Mini-Heap

Recent additions to the Heap of Links…

Discussion welcome.

1. “Digging deeper into the question [of the ‘realness’ of numbers] might challenge our assumptions about not only the nature of numbers, but the nature of the universe itself” — the philosophy math is covered at Salon, in an article that quotes Penelope Maddy (Irvine) and others
2. “In news stories… some of the letters in a swear word are obscured by asterisks. So you get f**k instead of ‘fuck’ and there’s this puzzle about how that works” — a conversation with Rebecca Roache (Royal Holloway, University of London) on swearing
3. “The goal is to help industry… corporations as well as startups, or organizations like law enforcement or hospitals, to develop and deploy AI systems responsibly and ethically” — a profile of Cansu Canca (Northeastern), recently recognized for work that “fosters an AI environment of equality and empowerment”
4. “The problems of the pursuit of virtue through craft are on full display in The Bear” — Errol Lord (Penn) on the television show The Bear and the virtue of hospitality
5. “He had a way of bringing ideas from all these fields together into a grand synopsis, a grand vision that would then resonate with so many people” — David Chalmers on Daniel Dennett (video)
6. The point is “to provide students with an experience of discussing and deliberating about difficult topics, knowing that they are with people that will disagree with them right from the beginning” — Harry Brighouse (Wisconsin) is interviewed about “Deliberation Dinners”
7. “What is morally good depends… on what a hypothetical congress of socially sophisticated, developmentally expensive humans, post-humans, aliens, sufficiently advanced AI, and others of the right type would judge to be good” — Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) offers up a characteristically weird (not an insult) metaethics

Mini-Heap posts usually appear when 7 or so new items accumulate in the Heap of Links, a collection of items from around the web that may be of interest to philosophers.

The Heap of Links consists partly of suggestions from readers; if you find something online that you think would be of interest to the philosophical community, please send it in for consideration for the Heap. Thank you.

Previous Edition