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Philosophy and Culture

Gifts Made By Philosophers

December 14, 2022

The holiday season is upon us. As you go about your holiday shopping, might I suggest you to consider some gifts made by philosophers?

Heap of Links

The most bizarre plagiarism-related story ever — featuring: a death, an investigator, a dissertation, a mysterious red book, and more
New data on earnings by major and university — though not all universities
“AI poses two different existential threats to [our] valuing practices” — Jordan MacKenzie offers an account of why negative judgments about AI taking over our creative and caring activities are justified
“Submission” is a humorous clicker-style game about starting a career in academic philosophy (or not) — created by Nat Hansen
“The best investment in education is to become the most human human—a challenging, fulfilling, exciting pursuit that connects us across generations” — an interview with Christa Acampora, philosopher and dean of Arts & Sciences at UVA
“What would happen if we tried to live without the mythology of agency at all?” — It's worth pondering, since "agency is just an internal command hallucination," says Alexander Douglas
“Reading List” is a free Mac app for keeping track of papers to read — philosophy PhD student Hayden Kajercline created this productivity tool for researchers, with help from Claude
How should we react to scary predictions about AI? “First: by asking questions” — "If you believe predictions uncritically, it amounts to obeying in advance," says Carissa Véliz
“I feel unbelievably lucky that I was able to make philosophy my profession” — Karen Ng reflects on her path into philosophy, at #first-genphilosophers
The ordinary concept of knowledge “doesn’t work at all the way philosophers said it does” — a round-up of studies shows how weird the philosophers' version of the concept is
1000 or so psychiatrists were asked to diagnose standardized clinical case vignettes. “Two doctors agreed on the diagnosis only 55% of the time” — What does this tell us about psychiatry? Or about other fields in which experts disagree?
Where Aristotle taught Alexander — "this newest dig may be the most revealing yet, offering insight into the specifics of Alexander the Great’s education"
Over 4000 of the Justice Department’s lawyers have left their jobs since Trump’s second term began — The New Yorker on the moral dilemma facing some government employees: resign and avoid complicity, or stay and resist where one can?
Underappreciated philosophy published between 1970-2019 — some old posts to which you can still add works that should be better appreciated
The AI threat to independent student writing is not necessarily a threat to student learning — what's needed, says Joe Cruz, are courses "in which ideas are expressed in real time and analytical thought unfolds as a debate or an oral defense or a group discussion"—and small enough classes to make that work
Would you take a pill that allows you, with no ill health effects, to permanently forgo sleep? — Rebecca Lowe thinks you have no good reason not to, though she neglects to consider that sometimes it's the world that needs a break from you
Fifty essays in the philosophy of paleontology — by Max Dresow at the Extinct blog
“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” — further research on the internal representations of AIs
Sixty Years of Philosophy in America — Ernest Sosa's Dewey Lecture from the 2024 APA Eastern Division Meeting
“You’re responsible for other people’s learning of this material, so you better know it at a higher level yourself” — for 20 years, the Socrates Project at the University of Toronto has hired senior philosophy undergrads to run weekly tutorials for introductory students

All Links →

Latest Comments

Mathieu Rees on AI for Philosophy: Progress through Capital-Intensive Philosophy (guest post)
Thanks for your response, which seems fair. I would push back a little in a couple of ways though. First, I still worry about forms of academic bullying.…
João da Rocha Rodrigues on AI for Philosophy: Progress through Capital-Intensive Philosophy (guest post)
"[…] whether you think that the problems of philosophy are not amenable to an approach that uses AI (in addition to human ingenuity)?" They are amenable in the…
David Strohmaier on AI for Philosophy: Progress through Capital-Intensive Philosophy (guest post)
Thank you for the challenge! Finding a stopping point is indeed a major problem in philosophy. I don't have an answer to how to justify a stopping point…
Preston Stovall on Your One Piece of Philosophy Grad School Advice
I take it the reference to wheat and chaff was made from the standpoint of committees who evaluate dossiers in large part (at least initially) on the basis…
David Strohmaier on AI for Philosophy: Progress through Capital-Intensive Philosophy (guest post)
The questions of philosophy are quite heterogeneous, so I don't think there is a general answer to what grounds truth in the case of philosophical problems. Why is…
Mark van Roojen on Your One Piece of Philosophy Grad School Advice
What does this even mean? Who is wheat and who is chaff exactly?
DoubleA on Your One Piece of Philosophy Grad School Advice
I don’t think that hearing the same advice from several people makes the advice cliche— in most circumstances it ought to increase credence in that advice. But, if…
Student Philosopher on AI for Philosophy: Progress through Capital-Intensive Philosophy (guest post)
'Personally, I am excited by this development. Although I very much enjoy engaging in philosophy the old-fashioned way, one reason I turned to computer science was that I…
David Wallace on AI for Philosophy: Progress through Capital-Intensive Philosophy (guest post)
At last: a nuanced and thoughtful take on this complex situation.
David Wallace on Those OpenAI Math Results
I think you are underestimating how geeky (in a good way!) leadership is at Anthropic and OpenAI. I think if you said to them, “we’ve proved the Riemann…
David Wallace on Those OpenAI Math Results
I completely disagree with that description of math. And much of the criticism of openAI by Tao and others is because they disagree, too. No interesting academic discipline…
Michael Gorman on AI for Philosophy: Progress through Capital-Intensive Philosophy (guest post)
"Part of me wonders if all my philological training will end up being less useful than I imagined if AI can help in these areas" — or the…
Michel on Those OpenAI Math Results
I have no such opinion, because not only am I not a mathematician or a logician, but my math chops don't go very far, and my logic chops…
Mathieu Rees on AI for Philosophy: Progress through Capital-Intensive Philosophy (guest post)
There was once a time where the definition-counterexample method was dominant in analytic philosophy. I think that good insight was produced by that method, though some philosophers have…
tfortarski on Those OpenAI Math Results
Then that's setting the bar pretty high indeed. Math (or in any case its subset transformed by AI) could be described easily : it's about proving theorems. There's…

Tag: crafts

Gifts Made By Philosophers