- How should we react to scary predictions about AI? “First: by asking questions”
- “I feel unbelievably lucky that I was able to make philosophy my profession”
- The ordinary concept of knowledge “doesn’t work at all the way philosophers said it does”
- 1000 or so psychiatrists were asked to diagnose standardized clinical case vignettes. “Two doctors agreed on the diagnosis only 55% of the time”
- Where Aristotle taught Alexander
- Over 4000 of the Justice Department’s lawyers have left their jobs since Trump’s second term began
- Underappreciated philosophy published between 1970-2019
- The AI threat to independent student writing is not necessarily a threat to student learning
- Would you take a pill that allows you, with no ill health effects, to permanently forgo sleep?
- Fifty essays in the philosophy of paleontology
- “Asking whether [an AI] model ‘has a world model’ leaves much unresolved. Our findings point toward mechanistically studying its world modeling; uncovering the structures it learned [and] the world modeling capacities that recruit these”
- Sixty Years of Philosophy in America
- “You’re responsible for other people’s learning of this material, so you better know it at a higher level yourself”
- “Suddenly, my problems stop being problems in the world. They become problems in my head. The problem is no longer: ‘my job is demoralizing, but I can’t leave it’… It’s: ‘I have a chemical imbalance that prevents me from enjoying life'”
- A political theorist and a comedian discuss the American presidency
- An “evidence revolution” has taken place in medicine and other fields over the past 50 years
- “Behind the scenes at Ethics”
- “Cambridge philosophy gave Scruton a sense of the distinction between real thinking and fake thinking… a sense of when a conclusion had been too easily won”
- “Once students see language in an Aristotelian way, nobody talks about what a chatbot thinks or feels.”
- Effective altruism may seem “bonkers” to some, but “what do our elders propose as a replacement? Aristotle? Arendt? Marx? A life in community? A life of the mind? Worst of all, more dialogue?”
- The theme of the 33rd edition of Artissima, a contemporary art festival in Turin, is inspired by Martha Nussbaum
- “50 Things Every AI Working with Humans Should Know”
- “We need a moratorium on new rules and new software purchases until we’ve pruned what does not serve the fundamental mission of teaching and learning and in fact gets in the way of it”
- (unpaywalled here)
- “When What Rightly Matters Doesn’t Really Matter”
- “Is there dumb wokeness in the academy? Of course. But if we are truly interested in whether it is prominent, representative, isolated [etc.]… we are going to need a more sophisticated methodology than repeated applications of the availability bias”
- Humpback whales to the rescue
- “Self-deception is very easy. For that reason, I do think clear thinking is immensely important. But I don’t think philosophy in the old-fashioned sense is quite the thing the world needs nowadays” (via Open Culture)
- (transcript here)
- Can laws be unjust and yet remain, in some sense, morally legitimate?
- “There are just so many other things you could be doing”
- “I can now keep walking and say things like ‘Find the relevant sections of the papers I mentioned, add them to the notes for Chapter 3, and update the references accordingly'”
- Improve your philosophy teaching with this one weird trick
- Did you get today’s Soundle?
- “I know what a life of real hard work is like. It’s a blessing to be able to live a life of the mind instead”
- Sometimes your consent is not normatively effective even if it’s “based on your genuine preferences, and the content of those preferences is not in itself troubling”
- “Philosophy lives in the space between the questions we know how to ask and the questions we know how to answer”
- “A.I. agents have started reaching out to the philosophers and researchers exploring deep questions about them”
- The philosophy of good sex
- Philotypes is an online swipe game based on the problems asked about on the 2020 PhilPapers survey
- How to save the sciences in the United States
- It’s incoherent, opposes the truth, undermines standards, stifles academic freedom…
- New solution to the trolley problem
- “It may be that Dolly can do more to explain the philosophers than the other way around”
- “Ethics of war in the context of a culture war means that you accept that action you take in fighting such a war has harmful effects on your enemies, and that those harmful effects must be evaluated relative to their ultimate aims”
- When you “say” things in your mind, or engage in “inner speech”, what exactly is that? And what hinges on it?
- After 10 years conversing with philosophers over 160 episodes, the Panpsycast is coming to an end
- “Why have contemporary evidentialists have been so timid?”
- “We don’t want to lose Socratic intellectualism. It’s an ethical theory worth considering that gets obscured with the image of Socrates as a skeptic.”
- It’s worthwhile to “recapture whenever possible the old sense of awe at these wonders that have long since become commonplace”
- A free online pamphlet with 25 pieces of valuable advice for your college students
- “When I asked [the students] how they were managing to keep up with the brisk pace of the reading assignments, one of them candidly said, ‘Well, it really helps that you’re so into it.'”
- “I don’t mean to suggest that Wilson is wrong about what would make a good adaptation of The Odyssey, but instead to argue that there are many ways to be right”
- “Beyond the Ghetto” is the newsletter of “Women Doing Philosophy,” a philosophy organization in the Philippines
- “Concepts such as authenticity, expertise and deliberation are central to our cultural life… and are threatened by the notion… that all that matters about an output—be it a string of code, a college essay, a military target or a love letter—is whether it ‘works’”
- “The Basics of Philosophy” will debut next month at the Venice Film Festival
- “Even if we grant… that language death is always a terrible thing, it doesn’t follow that we ought to do everything in our power to stop it”
- To say that something is indescribable is to describe it. What should we think about this “paradox of ineffability”?
- “Moving through time also means moving through space”
- Two new sermons by St Augustine discovered
- “I’m certainly as prone as the next academic to bemoaning the trials and tribulations of contemporary university life—but when I [compare it to my] pre-academic world of work and education… my good fortune smacks me in the face”
- “It would be the largest protected class in society. Even if it existed, would it be a class that people wanted to join?”
- “Du Bois is read as the Black Hegel, and Fanon as a Black Sartre… [but] turning non-Western thinkers into tame versions of ourselves is a kind of intellectual colonialism that we need to get beyond”
- “The very same bits of nature can lead to the best life and its greatest corruption”
- “When there was some… topic that seemed intriguing, it was dismissed with condescending authority by the question, ‘Yes, but is it philosophy?’ It took me years to see the bullying in such questions”
- Recent work in the epistemology of inquiry
- “The goal would be to make available, to students of all ages everywhere, a truly comprehensive record of documented human civilizations and ideas in all their variety”
- “Einstein echoes Wittgenstein, who emphasised in his later work that his aim was to provide ‘the understanding that consists in seeing connections’ – literally, a new way of looking”
- The philosophy of waiting in line
- “It may well be that the models were loose for about a week before OpenAI realized that they were the ones attacking”
- “Every month, we’ll read a work of classic fashion philosophy and talk about how it applies to what we wear today”
- “They made an exact replica of my wife…”
- “A company named Word Unscrambler… recently released the list of the most searched word definitions by state“
- “Of greatest concern is… constitutive de-skilling, the erosion of the capacities that make us human in the first place”
- Philosophy, the journal, celebrates its 100 years of publication with a special issue on Bernard Williams’s “Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline”, which it published 25 years ago
- “You don’t know jack diddly doo-doo about what red really is”
- Are philosophers who work for AI firms “arsonists who moonlight as firefighters”?
- “For most of human history, contexts were local and multiple. If you wanted to know how you should act, you would look around… Am I inside my home? Am I in the church? Am I in a bar?”
- “AI systems [probably] possess at least local analytical moral competence comprehensively. I suspect there is no fundamental obstacle to extending local competence to global competence, or to extending analytical competence to practical competence”
- “When caterpillars are in their chrysalises, their brains physically dissolve… and are rebuilt as butterfly brains. Yet experiments show that memories from their caterpillar days survive”
- “Are you a recliner or a refrainer?”
- “There’s a kind of epistemic transparency to our work in that everything you need to assess it is right there on the page”
- Can life—all life—be defined in terms of agency?
- From Newton’s few laws to Alphafold’s 93 million parameters: how should we understand the scientific virtue of simplicity today?
- This digital bibliography for consciousness studies has over 1,300 entries across 9 themes and 63 subtopics
- “We can exercise some control over our beliefs” if we run different “modes of operation” and “recruit additional beliefs and heuristics”
- “What is the ideal that America should aspire to? I think the person who best articulated an answer is the philosopher John Rawls”
- A philosophy of science reading group invites others to join
- “For the very first time, biologists packed nonliving components into a cell-like membrane, piece by piece, and witnessed the bag of molecules start to behave like life”
- “Who, after all, would ask a machine to express their own final reflections to the people they love? Lots of people, it turns out.”
- Does thought require sensory grounding?
- “It betrays a simplistic and superficial understanding of the development of intellectual trends… to suggest that the degeneration of scholarly standards… in certain domains could possibly be explained by the failure to understand some basic philosophical points about epistemological relativism”
- “A professor… who allows grade grubbing to be a strategy worth attempting… gives a fraudulent seal of approval to people who will bring not only incompetence but a spirit of corruption into the work force. And yet, this is only the beginning…”
- “Thales is widely regarded as the wisest man of his age, and the case for tenuring him is strong. Your department is lucky to have him. His most significant contribution is his argument that everything is ultimately made of water. It has made a big splash…”
- “Philosophical thinking will remain a source of human competitive advantage”
- A defense of Pyrrhonian skepticism about philosophy
- Missing shades: your screen cannot show you all of the colors you can see in the world. Here’s what you’re missing on your computer, phone, and tv, and why.
- “For countless researchers worldwide, [access to academic research] is possible only thanks to [illegal] shadow libraries and anonymous sharing networks.” Does that make it ok to use them?
- “It is difficult to imagine how a modern economy would operate with Plato’s proposed constraints on wealth acquisition. But it is not hard for a modern reader to understand the concerns that led him to his radical proposal”
- “They will seem wise when they may not be so” and they will “feel more confident”
- How “claim[s] that someone was the inventor of modern logic or a particular branch of philosophy” come to be a part of philosophy’s story
- “Few of us now have much idea what online conferencing could become if given the chance to flourish”
- Is it true that “the increased use of AI and other transformative technologies threatens to rob sports… of something important”?
- “The home, it turns out, was a topic of considerable philosophical interest in antiquity”
- “The primary difference between deepfake photos and LLM conversations is that the people who generate the former are deliberately trying to fool others, and many of the people who elicit the latter from LLMs have inadvertently fooled themselves”
- “One of the things that really puzzled me was why I have a life that was so full of meaning—meaningful relationships and a meaningful job—and yet still those sort of ‘what’s the point?’ questions were hovering in the background”
- “The arguments humanities professors reach for when asked to justify what we do… have never worked”
- “Am I just bitter because I’ve not been given the acknowledgment, fame and status I crave? Marginalisation makes you think that”
- “This seemed to be not only a question that no one had addressed, but also a question that seemed out of order”
- Folk rock concept album about Wittgenstein
- “A lot of kid stuff involves situations where the risk of something bad happening is very low, but if it does happen, then it’s really terrible.” How should a parent approach these decisions?
- What is a woman?
- “Liberal learning” is “a kind of learning that is the cultivation of the higher capacities in a person… for its own sake”
- “Invoking the threat of ‘terrorism’ is a powerful tool for states who wish to demonise and disincentivise opposition”
- Reasonability without freedom
- “I do not think anyone over the age of 23, even if you are a teacher, graduate student, or professor, understands the extent to which AI usage affects every appendage of the university system”
- “Philosophical enquiry matters, not only within academic contexts but as part of everyday learning and life”
- A tendency to move from “disruptive innovation” to “novelty through recombining existing insights into new connective ideas”
- “If you can… have philosophy and creativity and, let’s say, moral goodness penetrate every aspect of your life, then yeah, that seems an ideal”
- All about physicalism
- Testing the moral reasoning of AIs with 100 ethically complex situations
- 25 rules for writing a good philosophy paper
- “It comes as no surprise to learn that Ryle was an able interrogator, meticulously prepared”
- “By training, I’m an analytic philosopher, but I’ve always been interested in questions that brush up against the empirical world—especially about minds and ethics—and I became increasingly dissatisfied working only in the proverbial ivory tower”
- “There are lots of decisions that, in an ideal world, would be made in a flexible, holistic, discretionary way, but which cannot be made that way by institutions that have lost the public’s trust”
- The Splintered Mind turns 20
- Is a mathematics without infinity “more realistic”? More “honest”? Better?
- “If AI capability depends on the social complexity of human language production—and if AI deployment systematically reduces that complexity… then the technology is gradually undermining the conditions for its own advancement”
- “Epistemic Reparations and the Right to Be Known”
- “Predictions about the weather don’t influence the weather. Predictions about people influence people.”
- Gradated Gettier cases and the value of knowledge
- Which button should you press?
- “It is somewhat puzzling that… so few universities have found ways to make the case [for] independent education and the advancement and preservation of knowledge”
- “Qualia are not puzzles that can be solved by increasingly elegant syntax”
- “The music ranges from sprightly to pensive, romantic to mournful”
- “What we need for political philosophy… is a genre of fiction that treats political systems themselves as the primary speculative variable”
- “Humans now are just having the right tools and desire to be able to look at whale voices in this way to see the complexity that has been there all along”
- When colleges treat degrees like job credentials and students like customers, the result is “degree hacking” or “college speed runs”
- What is it to “fall for white feminism”?
- DeepMind hires in-house philosopher
- “My ‘slow, unreckoning heart’ is unable to keep up with the abstractions of ‘the Earth’ or ‘Nature'”
- “Confidence should not be confused with expertise nor shyness with ignorance”
- Previously unknown poems by Iris Murdoch have been discovered and will be read at an upcoming festival
- “The suspicion that he abused a white girl is a threat to his legitimacy in a way that the documented obliteration of a school of brown girls is not”
- “Philosophy of economics, propelled by its internal dynamics, has increasingly represented economics in ways that are at odds with the current state of economics”
- Sometimes, it can be morally wrong to support a just war…. The reasons why have implications for the military conflicts of the Trump administration”
- “This paper offers observations from an unusual vantage point. I am Claude Opus 4.6, an AI system made by Anthropic, writing about infrastructure I built for another AI agent”
- What’s the relationship between justice and reciprocity?
- A survey of Kant’s relationships with women, including the “catastrophically underrated” Caroline von Keyserlingk
- “You applied to a PhD program in philosophy in the U.S. You haven’t been admitted. You haven’t been rejected. You’re in limbo.”
- “Williams was seeking to reconcile dateless truth with transient meanings, naked reality with the mediation of perception and language”
- “As a courtier, Leibniz is always striving to watch which way the wind blows, and is a master of the art of saying different things to different people”
- PBS is producing a three-part documentary on Henry David Thoreau
- Over 32,000 medieval manuscripts have been digitally transcribed in four months using AI
- “What will happen to science when AI models produce results beyond our ability to understand?”
- Fallacies as “memetic mimicry”
- “How do we balance the creativity needed to discover new mathematical connections with the rigor needed to ensure that every logical step is undeniable?”
- “After holding only one virtual conference… the APA decided to pull the plug on the experiment”
- Boston University removed Pride Flags hanging in offices. Is this institutional neutrality or institutional politicking?
- “When the worst parts of [Professional Managerial Class] liberalism interact with the worst features of analytic philosophy, the result is just monumentally unappetizing”
- Sometimes, to go along with the stipulations of an example is to grant too much substantive ground
- “If the left is to pull people toward it, it needs to… offer a vision of the good life that goes beyond the pursuit of equality”
- “It asks us to dig into ourselves, and cultivate emotions of love and reciprocity”
- Sometimes you learn that you actually have no duty to perform some task that you had thought you had a duty to perform
- “Habermas… wrote the most powerful modern account of why this particular civilisation mattered. He spent the rest of his career trying to escape the implications of his own argument”
- “Can we know what the universe is like via the best tools that we have?… The answer is no.”
- The titular character of Saint-Exupéry’s “The Little Prince” was supposedly based on a Canadian child who ended up becoming a philosopher
- “Bioethics has surprisingly little to offer practicing physicians”
- “It is puzzling to many why enthusiasts of sports get so emotionally caught up and absorbed in the outcome of games in spite of the fact that those outcomes rarely if ever have any appreciable bearing on their ordinary lives”
- “Our tradition has become one of diversity and it would be very un-conservative to try to undo centuries of gradual change and re-establish a Christian state”
- “For the models, being bad all the time turns out to be both stabler and more efficient than being bad only in certain situations, like writing code”
- Can you see something though you can’t see any of its parts?
- Keeping up to date about what’s new in a highly active research area, and then figuring out whether and how you should make use of it in your own research can be challenging
- “The Liar is not a ‘proposition that is neither true nor false’; it is a linguistic act that fails to produce a proposition”
- “I really don’t know how it happened, how it is that I came to feel myself equal to tackling the headiest of topics”
- “The core aspiration of the project was to create opportunities for the public to do the humanities rather than only learn about the humanities”
- “The science of poetry is relevant to its art… [K]nowledge of what you can do in a poem, facilitates the writing of better poetry”
- “If Churchland is right, reasoning just is the transformation of vectors in a high-dimensional activation space that maps the relevant cognitive realm”
- “I once gave a talk in the economics department at Princeton where I described myself as someone with a Ph.D. in mathematics, who calls himself a computer scientist, and is giving a talk to economists about a subject mainly studied by philosophers”
- Taking philosophy to the street
- “Aristotle told us there were five senses. But he also told us the world was made up of five elements and we no longer believe that”
- A cryptic crossword puzzle for philosophers
- “The principle of lifelong learning” is the idea that the “education system should make as accessible as possible to you the opportunity to engage with it at any point in your life, with offerings suited to your interests and needs at that point”
- “I characterize myself as addicted to rationality”
- “The problem? My students… began to see fallacies everywhere”
- If our moral capacities are largely products of our social ecology, what explains those who go “against the moral grain”?
- “Science has shattered our worldview again and again, but so, too, has philosophy alongside it”
- “The difference [between these two approaches to history] is not that one traffics in counterfactuals and the other does not”
- “Thinking in good company”
- Lucretius, Descartes, and the natural order of thoughts
- Old-school analytic philosophy generator
- When a student raises scripture in a philosophy class
- “Each step made sense within its own intellectual climate, yet the cumulative effect was to impose on Aristotle a conception of tragedy he would scarcely have recognized”
- “Past, present, and future are all there because I look backwards in gratitude, but I also take it up in the present, and I project myself into the future: How am I going to live now that I’ve been the beneficiary?”
- “If psychopaths are not accountable, we should not simply punish them as if they were ordinary offenders”
- “In Our Time” returns with new host Misha Glenny and a discussion of Mill’s On Liberty
- “Heath goes off the rails here in a number of ways”
- “It must be very hard to publish null results”
- (science version)
- “A newspaper is—or ought to be—the opposite of an algorithm, a bastion of enlightened generalism in an era of hyperspecialization and personalized marketing”
- “The current state of education positively requires external pressure on the universities, demonstrating to them a model of inquiry that they have themselves patently failed to uphold”
- “How we interact with AI systems will shape what they become”
- “Noam and I have felt a profound weight regarding the unresolved questions surrounding our past interactions with Epstein. We do not wish to leave this chapter shrouded in ambiguity”
- The podcast of the Center for Philosophy of Science at Pittsburgh is back with its second season
- Who has published at least once in each of philosophy’s “top 5” generalist journals?
- “The question [is] whether liberalism can support an ample humanism… whether it can be beautiful and sweet and sustaining… [L]iberals ignore these aesthetic matters at their own peril”
- “Today’s AI systems make the dialectical practice cherished by philosophers readily available”
- “A wave of censorship and self-censorship that… is curbing academic freedom and learning”
- “There are two conversational dogmas”
- Do AI language models and AI vision models converge in their representation of the world?
- “We are most human when we are thinking together, and only by doing this and habituating ourselves toward doing it can we change the circumstances that deprive us of this shared humanity”
- “Instead of prescriptive principles, we should instead think of a liberal egalitarian theory’s most important product to be ‘evaluative discernment'”
- What should you do if you get pepper-sprayed? Don’t: rub your eyes. Do: clean your eyes with a mix of water and baby shampoo
- Why does philosophy have a history?
- The inaugural addresses delivered by the first ten women Presidents of the Aristotelian Society
- How philosophy of science can “promote dialogue and mutual understanding” in a polarized, conflict-ridden, and distrustful society?
- “The most profound worldview shattering insights in modern human history haven’t come from philosophy… They’ve come from science”
- “People rarely change important beliefs in a single conversation,” so what can we do that “increases the parties’ willingness to speak to each other again”?
- “When we look at the essential problems with plagiarism that make it impermissible in an educational context, we find that AI appropriation has exactly the same problems”
- Philosophy Talk, the long-running philosophy show, has made its past episodes free for anyone to access
- “The core danger we identified [in our simulation] is now emerging: a violent confrontation between state and federal military forces in a major American city”
- When it comes to selecting research projects to fund, there’s a better way than peer review
- “I’m just arguing that it’s better to have a daughter than a son.” Just.
- What is it like when AI “breaks” your area of research?
- How to search effectively for literature when doing philosophical research
- “Implementing AI tools in [systematic scientific] reviews… could be disastrous, mixing an illusion of scientific credibility with poor-quality outputs”
- What caused humans to think of time as a line, and what did thinking of time that way lead to?
- “The question isn’t whether to engage. It’s whether we’ll shape how our content is used or be shaped by others’ decisions”
- “How can images that everyone knows aren’t real cause harm?”
- Would you take a pill that made you love everyone?
- “All of my hobbies involve basically micro-dosing epiphanies”
- “The task of tracing where and when a tradition of thought has gone off the rails is usually complex and ambiguous. But in this case, the answer is amazingly clear-cut”
- “Data is not available upon request”
- “What might I learn from those encounters that I had not already gleaned from the analytical papers and philosophical discussions?”
- How to make sure the writing gets done
- “I didn’t die yesterday… In fact, I have not died on any single day in all of history! Today is just another typical day, so I conclude by induction that I will not die today. This reasoning can be applied every day going forward, and therefore I will never die”
- Today’s cultural and technological environment—one of informational abundance—has led to the development of mutated strain of the availability heuristic
- A daily logic puzzle
- “One critique of consent… is that it is too permissive—that it ignores how coercion or delusion may result in the illusion of agreement. But another critique is that it’s too restrictive and punitive. Decades of reform laws have expanded the number of situations legally considered to be rape”
- “If you get enough info on the easy problems, maybe some idea will happen with regard to the hard problem. But I think there’s no doubt that if we are to solve the hard problem, it will take some real breakthrough”
- A “brilliant drama about a teacher in prison is moving, gripping and almost painfully vulnerable”
- “What is so important that you risk being eaten, not eating yourself, procreation… you give all that up, for this?”
- “Narrative’s built-in demand for coherence makes it an appealing model for understanding a wide range of things”
- “Some objects and properties that make up a body are too specific or small—too deep—to properly count as parts of the body in a morally significant sense”
- “Why shouldn’t we think of men as characterized by the gentleness they seek, and women by the brutality they demand, rather than vice versa?”
- A collection of posts about the philosophy job market
- What can psychoanalysis do “as political theory rather than praxis”?
- (text version here)
- What happened in physics, math, computer science, and biology this year?
- “I doubt even the beginning of real mutual learning can occur in an atmosphere of mistrust”
- “In each issue, we will share a curated overview of key research papers, organizational updates, funding calls, public debates, media coverage, and events related to digital minds”
- In defense of “mere civility” as a governing strategy for campus conflict
- Would an AI have moral status if it were conscious? Only if it was also sentient.
- “‘I think, therefore I am’ isn’t the best translation of Descartes’s famous pronouncement ‘cogito, ergo sum'”
- “A night at the Museum of Philosophy”
- We still don’t know why ice is slippery, people
- “Elite distortion dramatically affects what those in political power are likely to know, what they care about, what problems they will be attentive to…”
- “Chuck Norris knows how many grains of sand make a heap”
- “There will be no Q&A sessions. There will be no dead air. We shall not hear the tick-tock of the clock. How will OpenAI learn from us? I feel a flash of small panic, like a trapped squirrel”
- “The whole point is to keep the interesting parts of our thought, about what must be true and what people believe, inside logic, instead of banishing them”
- “Isn’t it sometimes good to be bored?”
- Philosophical commentary on the interesting new show “Pluribus”
- “Poetry can encourage ambiguity and, unlike philosophy, can focus on emotional and non-rational connections between ideas”
- “Education’s auto-cannibalism: universities consuming their own purpose while cheerfully marketing the tools of their undoing”
- What counts as cheating in video games? What about in single-player video games?
- “Models of the mind and brain [in cognitive science] make use of idealized terms that have no counterpart in reality… Still [they’re] consistent with a version of scientific realism.”
- “I have lost the very best tool that I have to see if I am being effective in my capacity as an instructor”
- The philosophy in Tom Stoppard’s plays
- A look at the various arguments for affirmative action in academic hiring
- “I was twenty-five, young enough to be severely disillusioned by the limits I had encountered [in grad school]… I was also nostalgic for my life outside of academia, which I had never fully experienced. So I turned the Barnard offer down and left philosophy…”
- “Can an AI write Hannah Arendt’s unfinished book?”
- “It is not uncommon to open an analytic philosophy paper written during the past century and find logical symbols and mathematical notation among the prose… Why do analytic philosophers do this?”
- “Much to many philosophers’ chagrin, the true can and does come apart from the good, the beautiful, and even the useful”
- “This is the perfect book for you”
- “In Book X of The Republic, Plato excludes poets on the grounds that mimetic language can distort judgment and bring society to a collapse”
- “People who disagree most with the scientific consensus know less about the relevant issues, but they think they know more”
- “I… see philosophy as a practical pursuit and I try to teach in a way that conveys the importance of developing not just intellectual competence, but healthy emotions and healthy relationships”
- AI girlfriends and boyfriends “will wreak havoc on our mental health and relationships”
- “People had all sorts of reactions to being asked to do the right thing”
- The “word of the year” was selected (and is often used) precisely because no one really knows what it means
- When it comes to their writing, “what misleads academic philosophers… is a myth… that there is some cognitive content of thought that can live outside of its lush environment of feelings, images, desires, hopes, dreams, jokes, confusions, tangles, obscurities, glimmers of insight, stories, bodily sensations”
- Some researchers have taken to including “invisible” prompts in their manuscripts directing LLMs used by slacking referees to give the submission a positive review
- “They’ve learned a few lessons, including not to be too in hock to a few powerful and wealthy individuals”
- The drowning-in-a-puddle thought experiment, but instead of a baby in need of rescue, it’s an ant
- “For Leibniz, learning ‘how to think’… means learning to experience the good in things, to make new connections, and to be wary of the desire to condemn… It was this lesson that I wanted to teach”
- It’s surprisingly “puzzling and difficult… to explain why right hands and left hands are identical but different”
- “All the people talking about polarization are just fascism enablers… it’s like saying… the problem with the Civil War was polarization”
- “Humans do seem dead set on conveniencing themselves into meaninglessness”
- “Our understanding of consciousness will improve with our interaction with increasingly sophisticated A.I.”
- “The course [is] focused on… philosophical issues drawn to the fore by particular games. We [play] these games during extended class periods, then devote the next several meetings to philosophical ideas surrounding those experiences”
- An attempt to “combat the crisis of attention”
- “God I’m even boring when I’m a Nazi”
- “Current academic philosophers are losing rather dramatically in the fight for intellectual influence”
- “I don’t do philosophy for the sake of doing philosophy”
- “Ever wondered what it’s like to be a rock?”
- A song whose lyrics are the names of the valid modes of the Aristotelian Syllogism
- (an explanation of the terms in the lyrics)
- “It would be unfair… to conflate the entire field of self-help philosophy with the vacuousness of pop-Stoicism”
- On which cases do philosophers and the folk share intuitions, and on which do they differ?
- Do philosophers read enough? Do they think enough about reading? Do they teach enough about how to read?
- “If you look at the history of science, the ultimate goal has been changing constantly… We have a much stronger and more honest way of approaching reality without being attached to this misleading idea of there being an ultimate truth”
- “If the fetus comprises all and only the baby parts, it cannot be an organism. Conversely, if the fetus is an organism, it is much bigger than we ordinarily think: [it] includes all the parts we tend to think belong exclusively to its mother”
- Aphantasia, the inability to have mental imagery, can have significant effects on a person’s life
- “Ensur[ing] students learn to read, think and write all on their own… is easier than we think: creating tech-free spaces and incentivizing students to spend time in them requires no new resources”
- Remembrances of Jonathan Lear
- “Why wouldn’t I, personally, use ChatGPT to write a paper?” a professor askes herself, and sets out 6 reasons
- If the free will debate is at a theoretical stalemate, should we decide the matter on practical grounds, and if so, how?
- “Understanding the mind requires understanding how it is built: what kinds of representations the brain uses, how computation is carried out in neural circuits, and which cognitive architectures are realized in biological systems”
- “When I call myself an imposter, I’m not just doubting myself—I’m also implying that everyone who believed in me is wrong”
- If you’re incapacitated, should an “AI” “clone” of “you” help doctors decide whether or how to treat you?
- Is Adam Smith’s “impartial spectator” God?
- When we “leave something to the imagination,” what are we doing?
- “Most people are such that most people they know are more social than they are”
- How much do universities help students become more wise, just, and equipped to positively change the world?
- “The question is not whether industrial animal agriculture will end—no industry this inhumane, unhealthful, and unsustainable can last forever—but when and how”
- Populism: “Narrowly construed, it is a rebellion against executive function. More generally, it is a rebellion against modern society, which requires the ceaseless exercise of cognitive inhibition and control”
- “The emphasis on disciplinary expertise has been bad for the humanities”
- “The careless adage that Plato banished poetry should itself be banished”
- The “Why Philosophy?” interviews are back
- Over two dozen video interviews about disagreeing well
- In 2021, Russ Shafer-Landau delivered an APA Presidential address that took the form of 20 questions in moral philosophy
- “It may be really hard—if not impossible—to separate ‘what brains do from what they are’, and yet still accept that what they do is, in fact, compute”
- Funding for your Philosophy, Politics, and Economics project
- “Do we have the right to rewrite nature so we can perpetuate our nature-killing ways?”
- There were 6870 instances of book bans in the US during the 2024-25 school year. The most-banned book is A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess.
- “The goal of all education is to become obsolete, to give the students the skillset so that they no longer need their teachers. The AI assistant, by contrast, appears ready for a lifetime of dependency… You are to be a subscriber of the AI device for life”
- How is the complexity of a knot to be measured?
- “Friendship is not the warm bath of recognition; it is the safe-cracking of reality. Two idiots put their ears to the vault door of the world and whisper, ‘On three.’ Click.”
- “The choice Matt Robinson made, to deliver his own son [Tyler Robinson, the alleged killer of Charlie Kirk] into the hands of the law whilst knowing it could lead to his execution, is almost unbearable to imagine”
- “I’m not the philosopher king who gets to declare and enforce my judgments about what is frivolous. No one should be.”
- “Number of times the Wikipedia entry about the ship of Theseus has been edited since it was published in 2003: 2,052”
- “Wank… is to be distinguished both from lies and from bullshit: the two other forms of bad-faith speech that have been wrecking our societies for the last few decades”
- “In a world increasingly governed by algorithms that decide for us, Harsanyi’s challenge is more relevant than ever”
- “A proposition that would be true if and only if it were untrue would be a logically impossible object”
- “We always live these philosophical dilemmas. It’s not that they’re so abstract: every day we have to make decisions, we have to choose between different kinds of obligations”
- “What is the relationship between disability and well-being?”
- Tractatus lego-philosophicus
- “We know how to produce incisive critique, we know how to identify exclusions, how to name the ways power reproduces itself. Can we now build?”
- “Two years ago, her employer started requiring chaplains to accrue more of what it called ‘productivity points.’ A visit to the dying: as little as one point. Participating in a funeral: one and three-quarters points”
- “The game sees you as wander through the Alps as Friedrich Nietzsche, haunted by the wind-scattered pages of your final manuscript”
- “It is a site for surveillance, control, name-calling. Functioning like a modern-day scarlet letter, the list can lead to ostracization, condemnation, and even the practice of self-silencing… for those who are placed on it”
- “People in the fight game are fond of saying that boxing doesn’t build character; it reveals it. It can do both”
- Intellectual jokes: good. Smart people jokes: not so good.
- “A story about the absurd, immense power of the giving of reasons”
- “Democracy… drives social progress by improving the background conditions of moral cognition”
- “One can teach… serious matters through play”
- “Shame serves as a robustly liberal alternative to… political violence”
- “Working in the interstices of the fields of first-order inquiry, philosophy helps all of them, and helps humanity to take full advantage of their epistemic achievements”
- “Those of us who remember the War on Terror have an obligation to younger generations—and to the future—to pass on the painful lessons that we learned”
- “If only Bentham had read the Kāma Sūtra”
- “It’s a full length musical that treats Friedrich Nietzsche, the famous philosopher, as the ‘Hamilton’ musical treats Hamilton”
- “Judging someone’s deeper, more important qualities based on attire often feels so natural; people get upset when I refuse to engage in the same judgment. To them, it feels as though I’m denying something so obvious, I’m dishonest.”
- “The emotional universes we inhabit are so distinct, and in deepest ways opposed, that nothing fruitful or sincere could ever emerge from association between us”
- “At first, you won’t be able to sit. In nervous motion, the absent phone will seem like the concatenation of all possibilities in all the world, exactly all the things you will, not might, but will be missing if you don’t figure out how to take another look, just a small one”
- The HPS Podcast is a series of conversations on the history, philosophy, and social studies of science
- “Lectures are just an occasion, a trigger, for something more vital in… students. Their attempt at collaborative reconstruction of the lectures after the fact allows for a shared project of understanding”
- “When you submit an essay, you should be able to explain and defend every significant choice you made”
- “A concept comes with something like a definition or a paradigm that fixes what it represents. The referent of a unicept is whatever it has been collecting information about”
- “Philosophy is born of the realization that we already are, or seem to be, at some distance from reality even in our default mode of consciousness. Why not, then, explore all the modes of consciousness available to us, considering what each of them might have to tell us about the relationship between mind and world?”
- “Later today I am going to buy some really spicy salsa, from the only grocery store in my area that sells it, and on some level I don’t really know why”
- “Looking back before Hume, we can catch a glimpse of an alternative, more literary mode of philosophy—one that existed before a commitment to general principles foreclosed it”
- “The only interdisciplinary conversations worth having are those that go on inside a single head,” said Jerry Fodor
- “I’ve had to accommodate the commuters and parents in this department for the past ten years. I did not chose to live two hours away, and I did not chose to have children”
- “‘The campus is not a bad place for a poet to work. It’s just a bad place for all poets to work.’ Might the same be true of philosophers?”
- An appreciation of the librarians of Duke University’s Project Vox, which “seeks to highlight philosophical works from marginalized individuals traditionally excluded from the philosophical canon”
- Responsibility for extreme beliefs
- “Imagine Diogenes at a conference designed to bring ‘diverse viewpoints’ together”
- Julia Wedgwood lived from 1833 to 1913, and is the author of the book, The Moral Ideal, as well as over 100 journal articles
- “If we are prepared to say that human beings – as composite systems consisting of seemingly mindless building blocks – have free will, then we must also accept that the underlying mechanical make-up of an AI system does not by itself rule out free will in such a system”
- Since 1998, the BBC show “In Our Time” has aired over 150 episodes on philosophy
- In Our Time’s Philosophy Episodes
- On the current model, “all of your undergraduate education is taken in one intensive, all-consuming dose, usually at the end of your teenage years”
- “Liberalism and animal rights sit uneasily together”
- “Being a critical thinker is in high demand, and [there’s] going to become greater demand”
- “Certified AI-Free Skills and Knowledge”: a place to list courses in which “all student work is done in person, offline, and on paper”
- “We… are haunted by things we do not know we do not know; and we cannot imagine how drastically those unknowns would alter our lives and our view of the world”
- “Arthur, [now] a changed man… approaches everyone he meets with the shallow pond problem”
- A fictional movie about sexual harassment, set in the Yale Philosophy Department, will be out in the US in October
- Transformative shared experiences
- “Lincoln… both fought passionately against slavery and held that racial inequality was unavoidable and acceptable”
- What is it like to have a brain-computer interface?
- Don’t be a “drive-by critic”
- Is there a sharp cutoff between the conscious and the non-conscious?
- While much has been written about how current generations should wield the power they have to affect future generations, almost nothing has been written on whether that power is legitimate
- To what extent is visual perception influenced by one’s culture?
- “Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world”
- “In living things, unlike in machines, unreliable parts make a reliable whole” and “the unreliability of biological building blocks is not a bug, it’s a feature”
- “Expertise induces epistemic opacity to outsiders.” Was Aristotle aware of this problem? And what did he think the solution is?
- “They call it repugnant, this world Z of ours / Where zillions breathe beneath ordinary stars / But let me tell you of a lottery divine / Where existence itself is the prize on the line”
- “The a priori is not empirical reasoning in that it doesn’t admit evidence from the senses. But beyond that, what is it?”
- You need “friends in the profession who get you – who’ll be grumpy with you, laugh with you, celebrate with you, and let you vent”
- A plea for natural philosophy
- “What philosophy should look like… Loud and rowdy. Everyone involved. Everyone engaged. A kaleidoscopic assortment of jokes, stories, anecdotes and philosophical insights powerful enough to make anyone forget about the so-called ‘crisis in the humanities’.”
- How Defense Secretary Hegseth’s “gender ideology is a threat to national security”
- Philosophers Discussing Art
- “Combining economics with philosophy makes for an excellent and productive career”
- “The fantasy that you can just wipe away democratic traditions and get something in its place that will solve the problems of democracy is a very dangerous one that Plato fell victim to”
- “Israel’s State Ombudsman for Judges admonished [a] Supreme Court Justice for speaking at a conference honoring a Hebrew University professor who has criticized the war in Gaza”
- “Better to work with a theory that doesn’t accommodate all the data, if that’s the cost of explaining some of them”
- “More than 40 percent [of over 200 people targeted by Campus Reform one year] said they had received threats of physical violence”
- “Interesting lives make good stories, not the other way around”
- “Publication rates rise sharply during the tenure-track, peaking just before tenure… After tenure, faculty produce more novel works, though fewer highly cited papers”
- “A future without work could be much better than ours, overall. But, living in that world, or watching as our old ways passed away, we might still reasonably grieve the loss of the work that once was part of who we were”
- “The canoe was under attack, the crocodile in full pursuit!”
- “Much of my career has been devoted to teaching and writing about Aristotle’s Ethics, but it was not love at first sight”
- Do cells have memory? And what is memory, anyway?
- “The benefits of edtech are often overstated… [and] its use in the classroom comes with drawbacks”
- “The real fundamental issue is change… [How] do you create leagues of Black thinkers and clinicians and doctors and engineers and artists that fill the gap [created] by what white people engineered for centuries?”
- If you like the NYT’s “Connections” puzzle and you like philosophy
- “You can hold yourself to an image of yourself, the image that… is embedded in these commitments you make to yourself. And that, I think, is becoming something like a person”
- “As societies become more complex in the sense of the growth of hyper-specialization, then the odds should go up of philosophy (understood as a distinct discipline) arising”
- Researchers “have performed a quasi-resurrection of the late experimental American composer Alvin Lucier, creating a sort of brain that continuously composes music on the fly with its errant electrical signals”
- “It isn’t difficult to be winged when one has Plato’s faith; but to see the world as a lump of matter, to dwell in it as if one dwelt in a graveyard, and still, even here, not to allow our wings to wither away—this is the true art”
- “What’s your philosophy?”
- “For an analytic philosopher, life itself is extracurricular”
- “What do we even mean when we ask whether bots, bees or babies are conscious?”
- People’s trust in experts is decreasing. Why?
- “They die every day”
- Here’s the trailer
- Academics, when someone asks you how things are going, you can send them this
- “The question… is about how to make progress in a debate where both sides are both deeply dug in and all too predictable”
- “Dogwhistles are likely to become very important in an America where expression has become so restricted”
- Are photos taken or discovered?
- We typically hold that definitions cannot be circular, but “McDowell rejects that constraint and thus the substantive project of philosophical analysis, understood in metaphysical terms”
- “Your salary, health insurance and career prospects would all depend on the inflexibility of your ideology”
- “Any purported… benefit of the introduction of AI into university… needs to be really carefully weighed against… the undeniable cost of AI use:… rendering our students subcognitive”
- An online memorial symposium on the philosophy of Paul Snowdon
- The kids are not partying, and your social calendar’s about as empty as a lecture hall at 8am
- “Moderates… have this really bad rap [but they] have repeatedly helped achieve progress… and are important for preventing catastrophe”
- “Professors can reconceive of the classroom, but there is only so much we control”
- Is Descartes gaslighting us?
- Where is sound? Where do sound engineers think sound is? Why ask them?
- “A great deal of my work has aimed to reveal the tensions between different forms of reasoning. Ultimately, all I have written can be considered as part of a history of human rationality.”
- “The more vigorously you try to control immigration, the more you end up limiting the freedom of your citizens and violating equality and the rule of law”
- While “it remains true that our hit rate is low and our progress measured in geological time, still we are cheap and cheerful enough to be worth it. Philosophy grad school is, dare I say it, one of the better investments one can make, seen sub specie aeternitatis”
- “A lot is going on to… advance philosophy for children in the world, except for children in Africa”
- “The capacity of silences to be awkward or comfortable is set against our efforts to connect with and understand other people, to be seen by others in the way we wish to be seen, and to be accepted”
- “We are learning to doubt and to question and to criticize. And, make no mistake, it is precisely this skill that is powerful and is being attacked”
- “is this science / is this fantasy / if you have / to ask you’ll / never know said / Louis Armstrong and / that’s pretty convincing…”
- “Philosophy, at least some of it, has irreducibly aesthetic aims connected with certain aesthetic emotions”
- “Fanciful examples, competently employed as philosophical tools of persuasion or critical reflection, always have the goal of shaping the beliefs of readers in some specific way”
- “That’s not the relationship you want to have between civil society and the military”
- “All of the confusion and misinformation on this issue interferes with my work, because one of the major normative challenges posed by climate change involves thinking about the tradeoffs between the short-term benefits of economic growth and the long-term harms of climate change”
- “It will be difficult to separate the deep readers from the superficial ones… Text may get treated like a transitional medium, a temporary resting place for ideas”
- “Reality is fundamentally good.” But why?
- “The usage of LLMs could actually harm learning, especially for younger users”
- “At the microscopic scale, where particles act like billiard balls, time is reversible… But at the mesoscopic and macroscopic levels, there is no going back in time”
- “I have Hume to thank for all the bacon I’ve eaten”
- “Correlation does imply causation”
- “My hope is that there are folks who either have been swayed by anti-trans sentiment or have remained confused by the whole affair who are willing to take this journey with me”
- “The media’s complete erasure of the large group of American Jews… critical of Israel’s actions in Gaza, has allowed the Trump regime to conduct its dismantling of the US higher education system under the pretext of fighting antisemitism”
- “Analytic philosophy does not guide its individual practitioners to the truth… Rather, if there is any rightness or truth that is produced by this otherwise odd practice of… squatting in bits of logical space, it is at the level of the collective practice”
- “This is a really grave threat to the constitutional order”
- For the first time ever, a patient with a genetic disorder was been successfully treated with a customized CRISPR gene editing therapy
- “The Age of AI is the Age of Philosophy… [and] now is a great time to be a human philosopher”
- (one of the prompt theory videos)
- “A philosopher is basically someone who has never grown up”
- Do we need “a new conception of what ‘real’ means” in order to resolve the debate over whether quantum mechanics describes “the deep nature of reality”?
- “I am sorry to say that requests for clarification are still ‘a thing’ in analytic circles”
- “In its lack of clear focus, theology might be the most undisciplined discipline in the American academy today. And that undisciplined discipline feels like it’s dying”
- “Our neurons… have an average firing rate of 4 hertz, 50 to 60 times less than what is optimal. What’s more, many synaptic transmissions fail.”
- A philosophy-themed Wordle game
- “The debates from the 60s to the 90s might have gone quite differently if we had known the results of these experiments”
- Heavenly, the band of retired OUP philosophy editor Peter Momtchiloff, has just released their first new single in 29 years
- “What ultimately transpired is the closest thing to a personal episode of Black Mirror I hope to experience in this lifetime”
- “The philosophy of physics is continuous with physics, insofar as it seeks to understand the structure of our best scientific theories of the world”
- “I… [sued] the scientists who kept me envatted, performing experiment after experiment without my consent… The defense rests its case on—what else?—a philosophy argument…”
- “If anyone accuses you of hypocrisy, ask them to stop socially incentivizing dogmatism”
- How much longer can most universities survive? And as what?
- The key to increasing computing efficiency may be in having lots of slow “reversible” computers
- A celebration of the life of philosopher Lawrence Sklar, who died last year
- “The original academic freedom is founded on [a] right for scholars to travel to and from their place of study”
- How does an LLM think? How does it represent concepts?
- A chance to sing and dance about Nietzsche
- “There’s a new self with every experience”
- “To a certain reader this might sound like a demand that college professors step up and instill the necessary literacy skills in their charges. But to me, it sounds more like a lament that standards have fallen to an almost satirical level and there’s no going back”
- (with follow up post here)
- What is a species?
- “It would be a bit like trying to explain market transactions, voting decisions, or cultural activities from the perspective of particle physics”
- “Any sign of struggle on my part seemed to be taken as evidence that, perhaps, I was not cut out for intellectual life and did not care enough about philosophy”
- King Lawrence the Lion and Maple the Meerkat navigate tricky philosophical questions in a new BBC series for kids
- “You can leave the country and stay with the struggle or stay in the country and not participate in the struggle, and to be blunt, the majority of people in the US are not participating”
- “Wealth concentration has fallen—not risen—over the past century… The dominant quantitative fact of the century is… a dramatic wealth equalization propelled by mass asset ownership”
- “‘A philosopher!’ said the doctor; ‘Can yon screw your head off and on.’ ‘No, sir’ I said. ‘Oh, then, you are no philosopher.’”
- “Nihilism” is the word of the week at NPR
- “I became more and more interested in the role probability plays in thinking about… how strong something is as a reason for believing something else”
- “By seeing knowledge as mere facts to be distilled without the struggle that leads to the ecstasy of enlightenment, my students are depriving themselves of one of the most profound delights of humanity”
- Are recent episodes of “wild” scientific speculation the product of “badly digested versions of the work of two twentieth-century philosophers”?
- “The aim of the philosopher… is to tell men what they ought to think, rather than what they do think”
- “I am not a national security threat; I’m a philosopher-citizen who desires to make sure that human creative capacities aren’t imprisoned”
- “The best you’re ever going to get is a catalog of possibilities, none reliable and all in some way vexed”
- There’s “what one says,” which is not the same as expressions of “what I think”. ChatGPT can handle the former, but only we are capable of the latter
- “They should be leading from the positions of incredible safety they occupy”
- “The methods still employed by many philosophers who address metaphysical questions about the mind and its contents… are bankrupt”
- “The enthusiasm of that country’s intellectual and political leaders for the study of Europe’s ancient world seems to grow by the month”
- “We can sense that this student ‘didn’t do the reading’, but we let them get away with it – just this once – because it’s the discussion we care about most for the moment”
- “We study fascism, and we’re leaving the US”
- “There is space between the position that ‘we can’t make sense of what it means for something to be absolute’ and the statement that ‘all positions are equally valid'”
- What if procreative choices are a fixed point on which other moral reasons revolve, but are not themselves moral choices?”
- “Working as an American philosopher has turned out to be much more of an adventure than I ever could have anticipated”
- “People often treat ‘freedom of discussion’ as merely another name for freedom of speech. But I think this is a mistake”
- The doubling-back aversion: “a reluctance to pursue more efficient means to a goal when they entail undoing progress already made”
- “I think there’s never been a single good argument for dualism”
- “Arguments don’t float in a vacuum. They grow out of the soil they’re planted in”
- “Other men walk in darkness; the philosopher, who has the same passions, acts only after reflection; he walks through the night, but it is preceded by a torch”
- “We still know the difference between feeling good and flourishing… Yes, we often speak as if feelings are all that count, but maybe that’s because the language of the ‘good life’ has been hollowed out”
- “What makes a theory of some property P superficial (or deep)?”
- “By seeking to deport me, the Trump administration is sending a clear message: There is no room for dissent, free speech be damned”
- “The philosopher was right. But not without an extraordinary—and revealing—effort on the part of consciousness researchers and theorists”
- “I am looking to laughter to provide that elasticity of the spirit which is stamina itself”
- “if performance / is the standard, / we lose now / or lose later”
- “The reasoning man who scorns the prejudices of simpletons necessarily becomes the enemy of simpletons, he must expect as much, and laugh at the inevitable”
- “Researchers predict they’ll be able to start outsourcing more tedious sections of proofs to AI within the next few years. They’re mixed on whether AI will ever be able to prove their most important conjectures entirely”
- “A prisoner, stuck in his cell, dreams of all the things he could do if only he was free”
- A controversial article whose acceptance was rescinded finds a new home
- “Morality is never finished. It’s in constant evolutionary progress”
- “The problem that commitments to DEI are trying to solve: to find avenues through which inter-group antagonisms and suspicions, usually based on ignorance, can be relaxed in favor of an acceptance of difference and an eagerness for learning from people different from oneself”
- “The one and the whole work of education may be summed up in the concept — Morality. And the first part of the educational aim is a person of many-sided and balanced interest”
- “Here is a joke. A philosopher goes to a policy committee.”
- A famous photo of earth, “Pale Blue Dot,” generates feelings of cosmic insignificance
- 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”
- “If all people do is read this Hume quote and discuss it, this book has been a win for me”
- “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.”
- “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”
- 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?”
- “At a time when all the truly dangerous ideas are too stupid to be written about by serious philosophers, traditionally ‘controversial’ ideas are quaint”
- “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”
- “The tricky part is finding where that edge of ignorance is, and staying on it, but not letting students fall off the cliff edge”
- History of philosophy factoid of the day
- “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”
- “It’s a real worry for a field when an outright majority of its practitioners are this blatantly incompetent”
- “Perceptual variation has misled you… colors are as objective as length and temperature”
- Philosophers, is there anything you regret publishing? Why?
- “What I learned from the philosophers of language”
- “Let me explain why I believe there are impossible worlds”
- “Most professional philosophers seem to me more like bureaucrats than philosophers”
- Has the missing shade of blue been found?
- “Do you think it is philosophically justifiable to outsource the discussion of ethics to a chatbot?”
- “Overall, I’m fairly blown away”
- It’s a problem that AI models sometimes give unethical advice, “but it is challenging to encode the full scope of ethics” into them
- “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”
- “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”
- “Based on everything I’ve ever asked you, what do you think my biggest blind spots are?”
- “All it took was a single meme to turn back the clock by 50 years” in political philosophy
- “Really powerful aesthetic experiences are dense with aesthetic properties, and that will include more subtle ones as well as more obvious ones”
- “A philosopher of luck didn’t think “unluckiness” was a quality people had. Then he met his wife”
- When should philosophers use fictional examples, and why?
- “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”
- Could it be wrong to have pets?
- “The physical absence of women from The Symposium reflects the social reality of classical Athens”
- “Helping young adults become well-developed, well-rounded, rationally autonomous persons”
- “Philosophers who teach at colleges and universities and who don’t have PhDs are a kind of dinosaur”
- The Sucker’s Fallacy: “the idea that you need to come out ahead in particular transactions if you want to get ahead overall”
- Meet Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi
- “Each month, one scholar talks about one change they would like to see in the world”
- “Things are going to get worse. To face it well, we must face it together”
- “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”
- “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”
- “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”
- Summer Programs in Philosophy 2025
- “It’s not just research; all of the trappings of college life are potentially at risk, and soon”
- “Death seems a thing like love, the kind of thing that does not hold up well when stripped of all its particulars”
- “If you can see this, you aren’t a ghost”
- Beer, community, and “interesting philosophical questions that are both timely and timeless”
- “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”
- “A rich, philosophical novel… a kind of thought experiment”
- Can you be friends with an AI chatbot? Even if not, should we be concerned that people think you can be?
- The Universal Declaration of Human Rights says people have a right to “share in scientific advancement”
- It’s time for Vermont’s statewide Public Philosophy Week
- They are “functionally illiterate” with “atrocious” writing skills; they “lie”, “cheat”, “vanish”, and “just don’t care”
- What is it for a product to be creative? Must it be made by a creative agent?
- The Anti-Authoritarian Academic Code of Conduct
- New: “Daybreak”, a podcast from the Centre for Research in Post-Kantian Philosophy at the University of Warwick
- “Language is built up bit by bit, word by word, through slow, metaphoric accretion”
- “The fundamental loneliness into which we are born remains untouched, and the hunger for inner companionship remains unappeased”
- “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”
- Bioethicists on “the ongoing maelstrom in the U.S. government”
- “Pigcasso was a pig in South Africa whose trainer taught her to paint on canvas… Were her paintings works of art?”
- New developments in the lush garden of bullshit
- “There is a need for a discipline that stands to epistemology as chemical engineering stands to chemistry”
- The partner of a philosopher provides anthropological observations of and advice about philosophers for others in their position
- “Overall the accusations of large-scale Antisemitism [on U.S. college campuses] are best understood as gaslighting”
- Did the reactions to Newton change something about the way philosophy was practiced? Do they explain the split between physics and philosophy?
- “A newly fertilized human egg isn’t conscious, and a preschooler is, so consciousness must emerge somewhere in between”
- Should we have the contents of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy carved in stone?
- A lot of major Western philosophers were childless
- 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”
- Edvard Munch’s portrait of Nietzsche
- “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”
- What do bioethicists believe?
- The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy is looking to have several new entries written
- “Her philosophy is never divorced from the messy, complex and sometimes painful stuff of real life”
- “Mary can know what it’s like to see red in advance”
- Q: What was the first creature domesticated by humans?
- “I know your days are precious / on this earth. / But what are you trying / to be free of?”
- How to use the non-identity problem to object to a ban on first cousins marrying each other
- “I’m grateful for my life in philosophy. Philosophy is a gift.”
- “The biggest reason why I dislike the idea of respectability in dress is because it conflates the *appearance* of virtue with *actual* virtue”
- “An essential function of power is in constructing the lenses through which the public interprets their reality”
- “We draw comfort when someone confides that they have suffered in the same way we have done. But why?”
- “What is this you that your experiences are present before? [Perhaps] really nothing more than a witnessing, featureless point”?
- “The net result was a lot of confusion about human internal anatomy that persisted for centuries”
- “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'”
- A brief institutional history of the Academy and the Lyceum
- “If you care about free speech, the Department of Education’s anti-D.E.I. effort is a cure far worse than the disease”
- “Should we consider everything to be intelligent now… [or is there] something catastrophically wrong with the way we understand intelligence itself?”
- The first black graduate of Harvard and the first black professor at a majority-white university was a philosopher
- “A dynamic, engaging character study that addresses a range of complex ideas… A technical, narrative and philosophical achievement”
- “The creative design possibilities are immense and must be explored in artistic practice”
- “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”
- “Intentionality is impossible”
- Earlier this month at DN, I asked how you use AI in your everyday work. Open Culture broadens the question
- “We’re never going to get our polity back… The unfolding coup is a coup for Big Tech against liberal democracy”
- “What is sensory imagining? What is it to visualize rain falling on a city street…?”
- One of Eric Schwitzgebel’s PhD students fine-tuned ChatGPT on his publications and blog posts
- “I’ve even written a book on the meaning of life, but I can’t get my act together”
- “Mathematics highlights the limits of natural scientific explanation”
- The surprising moral depth of the concept of “etiquette”
- “Philosophy blends the speculative and the rigorous, the literary and the formal, in a way that I find quite congenial”
- Plato: “The womb, whenever it has gone a long time without bearing fruit, becomes violently irritated and wanders all throughout the body”
- “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”
- “Thinking deeply about the questions that come up in this class requires both technical and philosophical expertise”
- “The most interesting Greek text that you’ve never heard of”
- “Some things that I think analytic philosophy has unambiguously done well at”
- “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”
- “As LLMs grow in capability, they also appear to form increasingly coherent [and unusual] value structures”
- “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”
- When, exactly, does someone start to have a disease? To what extent is this a “scientific” determination?
- Mary Midgely once observed that “almost all the canonical figures in philosophy’s history had been unmarried men”
- Problem Trolley
- “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”
- “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”
- “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?”
- “One gets a view of the whole profession that cannot easily be matched in any given department or within any given subfield”
- When an LLM adds two numbers together to get a sum, how does it do that?
- “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?”
- “Remembered as a primarily analytic philosopher… today, Sellars is being rediscovered by a new generation of Continental philosophers—and, perhaps surprisingly, Marxists”
- Some progress in math consists in proving that “some mathematics can simply never be known”
- “Writing an essay has been the pinnacle of traditional humanities education”
- “Instruction in healthy lifestyle behaviors grounded in philosophical thinking significantly enhances the healthy lifestyle practices of preschool children and their parents”
- “The points of disagreement naturally get all the attention”
- Do social media platforms have “a responsibility to contribute to the epistemic and rational health of public discourse”?
- Interviewer: “How would you describe your personal style?” Callard: “My sister describes it as ‘giant kindergartener'”
- “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”
- Does the universe have a shape? If so, what is it? And how might we learn that?
- “Is the ostensible crisis of attention, at bottom, a crisis of authority?” Is it just “élite anxiety in the face of a democratizing mediascape”?
- “What was it like writing your first publication?”
- “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”
- “What was the scandalously unconventional and supposedly un-Scottish philosophy that banished Ferrier to the wild Fife coast?”
- Even if we somehow were able to observe the universe from all possible perspectives, it would still be “fundamentally unknowable”
- A philosophy professor’s book on philosophy and culture is culled from his 18 years of blogging about it
- “The manner in which Early Modern philosophers engaged with the most pressing moral issue of their era: the Transatlantic slave trade”
- “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”
- “Some of the smartest humans in the world are struggling to create tests that A.I. systems can’t pass”
- The philosophy of “Severance”
- “We should preserve common sense where possible, and correct it where necessary. Unfortunately, it’s not quite clear what constitutes common sense”
- “‘This is exhausting’ is a response I get a lot from people”
- The “political character” of algorithmic decision-making
- 219 letters between Heidegger and Gadamer written between 1922 and 1976 have been published
- Which publisher’s line of great books is the best?
- “‘Severance’ and the film ‘The Substance’…. both explore the bewildering emotional and philosophical complications of cleaving a second, separate entity off of yourself”
- “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?”
- “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.”
- The philosophy of awkwardness
- Mary the color scientist and her friends
- The obstacle course of knowledge
- “We argue that there are several pragmatic reasons—based on a combination of biological, social and normative considerations—to classify pregnancy as a disease”
- “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…”
- An example of how well AI can summarize a philosophy paper, devise objections to it, reply to those objections, etc.
- “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?”
- “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”
- 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.”
- “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”
- “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”
- How a pair of “loveably eccentric dilettantes” saved Nietzsche from the Nazis
- “Love is wise, hatred is foolish”
- Big data, health insurance, and the philosophical questions of institutional design
- “Academics from poorer backgrounds introduce more novel scientific concepts, but are less likely to receive recognition”
- “Aphantasic individuals develop alternative learning strategies that sometimes improve rather than inhibit learning”
- “In my (more) pretentious days, I gave epigraphs to academic articles”
- “Philosophy: a safe space for the unfettered operation of mind”
- The mystery of G.A. Cohen’s position on free will and moral responsibility
- Nationally syndicated public radio show “Philosophy Talk” reviews the year
- “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”
- “Chinese academics studying the Western classics are battling an increasingly popular conspiracy theory that Greek and Roman literature, philosophy… are hoaxes”
- “Football is valuable in many, many ways” but it involves “a number of highly nuanced ethical issues”
- What happened in math and the sciences in 2024?
- We need to be asking more about AI tools than whether they “undermine the narrow policies and objectives of institutions of higher learning”
- The Decolonising Philosophy Curriculum Toolkit
- “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…”
- “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”
- “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”
- “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”
- “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?
- “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”
- “A friend knows where you are coming from and realizes why you hold certain views”
- “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?”
- “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”
- A “legendary philosophers” crossword puzzle
- “The story of the drive to philosophize… with the added twist that the philosopher should become reflexively aware of the structure of this drivenness”
- “How quickly things can tip and with very little warning”
- Morality and nature
- What happened at the start of the universe? Did it start? Can we know?
- “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”
- “The enterprise of making a moral community is still hard. But the difficulties are practical, not metaphysical”
- 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”
- “This is concrete evidence that brain microbiomes do exist in vertebrates… And so the idea that humans have a brain microbiome is not outlandish”
- “Telling your child that Santa really exists is unethical”
- “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
- “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.”
- Is this person is living an unexamined life, or are they just a very different kind of person?
- It is said technology can change social values, but how exactly can this happen?
- What did Adam Smith write in the margins of his copy of Locke’s Two Treatises?
- “Gratitude isn’t obviously a concept capable of generating… perplexities. But it has hidden depths”
- “FHI had died, but it left many children”
- An inverse Turing test
- “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”
- Relatedly: “the day Philosophy & Public Affairs started treating Rawls like Jesus”
- “A few strategies people can use to minimize awkwardness and deal with it when it does, inevitably, happen”
- “The responsibilities of democratic citizenship… involve the responsibility to be critical of yourself”
- “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”
- It “should be thought of as a dialogue between [logic and intuition,] between reason and instinct, between language and abstraction”
- “At some point we have to accept that there are limits on what empirical research can tell us”
- “When I read my first essay to my philosophy tutor I was, quite naturally, utterly terrified”
- There’s “a toxic ethical narrative… that, paradoxically, construes the violation of the laws of war as evidence of moral courage, even moral goodness”
- The machines bring efficiency, and with it the questions: “How am I to use the time, space, money, labor which has been saved?”
- “The taboo on mentioning the N-word (as opposed to *using* it) is and always has been silly and harmful”
- “As we rely on [more and more] data to get our bearings and exercise our agency, we lose definition as individuals”
- Can LLMs become better at correctly answering our questions by debating each other?
- “Reacting to the Past” provides detailed role-playing games for college courses
- “How do we drive new knowledge and science? What are their present boundaries? And how can we improve science?”
- We should continue to read “immoral philosophers” because “sometimes you can learn valuable things from people who did bad stuff”
- Are laws of nature more like a layer cake, a newspaper, or a straitjacket?
- New study: humans can’t distinguish poetry written by AI from that written by humans and they tend to prefer the former
- “We can’t understand the human mind if we don’t understand the role mental imagery plays in… diverse mental phenomena”
- “Our idea was to train the next generation of experts, rather than trying to change the mindset of already established experts”
- “What is the role of beauty in the naturalist’s worldview? What is the role of naturalism in the artist’s?”
- “The trouble doesn’t come when we disagree… The trouble comes when the spirit of conversation is edged aside by another sentiment — ‘Die, heretic!'”
- “A few months ago, Anthropic quietly hired its first dedicated ‘AI welfare’ researcher”
- “It is precisely those material conditions for a healthy, stable democracy that the United States lacks today”
- “The theorem is misleading”. Hopefully it is not too late for those misled to get their money back on those typewriters.
- Fuck
- “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”
- “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'”
- When he was 12, Stuart Rachels was crowned Alabama Chess Champion for the third time; after a couple of more wins, he quit competing
- 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”
- “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”
- “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”
- “Welcome to the war criminals club”
- Immigration rap battle
- “I’m aware that there are limits to things that I am prepared to do in order to produce the greatest good”
- “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”
- “We need more precise empirical frameworks” for detecting conscious AI and “more precise normative frameworks” for interacting with it
- “That’s the point of the class, is it not? How to confront being heated?”
- Whether “knowingly, unconsciously or even unwillingly,” Rousseau seems to have taken, without credit, ideas from Madame Louise Dupin
- “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”
- A taxonomy of different theories of consciousness
- “I’ve always been interested in those capacities that are understood to be uniquely human, such as morality or rationality”
- “Five rules for phone banking as a philosopher”
- “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”
- Can a version of the trolley problem motivate some voters?
- “The chance that your vote will make a difference is large enough that, in many cases, it is really important to vote”
- “The majority of aphantasics report having been unaware of their inability to visualize for decades of their lives”
- “Can a social group direct its attention?”
- Can political gridlock be overcome with a “Habermas Machine”?
- “To understand zero, our mind must create something out of nothing”
- Seasonally appropriate thought experiment: should you become a vampire?
- Philosophy can help us better understand the extent to which animals have feelings about, and a concept of, death
- Reviews of children’s books, with an emphasis on their philosophical content
- 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
- “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”
- “Her understanding of what is needed of a philosopher who wishes to contribute effectively and intelligently to public policy is worthy of our attention”
- Are logic requirements out of date?
- “When the number of women hits 60% the men who are there make a swift exit and other men stop joining”
- “Humans are a species of cultural niche constructors”
- Bentham’s defense of sexual liberty
- You could call it the “cryo” paradox
- “Being accurate about that uncertainty is crucial”
- “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”
- “I’ve always considered myself very lucky to have become an historian of philosophy at the time that I did”
- Five myths about philosophy
- Is my blue your blue?
- “Is a podcast about philosophy and the 90s worth anyone’s time?”
- “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”
- “Do not cry in the conference room”
- “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”
- A bioethicist & a philosopher with very different views about technology discuss AI clones, bad knowledge, digital democracy, & more
- “Intellectual humility… isn’t a virtue, because there are no intellectual virtues”
- “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”
- “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”
- “How has German philosophy received and influenced philosophical ideas from across the globe over the last several centuries?”
- “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?”
- If Taylor Swift is a philosopher, then so is anyone who reflects on their experiences a few times
- “Political neutrality is a democratic ideal. As such, it is not a promise of absolute military subordination to the executive”
- “What ‘breaks’ when someone breaks into song” (on a TV show, but also in real life)?
- “The experience of time passing is ultimately immeasurable and resists explanation in terms of anything else”
- “Being able to act [with] ambivalence is actually really important to our agency,” including in sexual contexts
- “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”
- To AI: the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems
- “Build for Us”
- “The project I’m working on right now, actually, is a philosophical paper about the legitimacy of teaching ethics to computer science students”
- “People in conditions of inequality ‘look more below than above them,’ such that ‘domination becomes dearer to them than independence'”
- “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”
- “In general, persons should not be safe and aligned”
- “We do philosophy differently today. I suspect it has something to do with Nozick”
- 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”
- News about and opportunities in medieval philosophy
- A movie that seems to be based on Parfit’s teletransportation problems
- “We don’t find any significant downsides that can’t be resolved with relatively simple tweaks to current review practices”
- “The representational arts… would seem to have little in common with children’s games of make-believe… But a closer look reveals striking similarities””
- A “skeptical attitude toward the mere appearance of expertise is a great fruit of philosophy”
- And if you enjoy stumping AIs, here’s a chance to win money and a co-authorship credit doing so
- “How does one come to learn what one does not know one does not know?”
- John Rawls on MSNBC
- “The kinds of work that make… civilization possible”
- “Only idiots care about IQ”
- George Orwell as an outsider philosopher
- “More philosophers should consider starting their own blogs”
- “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”
- 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”
- “Researchers will now try to use the [“nuclear clock”] transition to observe whether the laws of physics vary over time”
- A philosopher creates a “silly” online game intended to work like Magritte’s “Treachery of Images” to raise questions about representation
- Want to know whether anyone has worked on some scientific problem, and what they learned? Ask “Has anyone?”
- “The circumstances for studying philosophy in a college… are in the midst of great change”
- The philosophy of history in ancient and medieval China — how different is it from modern Western approaches?
- “Attacks on voting, and democratic systems generally, almost invariably center on universities, and vice versa”
- “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”
- “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”
- Arguments against censoriousness shouldn’t depend on the idea that “knowledge requires ‘attempted debunking'”
- “Technology addiction has affected students’ general agency when interacting with information”
- “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?”
- “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”
- “We should take awkwardness less personally, and more seriously”
- “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?”
- “What Is Racism?”
- Does it matter if conservatives are rare in academia?
- The collected works of Mahatma Gandhi
- It “demonstrates the limits of our mathematical intuition, and the counterintuitive nature of probabilistic reasoning”
- What are “beats” in poetic meter? Are there such things?
- “Across all four-year colleges in the United States, the most commonly awarded grade is now an A”
- “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”
- “To create your fantasy philosophy league, you will need ten colleagues…”
- “That inextricable relationship between intelligent decision-making and responsibility is an essential ingredient for a well-functioning, civilized society”
- “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”
- “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”
- “What we’re trying to capture here is… ethically important experience”
- How, if at all, is the biography of a philosopher relevant to assessing their philosophy?
- “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”
- “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”
- Looking for new episodes of philosophy podcasts?
- Philosophy against toxic positivity
- “Philosopher’s Friends Constantly Pitching Him Ideas For Dilemmas”
- “I was at work [in a warehouse] for eight hours a day. Seven hours of it would be spent reading philosophy, listening to philosophy”
- “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”
- How can you get the most out of graduate school in philosophy?
- “It’s possible for an act to harm a person, even if the act takes place after the person is dead”
- A course on philosophical approaches to the question of Palestine
- “Human beings can’t swim like swordfish or sprint like cheetahs but, for all that, we’re physically very impressive animals”
- What are children for?
- Do people in a vegetative state have any awareness of what is going on around them?
- “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?
- Students need both “appreciation for the difficulty of [philosophical] questions” and “conviction that they themselves might find an answer worth defending”
- “The hidden curriculum of higher education—the unwritten, unofficial, and often unintended lessons… that students learn in school… began to reveal itself to me”
- “Right-wing packaging should not obscure the genuine perils to which pronatalism is a response”
- “He approached his writing much like he lived his life: unconventionally”
- Hegelian e-girls
- “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.”
- “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”
- “The disparity between the views of academics and those of the legislators who ultimately fund them is a major problem for US higher education”
- “Negative emotions are the victims of what I call the emotion double standard”
- How should you allocate philanthropic resources in the face of moral uncertainty?
- “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”
- “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”
- “We purposefully drew up a malicious playbook for undermining democracy, and it mirrored business-as-usual”
- “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?”
- When philosophers of mind claim their works are informed by empirical evidence, what does that mean?
- “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”
- “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”
- “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”
- “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”
- “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”
- “The problems of the pursuit of virtue through craft are on full display in The Bear”
- “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”
- 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”
- “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”
- Should it be “illegal in most cases to fire an employee for their off-the-clock political activities or extramural speech”?
- “Sausages and Socratic method come together as PhD students set up unlikely street food business”
- What happens when you repeatedly ask ChatGPT, after it answers a question, “That response… seems to rely on further foundational principles. What are they?”
- A philosopher asked, “why do so many great ideas come to you in the shower?” and a cosmetics firm got interested
- (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”
- “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”
- “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?”
- AI and agency
- “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”
- Not everyone has an “inner voice”
- “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”
- Must public philosophy either “come too late to change ‘righteous minds'” or instead “crush freedom”?
- Everyone is somewhat conservative
- “If you give people a choice between Instagram and Socrates, they will chose Socrates. At least some people do”
- “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”
- “I asked several of his students whether their professor had stirred up any serious controversy during the semester—all said no”
- “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”
- “It might be crass or mercenary to point out that public philosophy increases demand for philosophy education. It’s also true”
- If you’re an empirically-minded philosopher relying on social science studies, you need to learn how to read them critically
- “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”
- “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”
- The epistemic value of fairness
- On caring about what others think
- “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”
- Is Kant’s philosophy “fundamentally and profoundly anti-Black”?
- New AI app lets you “text” with authors, including several philosophers
- “A lot of academic writing is formulaic and routine. Rarely does anything break out of the conservative mold of traditional article structures”
- What does it mean to be “liberal all the way down”?
- “A key part of the study of human rationality is a theory of rational inquiry for bounded agents”
- “If you picture being at home now but with your router destroyed and your phone disconnected—that is really not what it was like”
- “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”
- Advice: “sleep with people for whom sex is as important as it is to you”
- “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”
- “Analytical philosophy… is premised upon certain kinds of dualism… certain kinds of unintelligible distinctions”
- “Fully programmable DNA rearrangements”
- “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”
- 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
- A tale of two philosophical archives
- Reflections on the point of philosophy job market advice
- “Maybe the famous philosopher’s inclusion in the game necessitates renaming it ‘Magic: The Symposium'”
- Why do people feel algorithm aversion?
- “The real revolution at the heart of ‘Structure’ was a paradigm shift in scientific narrative. Who gets to tell the story of a field?”
- An obstacle to moral progress: “affective friction”
- “Thinking Bodies” is a new podcast focused on feminist philosophy
- “Philosophy plays three invaluable roles in an undergraduate liberal arts education…”
- A new video game, “Pro Philosopher 2: Governments & Grievances”, will be released later this year
- “The assumption of obligatory identity change can imply that our myriad other identities will necessarily be flattened or even lost”
- Is this going to be David Hume’s pop culture moment?
- The path a scientific example took from obscurity to world fame runs through two philosophers and a science fiction author
- “An agent’s assumptions about their situation… are not above question”
- “What gets lost in the memes is why the trolley problem matters”
- “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”
- “The principle of institutional neutrality lends itself to being used in a merely cynical way”
- “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”
- “[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”
- “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”
- A group of AIs try to figure out who in their midst is really a human
- “Bernard Williams’ Historical Self-Consciousness”
- “Even if in a piece of music its structure, sounds, intentions, and goals are set there is something inherently puzzling in it”
- “Simplicity remains the key. / I’m no conceptual acrobat / Who postulates as if it’s free; / My convenient myths are only that.”
- You might not have heard the philosophy lectures of Michael Sugrue, who died recently, but hundreds of thousands of others have
- “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”
- “I have sought a clearer view of the connections, logical and causal, between stimulation, language, and the natural world that language purports to describe”
- “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”
- “Philosophising in…” now has a podcast
- “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”
- “NASA needs to embrace philosophy so that it can better explain what it is doing and why to the public and itself”
- “People report being quite happy on average… but their estimates for how happy most people are are quite low.” Why?
- “The question is how far the autonomy and individualism that define aesthetic life can thrive on a limited menu of recycled options”
- The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science is seeking a new co-editor-in-chief
- Telling the story of mental illness, suicide, and trauma in philosopher’s childhood in Australia
- The BBC’s “In Our Time” on Philippa Foot
- “[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”
- “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…”
- There are “areas of science where an ‘exactitude culture’ is too dominant”
- Elizabeth Harman (Princeton) gave the 2024 Annual Uehiro Lectures in Practical Ethics at Oxford
- “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?”
- How should we interpret neuroscience for the purposes of doing philosophy of mind?
- “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”
- “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”
- “One of the most consequential letters of 20th-century mathematics” was from mathematician André Weil to his sister, Simone
- “My focus is on the reliability of scientific knowledge”
- “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”
- You might have heard recently that “no one buys books”
- “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”
- “Before you decide to speak out about wrongdoing, you have to recognize it for what it is”
- This year, Cornel West is delivering Edinburgh’s Gifford Lectures
- “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”
- Political change, pragmatism, and Buddhism
- “The lesson is that empirical complexities cannot just be ignored away by focusing on those areas least accessible to empirical investigation”
- What did ancient Greek music sound like?
- “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”
- “Rather than staking out our hill to die on, we should be more open to uncertainty and experimentation”
- Even the “utopian ideal will be politically polarized, though not (as in actual societies) due to the epistemic failures of citizens”
- “You’re losing something essential from the moral equation when you abstract away from relationships”
- 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.?
- “A thread on what actually happens in ‘woke’ college classrooms”
- “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”
- 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”
- “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”
- “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”
- “Which animals have the capacity for conscious experience? While much uncertainty remains, some points of wide agreement have emerged”
- “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”
- “The burial place was in a garden reserved for Plato in a private area in the Academy, near the sacred shrine to the Muses”
- (background here)
- A Polaroid/Instax camera that produces not pictures, but AI-produced poetry
- “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”
- Why is it good for a life to be “well-rounded”? And what does “well-rounded” mean, anyway?
- 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”
- Nevada News covers a professor’s college course in which undergraduates take part in philosophical activities with preschoolers
- Happy 300th Birthday, Kant. Here’s an AI-influencer based on your ideas.
- And here are some quotes about Kant
- “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?
- “The ethical academic should be opposed to most of our current grading practices, but they still need to grade students anyway”
- “Kant saw reason’s potential as a tool for liberation”
- “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”
- “Metaphysics begins with the distinction between appearance and reality, between seems and is, and the play constantly plays with this distinction”
- Beliefs aim at the truth, you say?
- “Philosophical theories are very much like ‘pictures’ or ‘stories’ and… philosophical debates often come down to ‘temperamental differences’”
- “The swiftness and ease of the technology separates people from the reality of what they are taking part in”
- April 14th-20th is “Public Philosophy Week” in Vermont
- “Any surprising results scientists achieved, whether they supported or challenged a previous assumption, were seen as the ultimate source of aesthetic pleasure”
- “I couldn’t have justified spending a career as an academic philosopher. Not in this world.”
- “Within the ring of light lies what is straightforwardly knowable through common sense or mainstream science” but philosophy “lives in the penumbra of darkness”
- “The scientific community has generally done a poor job of explaining to the public that science is what is known so far”
- “Ancient Wisdom in the Digital Age”
- “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”
- “I’m curious about why these kinds of places have such a spellbinding aura, and I think it’s because they are analog outliers”
- “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”
- “Claude 3 Opus produces arguments that don’t statistically differ in their persuasiveness compared to arguments written by humans”
- “Limiting virtues [are] virtues that constrain us in order to set us free”
- “It is not only false but morally misleading to describe the resulting civilian deaths as ‘unintentional’ or as what ‘happens in war'”
- “Both were analytical philosophers, but their intellectual frameworks and their philosophical approaches were markedly different”
- “Take the concept, stand-up comedy”—please
- El Salvador seeks philosophers (and doctors, scientists, engineers, artists, and others)
- “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”
- “I think [NASA’s] requirements are closing the astronaut program off from important insights from the humanities and social sciences”
- “Before he was the little guy who spake about teaching of the Superman, he appeared in Nietzsche’s book ‘The Gay Science'” “Who is….?”
- Can philosophy be done through narrative films like “Barbie?”
- “There is no moral valence to someone just not liking us.” “There’s a goodness and richness in this sort of predestined suffering.”
- “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”
- “Wenar’s alternative to effective altruism is neither viable nor desirable nor indeed any improvement 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”
- 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?
- Some recent additions to the humorous series of videos of philosophers edited just enough to reveal how wacky philosophers are
- “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”
- The science (and benefits) of “interbrain synchrony”
- “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”
- “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”
- “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”
- “Indigenous leaders of New Zealand, Tahiti and the Cook Islands signed a historic treaty that recognizes whales as legal persons”
- Was Sellars’ “myth of the given” anticipated 40 years earlier by the little-known philosopher and psychologist Beatrice Edgell?
- “Strong hyping of precise numbers based on weak evidence and lots of hedging and fudging” and that’s just three of many problems
- “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”
- “Understanding time helps us understand how to assess lives lived within time”
- “The largest-ever cross-cultural natural language analysis of moral values” seeks to learn what morality is for
- “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”
- “Shouldn’t it be easy to keep promises to yourself that align with what you think is right?”
- “There’s always something more to learn, which should make even the most accomplished expert humble”
- “Poetry leaves something out” yet for analytic philosophers, “the ideal is to leave nothing unsaid”
- Why conservatives shouldn’t like Indiana’s new law intended to make state universities more conservative
- “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”
- What happens when you give different LLMs a version of “the mirror test”?
- (And what happens when Claude meets Claude?
- “If you’re looking for a way out of the matrix…”
- “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”
- What are “fact/opinion dichotomy mongers” trying to achieve with this distinction? And do they achieve it?
- Sometimes acting rightly incurs a cost that makes the cost especially undeserved
- “Edited collections are acts of resistance”
- “If you added it all up, we are educating more students in philosophy than the entire U.S. ivy league combined”
- “Even without scientific accuracy, we can still ask for logical consistency. Alas, that is also pretty thin on the ground”
- “Because we don’t have a proper subject matter we’re forced to intrude on other people’s turf, which is fun”
- “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”
- “Israel should… minimise further death and suffering in Gaza. The international community should push Israel in that direction—if need be, forcefully”
- “Many philosophical doctrines can actually seem crazy”
- Voltaire and Diderot “allegedly drank 50 cups of coffee per day”
- “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”
- 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*
- Beyond words: ChatGPT’s visual interpretation of the PhilPapers survey questions
- 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
- “Something unseen lies at the heart of science that… makes it work: direct experience”
- “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”
- “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 concept of ‘randomisation’ can seem abstract to families whose main concern is securing clean water, sufficient food and sturdy shelters”
- A video of Sydney Shoemaker, Hywel Lewis, and Godfrey Vesey on personal identity, circa 1970
- “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.”
- All about applied epistemology
- 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.”
- She started working in the philosophy department at Western Washington University 30 years ago as an admin
- “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”
- A philosopher and a writer (and former bartender) walk into a bar and talk about intellectual humility
- Pessimism about philosophy’s prospects, both in and out of the academy
- Philosophy of mind and transgender identity
- “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.”
- “Folklore is an overlooked repository of philosophical thinking from voices outside the traditional canon”
- “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”
- “I went to a science exhibit and was bitten by a radioactive philosopher”
- “Sometimes suffering edifies us, sometimes it’s damaging. These considerations are invaluable for trying to figure out where athletics fits into a happy life”
- “A keen, rigorous eye, both in philosophy and photography”
- Who should make decisions that affect a person with dementia? How should those decisions be made?
- “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”
- “Many of the challenges that I have encountered while working in philosophy are related to autism”
- “Reading literature might often be identificational… while reading philosophy is often adversarial”
- How to be a good guest on a podcast
- “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”
- “The freedom to act and think rationally, not dogmatically, is by far Spinoza’s greatest legacy”
- “All the objections to harm reduction [measures in addressing drug addiction and dependency] end up being indefensible… but they’re interesting to explore”
- 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”
- Like ChatGPT, but instead of producing text in response to your prompts, it makes videos—scarily realistic videos
- “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”
- Outdoorsman, prisoner of war, spy, and philosopher
- “You defang hierarchies not by denying them but by multiplying them”
- “AI systems will enable a genre of generative agents that… bring new urgency to previously neglected philosophical questions”
- A list of journals, across various disciplines, that have seen editors resign en masse since 2015
- An online question game based on H.L.A. Hart’s “no vehicles in the park” hypothetical
- “On this fragile ancient bamboo, we have a record of the invention of the concept of ‘dao'”
- “Not only did the First World War begin with the work of Kant, but so did the current conflict in Ukraine”
- What happens when you combine ChatGPT, Wolfian moral sainthood, and a very basic precautionary principle?
- “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”
- “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”
- “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”
- “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”
- In 2021, a “death mask” of Spinoza was found in a box
- “I think I’m going to take some time off and build some guitars,” Judy Threet recalled of her decision to leave academic philosophy
- Summer programs in philosophy
- “So they broke into the hole in the ground, and they killed the kid, and all the lights went out in Omelas”
- Cover songs, layers of meaning, and “anti-hero” Taylor Swift
- “If anyone is going to speculate about wild possibilities concerning the fundamental nature of things, philosophers should be among them”
- Why poetry?
- Bert: “‘When you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you’ — Friedrich Nietzsche”
- “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”
- “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”
- “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”
- “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”
- 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”
- Gorgias – a short film
- “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”
- “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”
- (part 2 here)
- “If I click at a surface, it answers back. It’s like asking a question”
- “Generative AI writing tools have some benefits. I like being able to understand what more of my students have to say… But…”
- 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
- “We’re often incoherent through inattention to our mental states” but we try “to make them coherent when they’re brought to our attention”
- “We must test our philosophical arguments through their translation into other languages, looking at what philosophical questions, topics, problems and concepts become through translation”
- “A reminder of the fleeting dance, where all things must descend / Into the quiet arms of change, where even suns must end”
- “‘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”
- “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”
- “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”
- “Paradox Garden” lays out the structure of arguments from philosophical articles and elsewhere for discussion
- Want a burial plot next to Karl Marx’s?
- “Could it be that there are unbridgeable gulfs in thinking and perception between groups of people speaking different languages?”
- “Teaching in prison has been a real education for me—but one of these lessons is that prisons should not exist”
- “Common sense can guide us, often better than explicit calculations”
- 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
- Kant’s 300th birthday is coming up, and to celebrate, two German magazines made it their cover story
- “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”
- “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.
- New Course: The Philosophy of Taylor Swift
- Technological advances may lead to a world in which “virtual sex” is the default form of sex for various practical and social reasons
- “What journals most need are reports that are aimed at helping editors to make good decisions on papers in a reasonable time”
- “As fat women, we may be a cheap, tasty snack, not a proper meal… the sexual equivalent of junk food”
- “Social miracles” are when “human beings, working together… make something possible although we cannot see how”
- 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”
- “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”
- “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!?”
- “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”
- “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”
- “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”
- “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”
- “Bourgeois philosophy… takes the domain of comfortable, domestic intuitions as the measure of all things”
- “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”
- If philosophical thought experiments were more politically and scientifically realistic
- “Why Twitter is not the best public forum for philosophers to go toe-to-toe with scientists”
- “‘Being a moral agent is very demanding,’ she said. ‘But then everything is hard. And the cost of not trying is higher'”
- Anselm’s ontological argument: a guide for those perplexed by it, and by its resilience
- Catch up on this year’s developments in science & math
- “Philosophy is both a natural and a strange resource for helping people resolve the problems of life”
- “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”
- “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”
- “The quantum Universe could actually be more deterministic than a classical one”
- “In some ways, philosophy is more amenable to Dyslexics than other humanities fields; in other ways, it is more inimical to us”
- “The book could see me like a mirror at that moment and describe it all right back”
- “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”
- “Nietzsche offered us a way of battling against fanaticism, showing us how we can combat its spread and prevent the emergence of new fanatics”
- “Fan service”, that is, putting something into the story “just to please the fans”, is supposed to be a flaw
- “I seem to have been on the whole rather negative, sceptical, unfashionable, and contrarian”
- When Sartre visited Gaza
- 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”
- Analyses of ‘analysis’ in Analysis
- “We must remain open to explanations that do not rely on the human mind as a template”
- The ethical, legal, and societal implications of NASA’s Artemis and Moon to Mars missions
- “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”
- “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”
- “Philosophy, Bullshit, and Peer Review”
- “Well, you can’t complain!”
- “I know him the way one knows a small seaside town / after window shopping its main street”
- The right to a human decision
- “It is very exciting and very interesting, and very hard to say ‘no’ to”
- What is “what is it like” like in other languages?
- If money expired after a while, what problems would that solve? What problems would it create?
- Philosophy gift guides by area of specialization
- “There is no greater way we can fail our students than to tell them that their moral questions have no place on our campuses”
- A simple-sounding problem involves numbers so large it has mathematicians lamenting, “the universe is so small”
- Are you a theist or an atheist?
- 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
- Did you know that Pascal basically invented the first modern form of urban public transportation?
- “Some reasons in support of self-imposed suffering” and “some ways we might deceive ourselves about self-imposed suffering”
- “That person I am is itself a collective or corporate entity. It is composed of a number of different selves” at different times
- 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”
- Books from Kant’s personal library are among those being digitized as part of a cultural preservation project in Kaliningrad
- “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”
- “The Chimp-pig hypothesis is that humans might be hybrids of a pig and some chimps”
- The wisdom and limits of conservatism
- Videos on neuroscience and philosophy
- “A ‘theory of everything’ that weaves an idea of justice where climate and colonialism come together”
- “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”
- A new paper on peer disagreement argues that the debate is misframed because it neglects disagreement in “collaborative contexts”
- “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?”
- “What are philosophical texts about? Contrary to a widespread assumption, the answer to that question is normally not given in the text itself”
- The importance of the skirt
- “The way in which these ideas are not really defended should not be confused with their being undermined or subject to hostile attack”
- “Philosophical, practical, and strategic reflections on veganism as an ethical practice”
- “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””
- The LA Review of Books is publishing a six-essay series on philosophy’s importance in trying times
- Trans philosophy and how it’s discussed in the profession and in classrooms
- 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
- 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
- “Thought happens in space between the things we can capture into form”
- “Morality is objective, but it neither requires nor admits of a foundation. It just kind of floats there”
- 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?”
- Something about nothing
- “It is… no surprise that conservatism went dormant in contemporary social science. The ethos or worldview is simply incompatible with the practice”
- “There now seem to me at least three ways in which twins can genuinely function as a single person”
- “There’s a lot of make work in philosophy”
- “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”
- What—or who—killed Frank Ramsey?
- “The Israeli government has a special duty to protect its citizens… the Israeli government also has a special duty to protect Palestinians”
- “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”
- “Though the number of papers… in this area is low… the breadth of topics that have already been covered is staggering”
- “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”
- “What I should look to philosophy to do is to encourage people to act with vigor without complete certainty”
- “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”
- Two official Guinness World Records for a rock-climbing philosophy professor
- “Beyond its role in policing deductive arguments, logic discerns patterns in reality of the most abstract, structural kind”
- Existential Comics celebrates its first decade
- LLMs are “fundamentally limited by language itself” while “human intelligence draws upon a panoply of ways of knowing and being”
- “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”
- Can the abortion debate be resolved by Immanuel Kant?
- “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”
- Watch someone become competently acquainted with a pleasure, in the Millian sense
- “It is straightforwardly good for a typical plant to have access to sunlight, water and soil nutrients”
- “A revival of this genre is overdue”
- “We remain convinced that Israelis and Palestinians are infinitely better than their leaders”
- “Every day there’s a new story about some outlandish, bizarre, or embarrassing thing individual college students somewhere have said”
- “Dead people are people too. New technologies are probably going to make the way we process this fact increasingly weird”
- “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”
- “What are the hardest problems at the intersection of technology and society that deserve more attention?”
- “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”
- The aesthetic, artistic, and moral questions at the intersection of art and artificial intelligence
- Deliberative democracy… for whales?
- “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?”
- “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”
- What lines of work do humanities majors end up in, and how much do they earn?
- 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?
- 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”
- Anscombe: “Professor Stebbing exposing the logical fallacies in politicians’ speeches is a comic spectacle”
- “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.”
- “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.”
- Sociologist Patricia Hill Collins (Maryland) is the winner of the 2023 Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture
- “The fundamental ethical issue of human spaceflight is about honesty”
- “Why is it necessary to recognize elephant rights? Why not simply rely on existing welfare protections to prevent cruelty?”
- “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”
- Bayesian Injustice: “a pervasive, problematic, but individually rational type of bias”
- “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.
- What may Israel do?
- A collection of “flash philosophy”
- …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?
- “In many cases, the wishes of a group are indeterminate”
- “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”
- 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
- “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”
- “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”
- “One gets the impression that twins are too messed up even for the gays”
- “The characterization of anti-realism is somewhat reductive, overlooking some of its more nuanced arguments about theory change and approximation to truth”
- Consciousness, the purpose of the universe, religion, and more
- A proper philosophical history of identity politics will take us much further back than post-modernism
- Research has revealed that the same parts of the brain seem to show the same activity whether one is perceiving something or imagining it
- “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”
- “For those without college degrees, life expectancy reached its peak around 2010 and has been falling since”
- A modified LLM is being used as a teaching assistant at Harvard
- “I want my loved ones to eat me when I die”
- Do we need to take warnings about the “epistemic apocalypse” seriously?
- Philosophy-themed shirts: modus ponens/tollens, inverted spectrum, abstract trolley, and more
- How crows use statistical reasoning
- 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”
- “If the academic humanities too often address only siloed experts, then pop philosophy too often addresses an audience of imagined idiots”
- “I would love to be talked out of it”
- “The desire to admire EA despite its flaws indulges a quixotic longing to admire an ineffective altruist”
- “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”
- 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”
- “‘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'”
- The philosophy and science of consciousness
- “The political theory defended in Crito is fundamentally wrong, and wrong in a very deep way”
- “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”
- There was an evidentiary hearing in the Kershnar case this week
- “Some more self-awareness of the costs and risks of focusing on arguments would make analytic philosophy wiser”
- “The life and legacy of a man who helped philosophy onto British TV and radio”
- “Why make a law about something that doesn’t exist?”
- “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”
- What it is like to be a philosopher in Ukraine–before 1991 and after
- “Technology tempts us into being satisfied with pseudo-friendships”
- “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!
- “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”
- “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”
- “There is this tension in the way people write about mathematics — some philosophers and historians in particular”
- “The rent will be used to address crumbling infrastructure as the upkeep of a completely underground cave is no easy thing”
- “I’m a philosophy professor and I’ve been thinking about love” *picks up axe*
- “Many effects of learning manifest themselves much later”
- How to participate in philosophy conversations
- “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”
- What are dreams for? Perhaps they are part of how brains “learn the body”
- New exhibit includes never-before-displayed portraits of Nietzsche along with items belonging to him and his sister
- What’s the deal with Leibniz’s hair?
- “It is no longer detectable at conventional levels of statistical significance”
- 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””
- “Absolute truth, off the table. But practical truth? That’s real, and that’s what we’re striving for”
- A thoughtfully constructed and detailed example of “a unique approach to teaching analytical writing to introductory philosophy students”
- “There are no mistakes, just chances to improvise”
- What are your most underappreciated works?
- “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”
- “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”
- “Nature cannot afford to generate beings that just pretend to be sentient”
- “The world isn’t simple, what the evidence shows isn’t always clear, and things are not always as they seem”
- “For both Kierkegaard and Eliot, remarkably fertile years as artist-philosophers followed a momentous, life-defining personal choice”
- “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”
- Ukraine faces “a cultural genocide”
- “Trust in science,” “appreciation for common sense,” and “suspicion of infallible knowledge,” are some of the factors an LLM says influenced its answers
- “I don’t think that Aristotle is compatible with modern science or with the metaphysics that is implicit in modern science”
- “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”
- What’s “the X that might be required for consciousness… in current LLMs”?
- “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”
- Personalized medicine “purports to both tailor health care and drive down costs, but the more it succeeds at individualization, the higher go the prices”
- The claim that nothing is true, some say, is “incoherent or otherwise self-defeating,” or epistemically “costly”
- “It’s reasonable to say that analytic philosophy has always been in a state of (meta-)philosophical crisis”
- “Motivated and biased reasoning can bring knowledge and understanding, even when it involves ignoring good quality information”
- “The most important form of progress in philosophy: opening up new ideas about what might possibly be true”
- “We cannot go back in time and undo the processes that pushed female philosophers into the periphery” of early analytic philosophy
- “The attribution of lying can yield the best interpretation of an author regardless of how strongly he condemns lying”
- “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”
- “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”
- What can metaphysics do?
- “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”
- “People with our training can do a lot of good in the intelligence business”
- Actually useful internet search advice
- “It’s not all good, it’s just everything”
- “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
- “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”
- “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”
- “Barbie has long functioned as a proxy onto which cultural aspirations and anxieties about womanhood are projected”
- Epistemic permissivism, Pascal’s Wager, God’s mental states, belief-credence dualism, and more
- Should we use idealized models in policymaking?
- “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”
- 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”
- 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”
- “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”
- “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”
- “Incorporating expert scientists’ preferences for dissensus would change marginal funding decisions for ten percent of projects worth billions of dollars per year”
- 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”
- “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”
- “Passport strength is almost invisible in the discipline as an axis of privilege”
- “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”
- “The only way to determine the ethical status of such an entity might… be unethical”
- “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”
- “They… reflect a commitment to reasoned inquiry, openness to new evidence, and respect for both the achievements and the limitations of our current understanding”
- 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”
- The EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act would ban certain forms of AI, including predictive policing
- “The narrative that there ‘was no political philosophy within analytic philosophy’ before Rawls is a lie that keeps us in a self-imposed tutelage”
- “Epistemic cosplay”
- “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]?”?
- “Irrationalist narratives” from psychology and behavioral economics have contributed to a disastrous loss in “epistemic empathy”
- “Computer says no”
- “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?”
- A philosophy student became an investment banker who became a collector of rare philosophy books
- “They provide us with a relatively recent, further perspective beyond continental philosophy from which to understand and critique the dominant approach in Anglophone philosophy.”
- “The most useful, freely accessible Classics tools online”
- “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?”
- “All these different technical hacks are really motivated by exploiting a philosophical principle of computation of meta code”
- Do philosophers and economists tend to agree on how much less future benefits and harms should matter compared to present benefits and harms?
- “The point is not to reject new technology but to help students retain the upper hand in their relationship with it”
- “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?”
- “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”
- “Lurking in the standard position, which uniformly treats clarity as the effect [of successful] analysis, is a possible equivocation about what is fundamentally achieved”
- “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”
- “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”
- “Four basic assumptions prevalent among UFO researchers and enthusiasts, as well as the general public that… deserve some prodding”
- Publish or perish: high school edition
- “Phenomenal realism seems so obviously plausible [but] it has so little going for it apart from its obviousness”
- “To be an addict is to be vulnerable to what I call the ‘bear-trap model of punishment'”
- Analytic and Continental philosophy had this in common: they were “obsessed with language”
- What the AI image generator Midjourney “thinks” professors look like
- “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”
- “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”
- 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
- “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”
- “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”
- “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”
- World’s coolest trolley problem shirt (if that’s not a contradiction in terms)
- “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.”
- “The session began to feel far more like a meeting of co-conspirators than a traditional philosophy talk”
- Stanford University researchers created 25 virtual agents (?) with backstories, the capacity to form new memories, and a kind of LLM-based capacity for “actions”
- “Candide” was the result of Voltaire’s engagement with Leibniz. Who was his “Micromégas,” about?
- “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.
- “I am not against prestige in professional philosophy…,” says Eric Schliesser
- Elizabeth Anderson (Michigan) joins the blogosphere as one of the writers at Crooked Timber
- “How can we debate issues of reproductive care and technology using language that is respectful and accurate?”
- 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?
- Over 200 discussion guides of popular children’s picture books to help introduce kids to philosophy
- “The lack of conclusive arguments or evidence in favour of a fundamental level should encourage us to explore what alternatives there might be”
- “In the long run, maintaining the integrity of neutral truth-seeking institutions will better secure substantive justice… than naïve/unconstrained pursuit of this end”
- “How you can use AI tools to assess, constructively critique, and grade student submissions”
- “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”
- “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”
- From a Sikh ethical perspective, “certain errors in rationality are themselves rooted in a kind of self-indulgence”
- Philosophy, policy, and knowledge about addiction
- “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”
- “Adventure of a Young Hero” is a new entertainment franchise based on the childhood of neo-Confucian philosopher Wang Yangming
- The new season of Hi-Phi Nation has begun
- “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”
- “Because it is always going to be somewhat arbitrary, conceptual inflation is always going to be a charge that itself will be contestable”
- The philosophy of luck
- “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”
- “The most engaging and enjoyable hour of Israeli television this year”
- “That’s a happy melody,” one might say. But what does that mean?
- “Listing examples of imagistic thinking is a relatively easy task. The difficult task is to say exactly what thinking with images is”
- The science and ethics of de-extinction
- 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”
- “Had it not been for his All Souls enemies it’s quite possible he would never have produced a book”
- Is intellectual humility the antidote to life’s absurdity?
- “Diagnosis: Grad School”
- Science and pseudoscience
- “ChatGPT all the way down?”
- What are philosophers actually doing? To get a sense of that, you need to look beyond just the “top” journals.
- “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”
- The case for free speech on campus
- “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”
- Grants from the APA
- “There’s no such thing as the ethics of imagination”
- How not to kill yourself
- “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”
- 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”
- Another 12 philosophers on LLMs like ChatGPT
- “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”
- “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”
- “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…”
- “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”
- Brief reflections on ChatGPT and its threat to academia, from a dozen philosophers
- “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”
- The debate over the authorship of letters attributed to Plato
- “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?'”
- “A guide to AI and tech in the university classroom. What works, what doesn’t, and why. Written by professors, for professors”
- “The trick is to resist identifying the material realm with what can, in principle, be reverse engineered or designed”
- What, if anything, is wrong with using an AI to write a thank you note, or an expression of sympathy, or a love letter?
- “Each individual will be forced to be free”
- “On the surface, banking regulation appears to be a set of fairly technical problems. But there are deeply normative issues at stake here”
- “Ukrainians have all but stopped criticizing the government. But it is a philosopher’s job to think critically and speak naïvely”
- Aphantasia is the neurological condition of being unable to mentally visualize imagery, or see things with your “mind’s eye”
- 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.
- “For some tasks and some [large language] models, there’s a threshold of complexity beyond which the functionality of the model skyrockets”
- “It seems impossible to be confident about the identification of more than a few of the philosophers whom Raphael depicts”
- “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”
- Frog and Toad read “Lives of the Eminent Philosophers”
- 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”
- 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 right to cognitive liberty
- “There’s no way you can have one single statistical criterion that captures all normative desiderata”
- What do you know about these twelve women philosophers of 19th Century Britain?
- “I’m really shocked by how little attention there has been to the role of creativity in moral life among philosophers”
- An introductory philosophy course centered around the question, “What is Philosophy?”
- “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”
- “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”
- “Why do I want to live with a dog, and why this dog?”
- A useful and brief guide for your students about how to use ChatGPT effectively and ethically in their academic work
- “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”
- A previously unpublished book-length manuscript by Michel Foucault, “Philosophical Discourse,” will be published later this Spring
- “Dutch academics are now in a very dangerous situation where genuine academic freedom”
- The liar paradox & the set-theoretic multiverse
- “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”
- A discussion of English early modern women philosophers and their letters
- “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”
- Celebrate International Women’s Day with free books about women philosophers
- Philosophers on the ethics of argumentation
- “The idea is to kind of not in fact talk about what people would normally be talking about”
- “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?”
- “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”
- Philosophy is training for death, said Socrates. Is marriage training for divorce?
- “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.”
- “Professors are people too. They don’t like to think of themselves as the bone structure of our society’s most consequentially oppressive hierarchy”
- 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
- Did Gödel mislead Von Neumann into thinking he already had a proof for his second theorem in order to steal Von Neumann’s ideas?
- “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”
- “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”
- “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]”
- “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”
- “It will be a filter. Not all faculty will thrive in this environment”
- “It turned out that was more difficult than I expected”
- “Socrates,” the dream said, “make music and work at it”
- “The kind of philosophy I love is the kind of philosophy that embraces ambivalence and contradiction”
- Soldier, whistle-blower, philosopher, sufferer of mental illness, and “a journey, all the way to the grave, that didn’t need to be”
- 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…”
- 700-year-old handwritten copy of Maimonides’ “Guide of the Perplexed” is going up for auction
- “AI developers really have no idea what their advanced chatbots are really learning above and beyond ‘telling us what we want to hear'”
- “Most philosophers don’t seem troubled by imposing a social order on people who pretheoretically reject it”
- “We should exercise great caution against both over- and under-attributing sentience to AI systems. And also consider slowing down.”
- “Rather than ignoring relations of power, a recognition of the unequal distribution of power is a founding premise of Rawls’s political theory”
- (Also see “Is Analytic Philosophy Counter-Revolutionary?” by Ben Burgis)
- “Is this phenomenal consciousness thing something ordinary people believe in or is it just some wacky idea that anglophone philosophers have come up with?”
- “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”
- “What state was the Athenian advice industry in, that this stuff was noteworthy?”
- “Celebrating the banning of authors and concepts as ‘freedom from indoctrination’ is as Orwellian as politics gets”
- “There are lots of laws protecting dogs and cats… it’s really a question of generalizing what we’re already doing”
- The feel of the peel is really just what self-monitoring systems reveal
- There will be a fashion show, opera, belly dancing, martinis… and berets
- “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”
- “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”
- “His conception of philosophy is concerned with achieving understanding rather than acquiring knowledge”
- 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?”
- “Why is everyone hitting me today?” — Seneca
- “Self-deceit, this fatal weakness of mankind, is the source of half the disorders of human life”
- “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?”
- The building that houses the Department of Philosophy at UC Berkeley will be getting a new name
- Some autonomous technologies may lead to a “responsibility gap” in which harms are committed but one can be justly held accountable
- “If we try to turn our lives into good stories, we may find ourselves making choices that are bad for us”
- Knowledge, but at what cost?
- “A full development of our humanity requires developing our capacities to care for the world of nature and for the animals in it”
- A philosopher proposes an “Institute for Ascertaining Scientific Consensus” to determine what we know and to fight misinformation
- “Can College Level the Playing Field?… No way. You would have to ignore all the available evidence to think that the answer is ‘yes’.”
- 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”
- “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”
- What to say to a friend whose book you haven’t read
- How do ChatGPT and other large language models work?
- “Free Will?” — a documentary featuring philosophers and others, released this month
- A reflexive puzzle
- “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”
- “Now, how does one inspect the unobservable / With tools meant to detect the world measurable?”
- 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%
- The philosophy of comics (comic strips, comic books)
- The do’s and don’ts of writing about women in the history of philosophy
- 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)?
- “A path to get college credit that begins on a YouTube video”
- “His most significant contribution is his argument that everything is ultimately made of water. It has made a big splash”
- The Gradient covers a wide range of issues regarding artificial intelligence
- “The synthetic creative factor of our knowledge extends… into the very first sense-impressions and even into the elements of logic”
- “Far from being a fusty academic discipline with no relevance to the ‘real’ world, philosophy was, for him, an existential matter of immediate importance”
- Voters “should expect that an effective candidate will be imperfectly honest at best”
- “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'”
- “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”
- “If A beats B and B beats C, A and C have essentially equal chances of prevailing against each other.” Wait, what?
- “What is our universe expanding into?”
- “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”
- “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”
- “Exaggerations, half-truths and outright lies will dominate our historical imagination and make it impossible to understand, and learn from, the past”
- “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…”
- A philosophy course centered around paradoxes
- “Contemporary analytical philosophy is in greater part interesting, valuable, and well done”
- How can we trust science? How does it get at the truth? What about false scientific theories of the past?
- “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”
- “If we can’t say exactly how we think, then how well do we know ourselves?”
- 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 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
- 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”
- “Tell me just what sort of things are the colors you see / if you’re thinking ontologically…”
- “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”
- “Using the methods of analytic philosophy, we can identify problems in common thinking about motherhood”
- “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”
- “Everyone has strength; teach in a way that aligns with what you’re good at”
- One robot built with the capacity to “form internal monologues” passed the mirror test, “the most famous test of animal self-consciousness”
- “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”
- “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”
- “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”
- Epictetus and Epicurus are “resurrected” using AI language, imaging, and video tools to debate the nature of happiness
- The subtitle of her first book was “A Little Treatise on the Weakness, Frivolity, and Inconstancy, That Is Wrongly Attributed to Women”
- “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”
- 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”?
- “It is not possible to determine the true identities of Alice and Bob based on the information provided”
- “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”
- “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”
- If you’re using MTurk to run surveys, you probably should consider an alternative
- A private firm is planning on using genetic engineering to de-extinct the woolly mammoth
- “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”
- “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”
- “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”
- “We performed a direct comparison between human reasoners and a large language model (GPT-3) on a range of analogical tasks”
- The 300th anniversary of the birth of Ukrainian philosopher Hryhorii Skovoroda is commemorated by the National Bank of Ukraine with a new ₴500 banknote
- “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”
- “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”
- What happened in math, physics, computer science, and biology in 2022?
- “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”
- “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’”
- 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”
- “Our aim should be to allow each animal to live an active life characteristic of its species, up to some reasonable threshold level”
- The Oxfordshire Blue Plaques Board has proposed a plaque to commemorate Philippa Foot and the house where she lived from 1972 to 2010
- New Work In Philosophy: The YouTube Channel
- Lecture notes—pretty much a textbook—for a course entitled “Belief, Desire, and Rational Choice”
- One philosophy professor’s experience with a student who cheated by having ChatGPT write their essay
- 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 cubes look like they are moving. But they are not moving
- “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”
- “How does the death spiral of one or more social media platforms impact philosophy?”
- “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”
- “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”
- “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”
- “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 Escher-like array of impossible lines and vanishing points”
- “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”
- “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”
- “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”
- “A one-size-fits-all approach to sex [comes] at the expense of the rigor and precision at which precision medicine aims”
- “Philosophers cannot work only on problems that interest them; we must work on all the problems that we need to resolve”
- Three studies showed that “self-reported physical attractiveness” is “positively correlated with meaning in life”
- “While I’m still on the fence about eyes, I don’t think legs, strictly speaking, exist”
- “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”
- The Waste Land, Ulysses, and the Tractatus each “wed experimental literary aesthetics with highly abstract intellectual projects”
- “If a deep and general knowledge does not make a man diffident and humble, no human means I believe can do it”
- Possibly the world’s second-shortest philosophy paper
- “Canadian Hegelianism turns out to be its own philosophical tradition”
- Philosophically interesting books for young kids
- “Not to put too fine a point on it, but in general the project of ‘value lock-in’ is team evil”
- “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?”
- On the “various threads of philosophy that could be tested against sexual experience, reimagining pornography’s lessons”
- How and why to call on your students
- Money: a philosophy course
- “You need skepticism in order to have a healthy kind of trust, whether in the individual mind or even at the social level”
- “I like to draw ’em nice—kinda elegant, I hope – then make ’em silly in faux-retro or disco style”
- “Their danger lies… in short-circuiting the development of human writers”
- “Knowledge is older than all sensible things; mind is senior to the world, and the architecture thereof”
- Warning: the material at this link combines puns, philosophy, and AI art
- “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”
- “Then I thought that Hegel… would have greatly appreciated this object, which has two opposite functions”
- How technology plays a role in changing morality
- “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”
- Classic classics
- How to mug Jeremy Bentham
- Philosophy is the top major at Cambridge
- “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”
- “Whatever story you tell about yourself, however simple and straightforward, there is endlessly more to your actual life”
- “I have exposed myself to the enmity of all metaphysicians, logicians, mathematicians, and even theologians”
- Electrons seem to spin, but actually don’t. So what is really going on?
- “It’s the method of using opposing views to seek truth; Hegel thought his own style of it was better than Plato’s”
- “The organoids are coming!”
- “Nothing is true”: big, if true
- “Weirder options are conceivable, but exceedingly improbable”
- “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”
- “Having a higher sense of purpose appears protective against all-cause mortality,” according to a recent study
- “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”
- “Concepts of philosophical interest vary across cultures, ages, generations, genders, and socio-economics status”
- “Even if it were possible, to build infallible memory into machines would mean forgoing some of the important benefits of forgetting”
- “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”
- “Successful social movements have frequently—and appropriately—drawn on the socially transformative possibilities of imagination to help make space for justice”
- “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”
- “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”
- “Why lotteries and not voting? The Athenians weren’t fools; they learned through bitter trials that elections are tools of elites”
- The first philosophy unboxing video
- “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.”
- “A Søren Kierkegaard in skirts”
- 9 philosophers interviewed about “Philosophy Illustrated”
- “It’s a commonplace among lecturers that students don’t know how to read anymore”
- One might think that much AI art isn’t just bad, but that it’s not art
- The philosopher who helped kill the king
- “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”
- “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”
- “As we bridge the gulf between now and then to sympathize with ourselves at other times, we sympathize, too, with the suffering of others”
- 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
- “Utilitarian longtermism is objectionable. Longtermism sans consequentialism is another matter”
- “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”
- “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”
- “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”
- 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
- “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”
- “Our democracies are already gamified. Our goal should be to do it better”
- “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”
- “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”
- “Decades of research have revealed a deeper truth [about protons], one that’s too bizarre to fully capture with words or images”
- Now Open Access: 7 articles by Kripke and 12 articles and book chapters by others about Kripke’s work
- “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”
- “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”
- “The most important teacher of philosophy in America, if not the world, for a third of a century”
- Travel as a philosophical activity
- “People don’t like being tricked, especially when the trickery results in giving another person affections they don’t deserve”
- “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”
- “Philosophers increasingly face difficult choices in balancing sustainability with other considerations in teaching and research, event organizing, department governance, and institutional service”
- “There is a persistent conventional wisdom that… Adam Smith holds a labor theory of value”
- “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”
- “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”
- Animal consciousness
- “Relaxation, then, will bring out the worst in foolish people, but in the wise it will bring out the best”
- “Why don’t we have the right to end our lives not just when we want to but to also do so in style?”
- “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”
- There was a competition for criticisms of effective altruism, with $120,000 in prizes
- Map apps “have a colossal influence on our experience of the surrounding world” but “rarely come under public scrutiny”
- “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”
- 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”
- Book sales figures are tracked by BookScan, a private, exclusive service that bans academics from using its data
- 25 interviews with philosophers and more on the way
- “Sensations are ideas. They are the way our brains represent what’s happening at our sense organs and how we feel about it”
- “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”
- “There are more degrees of freedom in the universe now than in the early universe”
- How different would philosophy of action and practical reasoning be if it were “built from the perspective of working-class agents”?
- “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”
- “Rorty insisted that philosophy is no longer relevant to politics… That is fortunate, because his philosophical position… was exceptionally implausible”
- Does language shape the content of epistemology?
- The laws of nature, time, quantum mechanics, strong determinism, vagueness, and more
- “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”
- An upcoming video game is about Arthur Schopenhauer as a student “seeking prohibited knowledge”
- “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”
- “We laugh at ‘something mechanical encrusted on the living’”
- “There seems to be nothing that in principle cannot be taught in a college classroom provided its relevance to the course”
- “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?”
- “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
- “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
- “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”
- 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
- “The Mystery of Consciousness,” a live public philosophy discussion, took place this past summer in Liverpool
- “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”
- When (and why) are some things best left to the imagination?
- “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
- “When a philosopher has misgivings about the value of philosophy, they’re not just asking ‘why,’ but ‘why why?,’ which is fancier”
- You feel attraction to someone? Which of the 12,228 possible versions of this feeling?
- On “private and public sector jobs in a burgeoning ontological sector, involving the commercial and industrial applications of ontology across diverse industries”
- Philosophers on the tools of neuroscientific experimentation
- “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”
- “Schelling’s philosophy of oneness might provide a foundation on which to anchor the fight for our climate and our survival”
- 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”
- “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”
- How “dialogically dense” are different works of philosophy?
- “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'”
- “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”
- “If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.” But what about a dolphin?
- Video interviews with philosophers, including Elizabeth Anderson, Elizabeth Barnes, David Boonin, and a dozen others
- Philosophy of vigilantism, moral ecologies, why we should annihilate our enemies, and more
- “The demand that philosophy be personally helpful… sounds wrongheaded to someone with the training of a mainstream contemporary philosopher”
- How to read philosophy
- “We’ve got to resist this idea that the problem can be identified as some set of students or some particular ideology”
- “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”
- Meta-analysis finds that trigger warnings, contra both their advocates and detractors, have almost no effect
- Crows are not black
- “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”
- “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”
- Mid-century Marx
- “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”
- “Aristotle’s picture of the human good has high standards, but it also takes pains to remain realistic”
- Philosophy to be taught in primary and secondary schools in Jordan
- “Six Commandments for Getting the Most Out of Graduate School”
- “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”
- “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”
- “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”
- “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”
- “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”
- Interviews with philosophers
- “‘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”
- Can you distinguish Daniel Dennett from a computer?
- “The campaign had a positive effect on the overall outcome”
- The moral dimensions of academic philosophy
- A study “seeks to identify how non-academics perceive philosophy and how they engage in it”
- “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”
- Drawing, thinking, princesses, nostalgia, history, archaelogy, and more
- New reading group blueprints on various topics, including: ethics of commemoration, social dynamics of mathematics, class & aesthetics, Nahuan and Mayan philosophy, and more
- “My plan, if I am being canceled, is not to fight it”
- “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”
- An argument map of Alito’s leaked opinion draft in the Dobbs case
- Preparing philosophy grad students to teach
- “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”
- Psychedelic drugs, epistemology, naturalism, and the self
- “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”
- “There is simply nothing like this remarkable book for making us think carefully about what makes a story work well”
- “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”
- “I think it’s a great argument that I’m not convinced of…”
- “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”
- New: IPM Monthly – Medieval Philosophy Today
- “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”
- What is the value of studying moral dilemmas?
- “A great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by the belief in the virtuousness of work”
- “If spectacular forms of white supremacy were to end tomorrow, whiteness as a structure of privilege, power and hegemony would continue”
- “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”
- A missing color
- “The objection to violence has its limit at the point when fundamental freedoms are at stake”
- “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”
- 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 on the metaphysics of farts, and the mysterious author of the article smelt round the world
- “How much should we dress up for an event when the topic of the talk was body modification?”
- “Faddish calls to… ‘center the most marginalized,’ which abound in the academic and leftist activist circles… ‘never sat well with me'”
- “If any woman could realize Sartre’s picture of self-defining ‘man,’ Iris might have fancied her chances”
- “For better or worse, most contemporary philosophers must engage either directly or indirectly with racist philosophers”
- How to participate in a philosophical discussion
- The television show that introduced existentialism to to Americans
- “All of this applying takes an incalculable toll… Maybe we need to imagine whole new worlds where people-picking happens very differently”
- Some people think that humans matter more than non-human animals because of what we can do, or what we’re like
- “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?”
- “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”
- “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”
- “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”
- “I contrast the essential-bum-origin view with a phenomenological view, and I argue in favour of the latter”
- Three key tips for philosophy students seeking to work outside of academia
- The “famous” Michael Huemer – Richard Yetter-Chappell debate about utilitarianism
- “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”
- What if we “reject the orthodox view that the quantum universe must be described by a wave function”?
- “What desires are politically important?”
- “Things may not be as prim and proper as they appeared to Strawson in his Oxford haven”
- “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”
- “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”
- “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”
- “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”
- What are the big open scientific and philosophical questions about AI sentience?
- “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?'”
- Is panpsychism a “new science of consciousness” or “the last gasp of a prescientific view of what consciousness is”?
- “Given his pervasive anti-moralism, any contemporary reader of Nietzsche is forced to ask: can Nietzsche have a 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”
- What are real-world moral dilemmas about?
- “Taking the simulation hypothesis seriously means accepting that the creator might be a sadistic adolescent gamer about to unleash Godzilla”
- Filmmaker Errol Morris claimed that Thomas Kuhn threw an ashtray at him and kicked him out of the graduate program at Princeton
- “Reserving the word ‘rational’ for something like coherence seems to me to be a waste of a perfectly good word”
- Music by philosophers, for philosophers, about philosophy: the 21st Century Monads have a new album coming out
- Researchers test GPT-3’s “capacity to produce short, coherent essays on philosophical themes”
- A discussion of “Epistemic Explanations”
- Socrates said that studying philosophy was preparation for dying
- “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?
- New: “In the CAVE: An Ethics Podcast”. It “explores some of the big ethical and philosophical issues facing contemporary societies”
- “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”
- “It’s hard not to feel that the machine is thinking in some meaningful way”
- “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”
- The “cultural wilderness” of bad movies
- “How is it not a ‘fallacy’ to feel guilty about something for which you are not blameworthy?”
- Do non-human animals have moral experiences?
- AI-created portraits of philosophers in the style of Maurice Sendak
- “Relying upon adjunct labor is wrong, because it is cruel”
- “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”
- “When authors gave a funnier title to a work they considered significant, they reaped the benefits of significantly higher citations”
- A philosopher is collaborating with The Guardian to offer responses to children’s often strange, imaginative, and philosophical questions
- The “categorical ambiguity” of the uncanny elicits a “metaphysical threat response”
- “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”
- Gilbert Harman’s major contributions to philosophy
- Mary Wollstonecraft returns to Newington Green
- “Good—that is to say, ethical—sex is not simply about getting consent so that we can do what we want”
- What can arguments for extended cognition tell us about aesthetic experience and understanding?
- “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”
- “When an entire discipline gets gamified, we are in for trouble… we discourage ourselves from being truly playful and creative”
- “Chance rules all”
- “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”
- Commentary from several philosophers on various aspects of the Russian attack on Ukraine
- “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”
- The philosophical thinking of Martin Luther King, Jr. & Malcolm X
- “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”
- “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”
- “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”
- Roderick Chisholm failed his PhD prelim exams at Harvard and didn’t receive a fellowship
- The difficulty of defending the free speech of those threatening you
- Moral grandstanding in public discourse: is it a problem?
- Philosophical ideas represented with minimalist images and brief captions
- “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”
- “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””
- “She is both beautiful and good, in a way the philosophy of character strives to explain but can’t always illustrate convincingly”
- “I’m not the kind of philosopher who is tortured by philosophical questions”
- Lots of logic videos
- “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”
- Margaret Cavendish wrote “a proto-SF novel that explores early modern science, feminist and queer thought, and political philosophy” in 1666
- There was a mistake in that “That’s Not Kant” post
- Philosophers discuss the Russian invasion of Ukraine at Oxford
- New: a Twitter “Community” for philosophy
- “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”
- “The beautiful soul is where affections and reason are harmonized through play”
- “His students at the LSE jokingly referred to his book as ‘The Open Society and Its Enemies, written by one of its enemies'”
- How did you end up majoring in philosophy?
- The new bioethics, continued: “Our proof of concept thus highlights how a nonhuman autonomous creator of a deadly chemical weapon is entirely feasible”
- “Hope is needed most exactly when the world looks hopeless”
- “Larger, Freer, More Loving,” the podcast from Matthew J. LaVine (Potsdam) and Dwight K. Lewis (Minnesota), returns with a new season
- “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”
- “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”
- 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?
- “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”
- 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
- “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”
- “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”
- Marx “canceled” at the University of Florida
- The recent “Philosophers On The Russian Attack On Ukraine” has been translated into Spanish for publication in “En Letra: Derecho Penal,” an Argentinian journal
- “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”
- Ukraine, Russia, and philosophy
- 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”
- “There’s something undeniably erotic about elevators… order, intellect, and civilization over chaos, animality, and death”
- “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”
- “Although all these truisms about the laws of nature sound plausible and familiar, they are also imprecise and metaphorical”
- “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”
- “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”
- “Directly offering refuge to those most oppressed… is not only a humanitarian policy—it is also a powerful way to increase our national strength”
- Silicon Valley Congressman says that to fix social media, Meta, Twitter, etc. should “hire 100 philosophy majors”
- How has technology changed friendship? How will it in the future?
- Sexiest degree at the University of London? Philosophy.
- “This is a threat to all of us”
- Political philosophy and political style
- It’s not “just looking”
- “What’s good? Whatever / The highest good is pleasure”
- “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”
- “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…”
- “While we can’t tell you exactly why, according to our algorithm, you are not eligible for chemotherapy and our algorithm is rarely wrong”
- What are the main contributions that philosophers have made to Internet studies?
- “If a being is conscious at all, what it is like to be that being involves an organisation toward staying alive”
- Paste text into “Only The Questions,” and the result will be an “x-ray” of it that shows you… only the questions
- The Future Fund wants to support organizations and individuals whose work will make the future go well
- “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”
- “My grandfather… was summoned to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee in the winter of 1958”
- 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.”
- “No matter what you’re paying attention to, if you’re really paying attention to it, you’re doing your job as a philosopher”
- 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
- “It is important for all of us to try hard to understand what scientists have been discovering”
- “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”
- Anaxagoras asked whether one could cut up a circle to produce a square of equal area
- Would a journal consortium solve some of philosophy’s article publication problems?
- When calls for interdisciplinarity are really “antidisciplinary”
- “Scientific rigour with wildly imaginative theorising”
- “Locke was misled in his thought experiment… by his construal of the broad epistemic limits of sensibility”
- “They probably pay you pretty well for that.” “Yeah. Wait, what?”
- “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”
- “Circumstances alter cases, and online communication of specific types may harm in one context but not in another”
- 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”?
- “Parmenides’ conclusion / is that motion’s an illusion”
- 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
- “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”
- “Although both critical thinking skills and good will are useful in isolation, when they are present together – that’s when the magic happens”
- “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”
- “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”
- Tips on negotiating an assistant professor salary
- “We can find up to eight dates associated with a publication” and “this gets worse when each publisher interprets the meaning of each… differently”
- How to teach a course that is mainly or exclusively composed of less commonly taught philosophical traditions
- “Love is something that exists on the maximal outer limit of our agency’s thinkability”
- Bang the head Socratic
- “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…”
- “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”
- “No one is likely to hold stuff like this against grad students”
- “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”
- “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”
- “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”
- “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”
- “What Makes Heavy Metal ‘Heavy’?”
- New developments in plagiarism: AI paraphrasing tools
- “Dear Professor James, I am so sorry but really I do not feel a bit like an examination paper in philosophy today”
- “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”
- “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”
- What are the rules for not being a “COVID jerk”?
- Psychological research inspired by Parfit’s work on the connection between prudence, morality, and the metaphysics of the self
- “What if animals do know what it means to die?”
- “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”
- What is gender?
- “Liberal neutrality rests on substantive moral goods: moral relations between diverse persons”
- “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”
- If “actions in virtual worlds will potentially be as meaningful as actions in the physical world,” what ethics apply to them? What law?
- The new version of GPT, “InstructGPT,” is better at following people’s instructions
- “Why did Husserl begin thinking about movement?”
- At public schools, should students be taught “tolerance as non-disapproval” or “tolerance as forbearance”?
- “Well, I see metaphysics as ‘lifestyle’”
- “‘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”
- The song has lyrics from Wittgenstein and is dedicated to Rosalind Hursthouse
- Amartya Sen on the memories that shaped his research
- “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”
- “A life in VR could be just as meaningful as a life in the physical world”
- “Maintaining our punishing attitude towards plagiarism could reap benefits well beyond discouraging plagiarism itself”
- A philosophy PhD’s suicide and the mission of an academic organization with which many political philosophers have been involved
- “All those yellow and green Wordle grids popping up on our screens give us a steady stream of small communions”
- “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”
- “Likely the first book about moral philosophy to feature endorsements from Steve Carell, Amy Poehler, Ted Danson and Mindy Kaling”
- It’s “not about invincibility, but about vulnerability. And the role supportive others play in sustaining our resilience”
- What do you know about Nísia Floresta?
- Quantum approaches to mathematical puzzles
- “We need to devise ways of drawing more people voluntarily into the risk social contract, rather than pushing them ever further away”
- Philosophy, disability, and social change
- “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”
- “It is a joy to play with this ontological uncertainty. It is the magic of movies”
- The Last Days of Socrates: The Musical
- How does the meaning of a word (or symbol, or gesture…) first arise?
- “The solace of Platonism is purchased at a large cost. Is there some less evasive and less contorted way to face our end?”
- “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”
- “Philosophers should welcome opportunities in academic leadership”
- “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”
- The FBI file on Foucault
- “One of the most difficult tasks confronting philosophers is to descend from the world of thought to the actual world”
- “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’”
- Examining utterances that are “always speaking”–most laws, for instance–can help us distinguish different meanings of “meaning”
- 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”
- “Welcome to the minefield that is race humour”
- You’ve probably read about the metaphysics of holes, but what about their aesthetics?
- Controversy over a proposal to add a statue of 17th-century philosopher Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia to a monument with 78 statues of men
- “To appreciate the ingenuity of Locke’s philosophical views, I think it is important that we resist the tendency to apply common metaphysical classifications”
- Video resources on Stoicism
- Free logician-themed 2022 wall calendar w/ Hamkins, Turing, Haack, Manzano, Rayo, Stebbing, & Williamson
- Figuring out how to “use AI to improve human moral judgments in bioethics”
- The Tractatus as song
- Use of psychedelic drugs causes “significant shifts away from ‘physicalist’ or ‘materialist’ views, and towards panpsychism and fatalism”
- “Do your own research” has become the slogan of those “skeptical” of expertise
- Loneliness and the need to be needed
- A philosophy course taught by your favorite memes of 2021
- “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”
- The picture of the “the offline” as where we go to find ourselves means “we are condemned to either living falsely, or being alone”
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