democracy and authoritarianism
“The sort of socially committed venture that should characterize public work in the arts and sciences generally” -- an appreciation of public philosophy, particularly the "Ask a Philosopher" project created by Ian Olasov (CUNY), in The Chronicle
“The law requires reformation to protect our modern scientific and philosophical understanding that many animals can live their own meaningful lives” -- Martha Nussbaum (Chicago) has submitted an amicus brief to the NY Court of Appeals in support of the effort to free an elephant from the Bronx Zoo
“Separateness as love’s aesthetic and ethical essence” -- a look at Simone de Beauvoir's lost novel of early love, in The New Yorker
“The great thing about philosophy, and what keeps me going at it: it’s so unpredictable. I simply have no idea where the argument might lead me” -- an interview with Sophie Grace Chappell (Open University) about her work and life
“The growing awareness of the moral ambiguity among veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq burdens them with sensibilities of moral injury” -- Stephen N. Xenakis and Jesse D. Hamilton (U. Penn) on helping those who "carry the moral burden of a nation at war"
“Machines can imagine what we cannot imagine and see what we cannot see” -- Arthur I. Miller (UCL) on machine creativity
“Does [Wittgenstein’s account] have a place for thinking that there may be space for the privacy of feelings and thoughts and thus for a potential freedom from the intrusiveness of the powers of surveillance?” -- Hans Sluga (Berkeley) on Wittgenstein, authoritarianism, and surveillance capitalism
The biology, psychology, and philosophy of near-death experiences -- "These reports are very vivid... we look at the positive evidence they offer for an afterlife and ignore the problems with the evidence” says John Martin Fischer (UC Riverside)
How to end a war justly -- Darrel Moellendorf (Goethe University) is interviewed on the subject
Philosophy podcasts organized by style and subject matter -- by Kelly Truelove
“In the coming years, we might discover whether or not the world is quantum all the way up” -- recent research on expanding the quantum scale
“The typical college professor would be lucky to make $35,560 per year, and often might expect to make more like $21,336” -- a look at the AAUP's Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession (via Sara Protasi)
“Mere uncertainty is not sufficient reason to reject a pandemic policy proposal” -- "critics need to offer reasons for thinking that the potential downsides outweigh the potential upsides," says Richard Chappell (Miami)
“The worst possible way of going about making decisions” -- Felipe De Brigard (Duke) and Rob Lowe (yes that Rob Lowe) discuss nostalgia, memory, and decision-making with Laurie Santos (Yale)
On a small island in the Pacific, near the Marianas Trench, a philosophy professor teaches a course that’s often “transformative” for his students -- Daniel S. Helman on being a philosopher on Yap, Micronesia
“It would be better for philosophy, and the humanities more generally, if the horizons of rational knowledge expanded rather than continued to contract. I am, therefore, begging at the very least for better atheists” -- Jennifer Frey (South Carolina) on philosophy's self-conception & future
A philosophical look at Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity” -- use it with care, advise Nathan Ballantyne (Fordham) and Peter H. Ditto (Irvine)
“You ought to care equally about people no matter when they exist, whether today, next year, or in a couple billion years henceforth” -- but speculations about the distant future shouldn't be an excuse for ignoring today's moral problems
“Try to see it my way / You and I both know that we are epistemic peers / I will see it your way / I might be confused because I had a few more beers” -- "We Can Work It Out", epistemology of disagreement version, by Brown University philosophers
“Perhaps one reason we think extinction would be so bad is that we have failed to recognise just how awful extreme agony is” -- Roger Crisp (Oxford) on the difficulty of moral questions surrounding possible human extinction
The philosophy of “my body, my choice” and its use as a slogan to defend abortion rights -- commentary from Elizabeth Lanphier (Cincinnati)
Understanding the popularity of Stoicism -- Vice reports on the cultural phenomenon, with comments from philosophers and other scholars
Researchers claim to have created a “time crystal… an object whose parts move in a regular, repeating cycle, sustaining this constant change without burning any energy” -- do they put "a new angle on the distinction between time and space"?
Pessimistic atheism in “Crimes and Misdemeanors” -- theist Edward Feser (Pasadena) appreciates Woody Allen's atheism
“Anything interesting is something that a lot of people are going to hate. All the ways of mitigating the hate make your text boringer. So, that’s probably why you’re not reading an academic journal right now” -- Michael Huemer (Colorado) on academic writing
“While there is surprisingly little deception on many online platforms, we may nonetheless be witnessing a failure of virtue, for there also does not appear to be much evidence of true honesty” -- Christian Miller (Wake Forest) on online lying
“I handed Heidegger my card… He screamed at me” -- when Paul Schilpp, editor of The Library of Living Philosophers, tried to get Heidegger to agree to a volume on him
“The truly valuable skill here isn’t the capacity to push yourself harder, but to stop and recuperate despite the discomfort of knowing that work remains unfinished, emails unanswered, other people’s demands unfulfilled” -- advice about work
When should we act for the sake of past people or our own past interests? -- a discussion about our duties to the past
Plunderous Plato, Dangerous Descartes, Lethal Locke, Ferocious Frege, and the rest of the Philosophical Powers action figures -- from way back in the day
That “interval during which we might not only speculate among ourselves about what might happen next, but also about what the characters should and should not do, and about which were ones are admirable or cowards or downright despicable” -- Noël Carroll (CUNY) on the costs of binge-wacthing
Kant’s view is that “trying to provide God’s reasons is itself evidence that you’ve got a culpably messed up view of what you can know, and trying to use evil to disprove God shows the same” -- Robert Gressis (CSUN) interviewed on Kant, religion, ethics, the current state of philosophy, and more
“We should keep in mind there’s a collective aspect to privacy. Every time you give out data about yourself, you are also exposing others” -- Carissa Véliz (Oxford ) interviewed by Evan Selinger (RIT) on data privacy in The Boston Globe
“What is X?” is a new philosophy podcast from Justin E.H. Smith & The Point in which he hosts interviews with experts on questions like “What is nature?” or “What is beauty?” -- the first episode, "What is Philosophy?" is with Agnes Callard (Chicago)
“A box much lighter than the others, nearly falling to pieces with a red cloth hanging out on all sides, caught my attention. Opening it gently, I was met with a face” -- the discovery of Spinoza's death mask
“The unlived life is not worth examining” -- aphorisms of the late great popularizer of philosophy, Bryan Magee
John Locke’s pancake recipe. Seriously. -- be warned: between the cream, freshly grated nutmeg, and orangeflower water it will be hard to leave enough and as good for others
In development: “Nietzsche! The Musical” -- "Time and again, he reached for a way to love life... His story of struggle and affirmation carries relevance for our time"
Experimental confirmation of Hume’s ideas about imagination and perception? -- "reality and imagination are completely intermixed in our brain which means that the separation between our inner world and the outside world is not as clear as we might like to think"
“The result is an agent with the ability to succeed at a wide spectrum of tasks” -- Google's significant progress training AI agents in a multiplayer environment "meant to simulate the physical world" and that involves "complex, non-linear interactions" (via MR)
“Long Covid” raises issues in bio-medical ethics, philosophy of medicine, philosophy of disability, business ethics -- Gregory Pence (Alabama) surveys some of the facts and questions related to a condition millions are suffering from
“In Socrates’s late-night imagination, sex ought to benefit neither church nor common good but philosophy students” -- Mary Townsend (St. John's) on eugenics, Socrates, and the "rationalization of eros"
Suppose there’s only a 1% chance that bugs are sentient -- despite that small chance, we ought to support "a moral presumption against harming insects," argue Jeff Sebo (NYU) & Jason Schukraft (Rethink Priorities)
“All the liars are calling me one” -- The Taylor Swift Paradox, as unpacked and analyzed by Theresa Helke (Smith)
“Socrates’s method eschewed the pressure to persuade… His politics of humility involved genuinely opening up the question under dispute” -- Agnes Callard (Chicago) appreciates Socrates' spirit of collaborative inquiry
“They hated it” -- Patricia Churchland (UCSD) interviewed about her work on the mind on Ideas Roadshow
Bob Moses, “a soft-spoken pioneer of the civil rights movement who faced relentless intimidation and brutal violence to register Black voters in Mississippi in the 1960s, and who later started a national organization devoted to teaching math as a means to a more equal society,” has died -- he majored in philosophy at Hamilton College and was working on his PhD in philosophy at Harvard "when he was forced to leave because of the death of his mother and the hospitalization of his father"
“Banded mongooses, acting from behind a veil of ignorance over kinship, allocate postnatal care in a way that reduces inequality among offspring, in the manner predicted by a Rawlsian model of cooperation” -- Rawlsianism in the wild
A philosopher teams up with the biggest art festival in Britain -- Vid Simoniti (Liverpool) and the Liverpool Biennial produce a series: "Art Against the World"
The Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory is “unquestionably the real deal” -- Vogue profiles Amia Srinivasan (Oxford)
“Panpsychism’s appeal may stem partly from the fact that scientists currently can not explain what consciousness actually is” -- philosophy of mind covered at Salon
“There are grounds for doubt… about the power of comedy to effect social change. But I don’t think that robs it of social value. We need to revise our expectations” -- Kieran Setiya (MIT) on political comedy
“This was a matter of redeeming humanity, of whether mathematics is what we always thought it was” -- why logicians and mathematicians are excited about a new proof about the sizes of infinity
Using the capabilities approach to assess the wellbeing of renters -- a report from the UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence makes use of Martha Nussbaum's ideas
A new series interviews scientists and philosophers on questions about consciousness -- hosted by Philip Goff (Durham) and Keith Frankish (Sheffield)
“If you are a sage, and you can’t do wrong, then there is no room for moral anguish or angst… But what if you are not a sage?” -- Nancy Sherman (Georgetown) on compassion, mercy, the military, and the social side of Stoic grit
“I keep looking to traditional… epistemology and finding it mostly unhelpful. But I keep finding bits of aesthetics and the philosophy of art incredibly useful” -- C. Thi Nguyen (Utah) on why philosophy of art and social epistemology are "intellectual soulmates"
“To say you’re giving up on the problem of demarcation does not mean that you are giving up on the idea that there is something distinctive about science” -- and we can acknowledge the limits of science while still vigorously defending it, says Lee McIntyre (Boston University), interviewed at 3:16AM
“What we need isn’t a kind of positive hermeneutics to be inculcated in viewers of pornography, so that they can better interpret what is going on… what we need is the onslaught of images to just stop for a moment” -- Amia Srinivasan (Oxford) interviewed on pornography and sexuality
“Seeing that I don’t write about things or topics but about what people say about things was one of the most important lessons I learned” -- Martin Lenz (Groningen) explains
“I found myself astonished by idea that the structural simplicity I associate with piano keys is the result of an ‘acceptable compromise’ to solve practical problems of musicians playing together” -- Patricia Marino (Waterloo) on subjectivity, simplicity, elegance, and the philosophy of keyboard engineering
“Narcissistic academic professionalism”, “cowardly deference”, “intellectual and spiritual bankruptcy” -- excerpts from Cornel West's letter of resignation from Harvard
Africana Philosophy in the 20th Century -- a series of episodes of The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, with several guest philosophers
Logic puzzles recently used to screen applicants to philosophy degree programs at Oxford -- from the collection of Joel David Hamkins
“Policing boundaries – whether between genders or between literature and philosophy – is only necessary if the line in question is liable to be transgressed” -- Carrie Jenkins (UBC) on literature, philosophy, gender, and emotion
“Philosophy is probably the most internationalized of the humanities subjects in Sweden” -- Sofia Jeppsson (Umeå) on what it's like being a philosopher in Sweden
“If you’re blind to the way circumstance shapes someone’s behavior, it’s going to be hard to really appreciate how the world looks to them” -- Robert Wright on Lee Ross, the fundamental attribution error, and cognitive empathy
Looking for some philosophy to listen to? -- a list of nearly 100 different philosophy podcasts
“The work of a professional philosopher in Ghana is significantly constrained” -- Emmanuel Ifeanyi Ani (University of Ghana) on what it's like to be a philosopher in his country
“There’d be much less pessimistic skepticism about the future of analytic philosophy if people were more familiar with some of the reasons to reject [the ‘grand march to Kripke’] narrative” -- Preston Stovall (University of Hradec Králové) defends analytic philosophy
“College vaccination requirements decidedly do not violate the core principles of medical ethics” -- Nathan Nobis (Morehouse) responds to critics of the requirements
“Clear writing… is aggressive and sadistic—not in its content but in the domination it attempts” -- Simon Evnine (Miami) on clarity
“The world’s foremost consequentialist signed. The world’s foremost deontologist signed. Two of the most prominent bioethicists in the world signed…” Not good enough? -- on the effort to hold human challenge trials in the U.S., and other aspects of COVID-19 response
Philosophy has “a tradition that you cut other people down… I sometimes hear our female students say, ‘I can’t really be a philosopher because that’s not what I feel like doing'” -- "I say to them, 'There are many different ways of doing philosophy'" -- Martha Nussbaum (Chicago)
Getting students to do the readings -- at The Philosophers' Cocoon, with helpful suggestions in the comments
“A young man smoking a pipe cannot do so without looking like a pompous dick… and Classics finds itself in a similar quandary” -- actor Stephen Fry on breaking the cycle of elitism and showing the value of the classics to today's youth (via The Browser)
Philosophers as public intellectuals -- a roundtable discussion with Anastasia Berg (Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem), Agnes Callard (Chicago), and Justin Weinberg (South Carolina)
For two decades, he “encouraged his students to examine the meaning of life and become active and conscientious citizens who help build societies based on values such as justice and liberty” -- now, visiting his former students in prison is part of the life of Chow Po Chung (Chinese Univ. of Hong Kong)
“Being a philosopher, for me, amounts to never wanting to own up out loud to what you are or should be doing” -- marvelous prose from Amy Olberding (Oklahoma) about a stranger, a truck in need of repair, sadness, and a book about death
“We worry about being too gullible with other people. But we should also worry about technological gullibility—about being too willing and eager to trust technologies without realising how deeply they will change us” -- C. Thi Nguyen (Utah) on trust & technology
“EleutherAI’s dataset for large language models, The Pile, includes PhilPapers! So, philosofriends, I prompted their GPT-J-6B to write abstracts based on a few of your titles” -- Kathleen Creel (Stanford) presents her "favorite fake abstracts (vs the real papers)"
A paper in Phil Studies, says a gamer, “really helped me to gain confidence and start playing League of Legends again” -- a brief video with both recordings of gameplay and screenshots of Michael Ridge's "Illusory attitudes and the playful stoic" -- and an appreciation of the virtue of "lightness"
The family had long thought that “Philosopher Reading” was relatively worthless -- but the painting was discovered to be by Jean-Honoré Fragonard and recently sold at auction for over $9 million
“How could it be that a single cat-call, which occurs in isolation, contains seemingly innocuous content, and should therefore by all accounts be nothing more than a communicative pinprick, can nonetheless wrong its target?” -- Lucy McDonald (Cambridge) takes up the question
A bike tour of Amsterdam inspired by Spinoza -- along the "Spinozaroute" are 11 specially decorated benches with unique QR codes for free related podcast episodes on humans and nature
“Without the Comb, the Razor is too dangerous” -- metaphysics, ideology, sexual orientation, and more, in an interview with Peter Finocchiaro (Wuhan)
“The failure of the Board of Trustees to approve tenure for Nikole Hannah-Jones is doing great harm to the standing, reputation, and integrity of the University that I have served energetically since 2003” -- Marc Lange (UNC Chapel Hill) has some words for the Board
A collection of video interviews with philosophers -- and video explainers on topics in ethics, logic, and more, from Sahar Joakim (St. Louis CC)
“The Stone showed that there is a large audience for philosophical ideas, a fact which still surprises and pleases us” -- John Kaag (UMass Lowell) and Crispin Sartwell (Dickinson) on the end of the NYT's dedicated philosophy column
“Pragmatic genealogists take an idea whose practical value is in doubt, or elusive, and try to reverse-engineer the idea’s function in human affairs by figuring out what practical concerns, if any, it answers to” -- Matthieu Queloz (Oxford) on pragmatic genealogies of ideas, such as "state of nature" models
The rewards and risks of philosophical tourism -- Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) comments on Julian Baggini's "How the World Thinks: A Global History of Philosophy"
The ethics of aesthetics and the problem of global warming -- Michael Spicher (Aesthetics Research Lab) on how beauty, ugliness, and environmental technology
10 new conversations with 10 philosophers -- the new season of the UnMute Podcast from Myisha Cherry (UC Riverside) was recently released
“Bearing the facts about publishing in mind helps to rebut one common argument against cancellation: it doesn’t suppress ideas” -- and besides, says Neil Levy (Oxford) "if cancelling a book by some right-wing provocateur opens up space for a different book that is just or more as valuable, then it’s hard to see how the world has suffered a net loss"
A look at six definitions of “gender identity” leads a philosopher to suggest eliminating the concept -- still, argues Anca Gheaus (CEU) "a feminism without gender identity does not exclude trans people"
“We normally think of grit as opposed to being a quitter, but quitting in order to move on to a different approach to a higher level goal can be an exhibition of grit” -- thoughts from Alexander Pruss (Baylor)
The value of being able to “practise in all things a certain nonchalance which conceals all artistry and makes whatever one says or does seem uncontrived and effortless” -- Helen De Cruz (SLU) on "sprezzatura" in academia
Academics and authors issue public letter in support of the Oxford University Press USA Union Campaign -- "the collective voice of OUP workers can contribute to the Press’s mission of publishing excellence"
As a student he took his engineering education “beyond the technical into the philosophical” -- a profile of philosophy-minded engineer Zachary Pirtle, who recently won a NASA Early Career Achievement Medal; worth sharing with science-minded undergrads.
“The kind of ethics we should hope the arts and humanities steer us towards is one that ameliorates and transcends the limitations and distortions of this dominant paradigm derived from science and economics” -- John Tasioulas (Oxford) on the value of humanistic thinking for AI ethics
The definition, defining moment, history, politics, and future of analytic philosophy -- a discussion with Christoph Schuringa (NCH)
What does it mean to call an inanimate object “racist”? -- Vanessa Carbonell (Cincinatti) and Shen-yi Liao (Puget Sound) explain, with a focus on medical devices
“The problem with the cities that Plato and Aristotle envision is not that their citizens lack autonomy… The problem is that most of us think that Plato and Aristotle are simply wrong about what the wise and just laws are” -- Christopher Frey (South Carolina) on philosopher kings and liberal individualism
“You cannot simply cut people off; you are not free to leave at any time… If your [lives are] entwined” -- Agnes Callard (Chicago) on the ethics of ending relationships
“What does story telling do to people? It is making them dream, it is making them suffer as well. But can we stop storytelling? I don’t think so.” -- Julie Delpy, actress in and co-writer of the films "Before Sunrise," "Before Sunset," and "Before Midnight", is interviewed by philosophers at AfB
“The fact that there are unhealthy forms of pity should not prevent us from recognising its humanising element” -- Gordon Marino (St. Olaf) on pity
Do people view pain as mind-centric or body-centric? -- new results suggest people conceive of pain as a "hybrid combining both mental and bodily aspects"
Underphilosophized: “the fraught relationship between the private insurance industry and the state, and the growing power of insurance companies in gathering and wielding data about individuals and groups” -- Caley Horan (MIT) looks at the issues
The allies of Viktor Orban, the right-wing prime minister of Hungary, “have poured £1.5 million into a chain of coffee shops in Scruton’s memory” -- the first cafe to open features "memorabilia including books, records and a teapot donated by the widow of Sir Roger Scruton"
“By contemplating what is possible in the universe, in addition to what happens, we have a much more complete picture of the physical world” -- Chiara Marletto (Oxford) on the importance of counterfactuals in science
“8-bit” style watercolor rendition of Raphael’s “School of Athens” -- by artist Adam Lister
“Engineers of the human soul would wish to deal with…evil by suppression; literature, real literature, deals with it through the power of imaginative sublimation” -- also, says Justin E.H. Smith, "philosophy is not a fan club, and if you are treating it as one, this is because you do not really understand what philosophy is"
“The philosophical picture of natural kinds… are not well-suited to the aims of medicine and disease classification” -- an interview with Anya Plutynski (Wash. U. St. Louis) on the philosophy of cancer and other questions related to philosophy, science, and medicine
“Whether we frame the relevant decision problems from the perspective of the individual or from an aggregate perspective can make a difference” -- Johanna Thoma (LSE) on why the morality of artificial intelligences might rationally differ from the morality of humans
“If speaking our minds is important to developing ourselves as rational creatures, and if such development is at least one important aspect of the good life, then we ought not to sacrifice it willy-nilly at the altar of social status” -- Hrishikesh Joshi (Bowling Green) brings together Aristotle and an interactionist account of reason
“There is a switch that can divert the trolley onto another track, away from the bill. But! Lying strapped to that length of track is the filibuster” -- the filibuster variant of the trolley problem, from Alexandra Petri (via Kathleen Wallace)
“Maybe in the end numbers will come to seem a little like the way logic as used in the Middle Ages might seem to us today: a framework for determining things that’s much less complete and powerful than what we now have” -- have we been tricked by the limits of our epistemology into making mistakes about metaphysics in regards to numbers? (via MR)
“Whatever I knew about masks and vaccines at an intellectual level, violating those expectations still felt wrong” -- Evan Westra (York) on the weirdness of going maskless
“Looking back, when did you feel like you had made your mark in the field?” “I have not reached that point yet.” -- Amartya Sen (Harvard) is interviewed about his life, education, and work
What’s so bad about the literary dominance of white men? -- figuring out the answer isn't as easy as you might think, says Rachel Fraser (Oxford)
“A lot of times, the value of a thing in our lives is not just what it presents, on its face, as its function” -- Zoom makes communication efficient, and efficiency has its costs, writes C. Thi Nguyen (Utah)
“With this series of adversarial collaborations, neuroscientists will get closer to understanding consciousness and how it fits into the physical world while improving scientific practices along the way” -- empirically testing the predictions of different theories of consciousness (via Brian Earp)
How to read philosophy with “less eyestrain, consistent annotations, fewer distractions, great mobility, being able to work outside, with much of the haptics of working on paper” -- Gregor Bös, a philosophy PhD candidate (KCL), helpfully explains his "e-ink solution for focused reading and writing"
“It’s enough for [scientific papers] to draw attention to an idea that is worth pursuing further—and an idea need not be true, well-justified given all our evidence, nor even believed by the scientist in order to pass that test” -- Haixin Dang (Leeds) & Liam Kofi Bright (LSE) on the value of contradictory science
“I want to be somebody who, until the last moment of my life, is absorbing what’s going on around me, learning from it, growing, and shifting” -- a video profile of longtime philosopher and relatively new boxer Quill Kukla (Georgetown)
“Lol… the audacity”: when the Society for the Social Studies of Science tried to school MC Hammer -- and what can be learned from this episode, from Joshua Earle (Virginia Tech)
“There was no Renaissance. It is an invention by historians, a fiction made in order to tell a story… about the development of philosophy”” -- Henrik Lagerlund (Stockholm) makes the case for historiographical nihilism
Is this art? -- an Italian artist sells his latest invisible sculpture
“It seems we want to let money in to further research and philosophical excellence and improve and strengthen departments even if it moves a dept in a direction it would not have itself chosen, so long as that path is one of the paths the dept deems a reasonable direction” -- David Sobel (Syracuse) on outside funding for academic hires
Kant’s Copernican Revolution -- Fiona Hughes (Esssex), Anil Gomes (Oxford), and John Callanan (KCL) talk about Kant on the BBC's In Our Time
“We need advocates to work out all the options, after all” -- Richard Chappell (Miami) on why disagreement between philosophers should not be seen as evidence of philosophy's failure
“Human beings are who we are: we’re walking disasters, we’re walking wonders at the same time” -- Cornel West (Union Theological Seminary) in conversation with Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt)
The sociological aspects of “the end of analytic philosophy” -- from the point of view of a relatively recent philosophy PhD, Dave Atenasio (Frostburg)
“I think that off-the-charts retributivism is weak. I think it is weak because it just means I have nothing constructive to do, so I’m going to punish you“ -- Martha Nussbaum (Chicago) interviewed in The New Yorker
More on racial, ethnic, and gender diversity among US philosophy students and faculty -- "It's mixed news"
Leibniz’s freaky unicorn -- the "imaginatively reassembled" skeleton of which he depicted in his Protogaea
“Even if our evolutionary background does not debunk our claim to know objective moral truths, the explanatory stories told by debunkers can still be useful in flagging ways in which evolutionary influences might be distorting our moral thinking” -- William J. Fitzpatrick (Rochester) on the interplay of metaethics and science
Interested in teaching Latin American philosophy but fear you don’t know enough? Here’s how -- and why, from Robert Eli Sanchez, Jr. (Occidental)
“Before the ruling, a book had to prove that it was not obscene before being allowed to cross the border; after, customs had to prove that something was indecent before seizing it” -- how the obscenity case of a book by philosopher Richard Mohr (Illinois) changed Canadian free speech law
“On average, people in more individualist countries donate more money, more blood, more bone marrow and more organs” -- recent research on individualism, altruism, and selfishness
“The question I am asking is whether, looking at ourselves from outside, we should come to view our attachment to rights and deontology as an unnecessarily cluttered moral outlook” -- Thomas Nagel (NYU) attempts to bring our moral intuitions and the science on them into reflective equilibrium.
On teaching: “I don’t think it is a particularly meaningful job, despite what some people claim” -- John Danaher (NUI) explains his negative view of teaching
APA reinstates Diversity Grant and Small Grants programs -- they had been suspended during the pandemic. Applications are open now.
Improvement through subtraction -- experimental research on the human tendencies to think solutions involve adding something, and to overlook solutions that involve removing something
“Further reflections on tolerance and its difficulty” -- T.M. Scanlon (Harvard) delivers the 2021 Knox Lecture at St. Andrews
“Weil was an anarchist who happened to espouse conservative ideals” -- Robert Zaretsky (Houston) on how Simone Weil might offer conservatives "a path forward"
“We found that people who do not fall for COVID-19 misinformation have two qualities in common: they are curious, and they do not cling to their views” -- a team of philosophers bring their work on epistemic trust to bear on the spread of pandemic falsehoods
The promise and perils of brain-computer interface technology -- a survey of what we can currently do with BCI and what we might end up doing
Which schools have the greatest racial diversity among their philosophy majors? -- Eric Schwitzgebel (Riverside) investigates
“I had just finished my oral exam with Donald Davidson, John Searle, and Hubert Dreyfus [and switched] to working as a staff writer for David Letterman…” -- Eric Kaplan, a television writer with a PhD in philosophy, on how "stories can reach places essays don't"
“My point is not that CRISPR technology is an intrinsically bad thing… but that it is taking place in an intrinsically problematic system” -- John Dupré (Exeter) looks at recent books on gene editing and its controversies
Florida politician: “If Socrates was out philosophizing in American society today, he would be cancelled real quick” -- Everyone else: "maybe you want to sit down for this"
Stoicism seems to have a lot of popular appeal; might existentialism be next? -- Gordon Marino (St. Olaf) on the counsel of Kierkegaard
“You cannot understand what science is, and therefore cannot really do philosophy of science, without understanding the extent to which science is embedded in culture” -- a defense of ethnoscience from Justin E.H. Smith (Paris)
Would you like to learn how to incorporate argument-mapping into your teaching? -- there's a free seminar on it coming up in June, sponsored by ThinkerAnalytix and Harvard's Dept. of Philosophy
A list of black studies texts philosophers should be reading -- a list from Nicholas Whittaker (CUNY)
If we’re interested in holding police accountable, we need to know what they should do. Medicine and public health provide some instructive analogies. -- Brandon del Pozo (Miriam Hospital/Brown University) on how to improve policing
Mommy-shaming and philosophy of science -- Cailin O’Connor (UC Irvine) on "the use of scientific findings to promote unrealistic standards for modern parents"
When does a philosophy Ph.D. go “stale”? -- a discussion of some findings from Charles Lassiter (Gonzaga)
Some infinities are bigger than others -- a new animation tells the story of Hilbert's Hotel
“Let’s sort out what is going on here” -- this new interview with Timothy Williamson (Oxford), conducted by Hasen Khudairi, skips the small talk and gets right to exploring his views on a variety of philosophical topics
“The self is a highly organised network” -- What does this mean, and why should we believe it? Kathleen Wallace (Hofstra) explains.
“There is much interaction in Japan between people working in different areas and traditions of philosophy, and across the so-called analytic/continental divide” -- Katsunori Miyahara and Kengo Miyazono (Hokkaido) on being a philosopher in Japan
“How can we allow trans athletes to compete without giving them an unfair advantage over their competitors?” -- a proposal from Chris Surprenant (New Orleans)
“The moral guilt we feel upon being vaccinated is one we have good reason to sit with, rather than ease” -- Elizabeth Lanphier (Cincinnati) explains why
“When considering going rogue, jurors should aim to strike a balance between following their own sense of justice and respecting the accumulated cultural knowledge represented by the law” -- Doug McConnell (Oxford) provides guidance for those considering jury nullification
“A creep is close to normal on the outside, but not quite normal… beneath the surface lurks an active malevolence — maybe sexual, maybe not” -- the guy who wrote the book on being a jerk gives creepiness a try
The popular conception of Stoicism as a me-focused collection of life hacks “misses ancient Stoicism’s emphasis on our flourishing as social selves, connected locally and globally” -- Nancy Sherman (Georgetown) on "the enduring Stoic promise: to empower us in our common humanity"
“It seems that philosophical arguments can be effective in convincing people that they have moral duties to the global poor and move them to act in ways that are consistent with these convictions” -- new experimental philosophy on "the real-world impact of philosophical arguments"
“I tend to think that simply applying deontology or consequentialism is not a great way to approach issues in applied ethics” -- ethics, authenticity, nurses' strikes, and more, in an interview with Paul Neiman (Weber State)
The Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Review -- the new international undergraduate journal is based at the Kellogg Center for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Virginia Tech.
“These issues would not be too concerning for a budding science; they are anomalies for a thirty-year old research tradition that has been extremely successful at selling itself to policy makers and the public” -- Edouard Machery (Pitt) offers a lengthy critique of research on implicit attitudes and bias
“The idea that children are capable of careful thinking about abstract issues is difficult for many adults to accept” -- Jana Mohr Lone (Washington) on doing philosophy with children and what she has learned from them
Minds, symbolic forms, and the cultural world -- Samantha Matherne (Harvard) and Carrie Figdor (Iowa) discuss the philosophy of Ernst Cassirer
Learning about virtue by studying the “difference between cultivating and controlling disgust” -- Charlie Kurth (WMU) on the moral value of disgust
“The highest honorary position in German Protestantism” has been given to a 25-year-old who majored in philosophy -- Anna-Nicole Heinrich is the new chair of the Synod of the Evangelical Church in Germany (via Adrian Kind)
“Is it fortune cookies or a tractatus, a mantra or a rich, textured, and open-ended philosophical program?” -- Daniel Little (UM-Dearborn) on whether Seneca has a system of philosophy
On the moral status of animals, Kantian moral philosophy in practice, and altruism -- a brief interview with Christine Korsgaard (Harvard) by Erich Grunewald
Personal transformation and practical reason -- a conversation with Agnes Callard (Chicago) and Laurie Paul (Yale)
“To reject demonization is to attempt to understand what every other human being does as something you might have done yourself” -- an interview with Samuel Fleishacker on a range of topics, including empathy, Adam Smith, ethics, philosophy of religion, and more
“Appropriate caution in philosophy can become timidity in politics” -- Julian Baggini on Hume and the need to supplement the skeptical wisdom of conservatism with progressive skepticism about the status quo
“Philosophers often feel superior on the grounds that they provide arguments. It is surprising, then, that the poets are more likely to provide demonstrations” -- AfB's series of brief reflections by philosophers on art, music, poetry, films, and literature continues, with a recent entry from Errol Lord (U Penn)
In July 2020, a dozen philosophers submitted an amicus brief in support of legal personhood status for an elephant at the Bronx Zoo -- yesterday, the New York Court of Appeals agreed to hear the case (via Spencer Lo)
“Constructor theory puts counterfactuals at the very foundation of physics, so that the most fundamental laws can be formulated in these terms” -- Chiara Marletto (Oxford) is interviewed about an approach to physics based on possibility and impossibility
Philosopher, artist, and now education activist -- Adrian Piper, who moved to Berlin 16 years ago, is planning a demonstration calling for smaller school class sizes in Germany
“Philosophy is about acquiring wisdom and developing the virtues… with proper instruction, boxing can be fertile ground for those two endeavors” -- a profile of philosophy professor and boxing coach Gordon Marino (St. Olaf)
Criticisms of Howard University’s decision to shut its classics department “overlook a deeper and more urgent problem” -- Brandon Hogan & Jacoby Adeshei Carter, "philosophy professors at Howard who have reverence for the classics"
“My diet is emphatically not the product of an effective-altruist calculus, but rather a strange blend of Kafka-like hunger artistry, neo-Stylitism, deep visceral horror at the very thought of factory farming…” -- Justin E.H. Smith (Paris) on eating animals, converting convictions into an identity, and the aesthetics of moral life
If the university can “fire faculty with impunity, it will set a precedent that will eviscerate the foundational principles of both free speech and of faculty governance on college and university campuses” -- Linfield University has fired a faculty member for speaking up about alleged sexual abuse by board trustees and anti-Semitic remarks by the president
Argument Schemes: a video playlist that uses clips from movies to illustrate logical argument forms -- from Amsterdam University College
Derek Parfit: philosopher, photographer, and… lampost designer? -- yes, according to Nigel Warburton, who learned it from Janet Radcliffe-Richards (who was married to Parfit)
Shame and love in reading and understanding philosophical texts -- reflections from Martin Lenz (Groningen)
“There are immoral and outrageous ideas that cause no controversy whatever” -- perhaps we need a "Journal of Hegemonically Uncontroversial Ideas," writes Leslie Green (Oxford)
“Students need not only learn to think well for themselves… they need to learn to help others think well, too” -- T. Ryan Byerly (Sheffield) on "educating for intellectual dependability"
“Polite Conversations: Philosophers Discuss the Arts” -- a series of interviews with philosophers about their work in aesthetics and philosophy of art, conducted by Brandon Polite (Knox)
“How philosophy is making me a better scientist” -- genomics data science PhD student Rasha Shraim recounts various ways her philosophy background informs and improves her science work (via Michael Dale)
An unusually good newspaper piece on free will, for which several philosophers were consulted -- its author, Oliver Burkeman, deserves a lot of credit... or does he?
“The only idea we are in fact able to conjure of what intelligent beings elsewhere may be like is one that we extrapolate directly from our idea of our own intelligence” -- Justin E.H. Smith (Paris) on how this is "a gross failure of imagination"
Scientists have created human-monkey embryos -- is this a problem? a possible solution to a problem? both?
Junior scholars in philosophy of science on the effects of the pandemic on their work -- testimonies collected by the European Philosophy of Science Association
When Rudolf Carnap visited three imprisoned Mexican philosophers -- Carnap's own account of his visit (via Nathan Ballantyne)
“Our challenge is to see how he can both endorse restrictions on a range of expression of opinion and yet argue for absolute freedom of discussion” -- several philosophers on updating Mill on speech
“The position of advocating for moderation, civility, and civic friendship does not magically rise above the fray, rendering itself, by its peaceable face, immune to debunking arguments and accusations of motivated reasoning” -- C. Thi Nguyen (Utah) on polarization, propaganda, and political explanation
An online Wittgenstein gallery -- featuring photos, notes, and other materials
Can one “get credit for doing the right thing without seeing oneself as doing the right thing”? -- Nomy Arpaly (Brown) on understanding accidentality
“Eventually, the algorithm will find you” -- Simon DeDeo (CMU) on why he quit social media
“I think offering a platform for reasoned argument is not participating in oppression. I think it’s trying to get to the truth” -- very good interview of Peter Singer (Princeton) by Daniel Gross in The New Yorker
“With collective identity comes collective responsibility” -- Jessica Wolfendale (Marquette) explains how this applies to the military in regard to war crimes
“We need the combined wisdom of the mathematician, the philosopher and the psychological counsellor to help combat the forces that sustain problem gambling” -- Catalin Barboianu with an interesting argument for practical, applied interdisciplinarity
How the brain literally “turns” sensory data into memories -- new work in the neuroscience of memory
Do you have an obligation to get vaccinated? -- the answer is more complicated than you might think, argues Travis Rieder (Johns Hopkins)
20 works of philosophical fiction -- a list from Book Riot
“Do we really need a theory of instrumental rationality?” -- we do, says Sergio Tenenbaum (Toronto), and he is explaining why and what it should look like at Brains this week
“Spock is held up as this exemplar of logic and reason and rationality” -- but he's really "a straw man... of reason and rationality, because he keeps making all these dumb mistakes" (via MR)
Zoom and academic freedom -- the firm develops a policy in the wake of outcries over its previous decisions to disallow certain events on its system
“Upon his return to America, he recognized the critical importance of getting at the root of racial prejudice and, in his case, how we treat Asian Americans” -- how Dewey's thoughts on bigotry are relevant today
“An understanding of Coleridge’s thinking… provides insight into the beginnings of the analytic-Continental divide and a bridge between materialist and dynamic (powers-based) views in the sciences” -- Peter Cheyne (Shimane) on the philosophy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Radical embodied cognitive science -- a conversation ranging across philosophy and psychology with Richard Brown (CUNY) and Tony Chemero (Cincinnati)
“What do accountants know about morality? More than you might think, but not enough” -- Robert Bloomfield (Cornell) sets out "moral accounting" and asks philosophers for feedback
“Rogue Philosophers” is a new video series of conversations -- between academic philosopher Jennifer Scuro and philosophical counselor Monica Vilhauer
The park in Athens that is home to the site of Plato’s Academy is getting a makeover -- the plan, which includes a new archaeological museum, "fully respects the history of the space and revives the spirit of the Platonic Academy for the simultaneous education of mind and body," says Greece's culture minister
“I think imagination can do much more than philosophers often give it credit for” -- an interview with Amy Kind (Claremont McKenna)
29 philosophers agree: enough with the repugnant conclusion already! -- in Utilitas. (Editorial note: ok, but let's stop framing Parfit's problems as *about* population; his "population problems" are no more about population than trolley problems are about trolleys)
What should you do as the commenter on a philosophy paper? -- some common and not-so-common options, from Jonathan Ichikawa (UBC)
What’s the use of impostor syndrome? -- Stephen Gadsby (Monash) thinks it may be motivating
“He is much more than an intellectual, he is an adventurer of ideas” -- “Voltaire in Love” is a new four-episode Franco-Belgian mini-series
“Pro-choice advocates have deliberately avoided engaging moral or ethical questions about abortion” -- they shouldn't, argues Nathan Nobis (Morehouse) and Jonathan Dudley (JHU)
“All I knew was that it was interesting” -- Stephen Darwall (Yale) interviewed by Connie Rosati (UT Austin) about his life and work in philosophy in PEA Soup's "Mentees Interviewing Mentors" series

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