New links…
- “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
Mini-Heap posts usually appear when 7 or so new items accumulate in the Heap of Links, a collection of items from around the web that may be of interest to philosophers. The Heap of Links consists partly of suggestions from readers; if you find something online that you think would be of interest to the philosophical community, please send it in for consideration for the Heap. Thank you.
Previous Edition
This short blog post and appended reading list may interest those profoundly concerned with the systematic attack on Liberal democracy in the U.S. by the (economic and political) powers-that-be: Discretionary reading as but one antidote for coping with the hydra-headed crisis of the would-be Liberal democratic polity in the U.S.
This is rather different from the earlier post (and has proven popular with my FB friends). It is related to my long-standing research on three overlapping therapies of desire: philosophical, spiritual and psychoanalytic: Spiritual philosophy and exercises: Simone Weil and the “paradox of effort and grace” … or “intimations of mysticism”