Philosophy and the Sciences

MIT Launches Billion Dollar Ethics-Oriented AI Initiative

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is establishing a new college focused on the development and “ethical application” artificial intelligence. (more…)

Lessons on Disagreement from a Psychologist of Human Error

Lee Ross (Stanford), an influential social psychologist, reflects on his career of studying error and disagreement in a new essay at Perspectives on Psychological Science. (more…)

When Scientists Read Philosophy, Are They Reading The “Wrong Philosophers”?

“The trouble with physicists who denigrate philosophy is that they read the wrong philosophers, which sad to say is most philosophers.”

That’s Clark Glymour (Carnegie Mellon) in an interview with Richard Marshall at 3:AM Magazine. (more…)

Freaky Audio Illusions In The News

By now, you’ve probably heard of the “laurel/yanny” audio illusion making the rounds. If not, you can hear it on the page of this article about it at The New York Times that embeds a helpful tool to modify its frequencies in various ways to adjust which of the two words it sounds more like. (more…)

Resurrecting Brains: Philosophical Questions and New Ethical Territory (guest post)

A team of scientists led by Nenad Sestan (Yale) have “restored circulation to the brains of decapitated pigs and kept the reanimated organs alive for as long as 36 hours,” reports MIT Technology Review. The method used to keep pigs’ brains alive outside the body will work on other animals, including primates, Sestan said. The following is a guest post * by Carolyn Di..

Philosophical Implications of New Thought-Imaging Technology

The CBC reports on recent work on thought-imaging technology, the use and development of which would raise various questions in ethics, and which would possibly be relevant to work in philosophy of mind, philosophy of perception, philosophy of science, philosophy of action, and other areas of philosophy. (more…)

Why Science Education Needs Philosophy

Many of the young people who attend my classes think that philosophy is a fuzzy discipline that’s concerned only with matters of opinion, whereas science is in the business of discovering facts, delivering proofs, and disseminating objective truths. Furthermore, many of them believe that scientists can answer philosophical questions, but philosophers have no busines..

What Neuroscience Can and Cannot Do for Philosophy

Adina Roskies, professor of philosophy at Dartmouth College, discusses neuroscience and philosophy in a recent interview with Richard Marshall at 3AM:Magazine. (more…)

Scientism’s Threat To Philosophy

So, just as naturalism-as-opposed-to-apriorism succumbs to scientism when it falsely assumes that whatever isn’t a priori must be science, naturalism-as-opposed-to-supernaturalism succumbs to scientism when it falsely assumes that whatever isn’t religion must be science. Granted, theological “explanations” don’t really explain anything; but it doesn’t follow, and it..

Beliefs About Genetic & Environmental Determinism By Discipline

Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, a new journal, has published the results of a survey of academics, sorted by discipline, regarding their views about genetic and environmental determinism and the explanatory power of science. (more…)

Finding Value in the False Scientific Beliefs of Earlier Philosophers

Anyone who studies the contemporary phenomenon of global warming, or who fears the insidious impact that the smartphone is having on our lives, or who remembers that there are enough nuclear warheads on enough intercontinental ballistic missiles to destroy human civilization with some ease, understands that modern technology threatens, indeed is likely, to overwhelm..

Psychologists Test Kant’s Aesthetics

The experience of beauty is a pleasure, but common sense and philosophy suggest that feeling beauty differs from sensuous pleasures such as eating or sex. Immanuel Kant claimed that experiencing beauty requires thought but that sensuous pleasure can be enjoyed without thought and cannot be beautiful. These venerable hypotheses persist in models of aesthetic processi..

APA Issues Statement to Support March for Science

The Board of Officers of the American Philosophical Association (APA) has issued a statement in support of the March for Science, a demonstration taking place next month which “champions robustly funded and publicly communicated science as a pillar of human freedom and prosperity” and which calls for “science that upholds the common good and for political leaders an..

Traits of Deontologists and Consequentialists: Appearance and Reality

People who hold deontological moral views appear to others to be more “pro-social,” but actually aren’t, according to a new study. The study, entitled “Are Kantians Better Social Partners? People Making Deontological Judgments Are Perceived to Be More Prosocial than They Actually Are,” is by Valerio Capraro (Middlesex University, London) and seven others, and is ava..

Which Sciences Can Help Answer Philosophical Questions?

Can science help us answer philosophical questions? Hanoch Ben-Yami, professor of philosophy at Central European University (CEU), in an interview at 3:AM Magazine, suggests that the question is too broad. The answers are different for different scientific inquiries. (more…)

A Scientist On Philosophy, The “Thankless Job” That Succeeds Through Superfluousness

egardless of whom you want to assign the task of reaching across the line , presently little crosses it. Few practicing physicists today care what philosophers do or think.

And as someone who has tried to write about topics on the intersection of both fields, I can report that this disciplinary segregation is meanwhile institutionalized: The physics journals won’..

The Biggest Problems Facing Science — How Different is Philosophy?

A few reporters at Vox conducted an unscientific survey of scientists to unpack the sense they’ve been getting that “science is in big trouble.” The result is a list of the seven biggest problems facing science, based on responses from 270 scientists. (more…)

The Value of Philosophy in Interdisciplinary Research (guest post by Brian Robinson and Michael O’Rourke)

Brian Robinson and Michael O’Rourke, both at Michigan State University, lead The Toolbox Project, an initiative which provides “philosophical yet practical enhancement to cross-disciplinary, collaborative science.” It is a fascinating and innovative use of philosophy to facilitate interdisciplinary research, and has been up and running for over a decade. I asked the..

Just One-Third of Published Psychology is Reliable

A team of 270 researchers have now published the findings from their “Reproducibility Project”—an attempt to replicate the findings in published psychology papers—in Science, and the results are dismal. Nina Strohminger (Yale) and Elizabeth Gilbert (Virginia) discuss the findings in an essay at The Conversation:

Almost all of the original published studies (9..

Holy %#&! They Made a Real Brain in a Vat

An almost fully-formed human brain has been grown in a lab for the first time, claim scientists from Ohio State University… Though not conscious the miniature brain, which resembles that of a five-week-old foetus, could potentially be useful for scientists who want to study the progression of developmental diseases… The brain, which is about the size of a pencil..

We Are Not Human Individuals

Unbeknownst to many people, our emotions, cognition, behavior, and mental health are influenced by a large number of entities that reside in our bodies while pursuing their own interests, which need not coincide with ours. Such selfish entities include microbes, viruses, foreign human cells, and imprinted genes regulated by viruslike elements. This article provides ..

Putting the “Ph” in Science PhDs

My goal is to put the Ph back into a PhD. I want to restore more philosophical thinking into the doctoral degrees that students earn here.

So says Arturo Casadevall, chair of the Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at Johns Hopkins University, in the Johns Hopkins Public Health Magazine. Casadevall thinks that bringing philosophical thinking, part..

How Philosophers Can Help Cosmologists

Cosmology’s hot streak has stalled. Cosmologists have looked deep into time, almost all the way back to the Big Bang itself, but they don’t know what came before it. They don’t know whether the Big Bang was the beginning, or merely one of many beginnings. Something entirely unimaginable might have preceded it. Cosmologists don’t know if the world we see around us is..

Defending Philosophy Against the Physicists

In 2012, physicists Lawrence Krauss claimed that “…science progresses and philosophy doesn’t”, and Neil deGrasse Tyson infamously echoes such opinions… Lots of high profile physicists make dead wrong claims about a subject in which they are not experts, repeating misperceptions even after philosophers keep correcting them. This is like listening to creationists re..