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Before yesterdayDaily Nous

Mini-Heap

By: Justin Weinberg

Recent links…

  1. How not to kill yourself — NPR’s Terry Gross interviews philosopher Clancy Martin (Missouri-Kansas City), a survivor of ten suicide attempts
  2. “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” — sexism (and other oddities) in Aristotle’s account of human reproduction, from Emily Thomas (Durham)
  3. Videos of sessions of the Online Benefit Conference for Ukraine — Donations are still being accepted
  4. “The idea of ironic appreciation is puzzling, if not outright paradoxical” — Alex King (Simon Fraser) on what it means to like something ironically
  5. Another 12 philosophers on LLMs like ChatGPT — once again compiled by Ahmed Bouzid, at Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective
  6. “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” — a heatmap of PhilPapers survey responses, from David Bourget (Western)
  7. “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” — it’s rampant, seductive, and “one of the worst forms of overstatement,” according to Evan Selinger (RIT)

Discussion welcome.

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. Thanks!

 

Mini-Heap

By: Justin Weinberg

Links of the day…

  1. 93% of philosophy expected to be LLM-authored summaries of corpus analyses of x-phi survey results by 2027 — findings from a new statistical study forthcoming in Mined.
  2. DeSantis bans teaching of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty in Florida classrooms — his idea of “experiments in living”, according to parents who had complained about the book, “sounds gay”.
  3. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Noûs, and Ethics among philosophy journals leaving their publishers and moving to Substack — the bad news is they will still be behind a paywall, the good news is that the paywall is only $5/month
  4. “Other philosophers have simply failed to appreciate just how much can be derived from ‘A=A'” — Richard Marshall “interviews” Ayn Rand at 3:16AM.
  5. New “Philosophy for Kids” program focuses on teaching elementary students the skills they’ll need — in order to eventually pursue careers in computer programming, business, government, consulting, etc.
  6. “It turns out there is value in a history of philosophical work on the value of the history of philosophy” — from a recent article in Metametaphilosophy.
  7. “I am a philosopher who has taken an interest, of late, in Candy Crush, and I find that my experiments have significantly widened the range of accounts of the nature of reality that I am disposed to take seriously” — Justin E.H. Smith continues to push against the boundaries of philosophy.

Discussion welcome.

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. Thanks!

Mini-Heap

By: Justin Weinberg

The latest links…

  1. “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…” — “Composition as Fiction,” a poem by Brad Skow (MIT)
  2. “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” — one consideration among many taken up in a discussion by Ingrid Robeyns (Utrecht) on whether academics should fly at all
  3. Brief reflections on ChatGPT and its threat to academia, from a dozen philosophers — collected by Ahmed Bouzid
  4. “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” — Subrema Smith (New Hampshire) and David Livingstone Smith (New England) on why “to get rid of racism we have to get rid of race”
  5. The debate over the authorship of letters attributed to Plato — “enormous reverence for Plato” has unduly influenced it, argues James Romm (Bard)
  6. “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?’” — Francey Russell (Barnard/Columbia) reviews a movie based on a true story that “needed to be rerouted and mediated through the alchemical powers of narrative film”
  7. “A guide to AI and tech in the university classroom. What works, what doesn’t, and why. Written by professors, for professors” — check out “AutomatED”, a project from philosophy PhD Graham Clay

Discussion welcome.

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. Thanks!

Mini-Heap

By: Justin Weinberg

New links…

  1. “Ukrainians have all but stopped criticizing the government. But it is a philosopher’s job to think critically and speak naïvely” — a profile of Ukrainian philosopher Irina Zherebkina, who has just left her position at Kharkiv to take one at LSE
  2. “If we do someday create AI entities with real moral considerability similar to non-human animals or similar to humans, we should design them so that ordinary users will emotionally react to them in a way that is appropriate to their moral status” — the “emotional alignment design policy” of Mara Garza and Eric Schwitzgebel (Riverside)
  3. Aphantasia is the neurological condition of being unable to mentally visualize imagery, or see things with your “mind’s eye” — How might having this condition affect one’s philosophical beliefs? Reflections from Mette Leonard Høeg (Oxford) and photos from Derek Parfit, both aphantasic
  4. 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. — Its author? Hanno Sauer. And yes, it was anonymously refereed.
  5. “For some tasks and some [large language] models, there’s a threshold of complexity beyond which the functionality of the model skyrockets” — “Researchers are racing not only to identify additional emergent abilities but also to figure out why and how they occur at all—in essence, to try to predict unpredictability”
  6. “It seems impossible to be confident about the identification of more than a few of the philosophers whom Raphael depicts” — a guided tour of Raphael’s “The School of Athens” and the history of its interpretations
  7. “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” — Huw Price (Cambridge) and Ken Wharton (San Jose) on the case for retrocausality

Discussion welcome.

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. Thanks!

Mini-Heap

By: Justin Weinberg

Recent links…

  1. Frog and Toad read “Lives of the Eminent Philosophers” — Brad Skow (MIT) tells the tale
  2. 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” — an “interview” with Hermann Cohen at 3:16AM
  3. 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 architectural design for the museum is open-plan and has long-term sustainability in mind”
  4. The right to cognitive liberty — Nita Farahany (Duke) explains what it is and how technological developments make its recognition urgent and important, in an interview at NPR
  5. “There’s no way you can have one single statistical criterion that captures all normative desiderata” — a brief, interesting interview with computer scientist Arvind Narayanan (Princeton) on statistics, machine learning, AI, interdisciplinarity, and ethics
  6. What do you know about these twelve women philosophers of 19th Century Britain? — learn more by listening in on a conversation between Alison Stone (Lancaster) and Morteza Hajizadeh (Auckland)
  7. “I’m really shocked by how little attention there has been to the role of creativity in moral life among philosophers” — Mandi Astola (Delft) on phronesis as moral creativity

Discussion welcome.

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. Thanks!

Mini-Heap

By: Justin Weinberg

Recent links added to the Heap…

  1. An introductory philosophy course centered around the question, “What is Philosophy?” — Christopher P. Noble (New College of Florida) describes why and how he teaches it
  2. “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” — a contest to use machine learning, 3D x-rays, and other technology to read the ancient philosophy, mathematics, literature, etc., trapped in the carbonized, ashen, and unopenable Herculaneum scrolls
  3. “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” — Ryan Muldoon (Buffalo) on how “the big tools of liberal democracy—discussion and debate—only work well if these tools are built on diverse inputs”
  4. “Why do I want to live with a dog, and why this dog?” — the ethical considerations of choosing a dog, from Jessica Pierce (U.of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus
  5. A useful and brief guide for your students about how to use ChatGPT effectively and ethically in their academic work — by Benjamin Smart and Catherine Botha (Johannesburg)
  6. “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” — an interview with Aaron Wendland (KCL, Massey College) about the his work to help Ukrainians, including further details about the philosophy benefit conference taking place this week
  7. A previously unpublished book-length manuscript by Michel Foucault, “Philosophical Discourse,” will be published later this Spring — here’s the table of contents

Discussion welcome.

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. Thanks!

Mini-Heap

By: Justin Weinberg

New links…

  1. “Dutch academics are now in a very dangerous situation where genuine academic freedom” — “Dutch universities have been given a template of how to get rid of academics they find a nuisance… <first,>make the workplace hellish for the employee”</first,>
  2. The liar paradox & the set-theoretic multiverse — a discussion between Joel David Hamkins (Notre Dame) and Graham Priest (CUNY) on Robinson’s Podcast
  3. “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” — Machiavelli is “interviewed” at 3:16AM
  4. A discussion of English early modern women philosophers and their letters — Jacquieline Broad (Monash) talks with Morteza Hajizadeh (Auckland)
  5. “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” — Regan Penaluna on Damaris Cudworth Masham and the importance of her friendship with John Locke
  6. Celebrate International Women’s Day with free books about women philosophers — the Cambridge Elements Series on Women in the History of Philosophy is available to download for free
  7. Philosophers on the ethics of argumentation — a series of videos from the Argumentation Network of the Americas

Discussion welcome.

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. Thanks!

Mini-Heap

By: Justin Weinberg

Links to interesting stuff elsewhere…

  1. “The idea is to kind of not in fact talk about what people would normally be talking about” — philosopher Stephen Asma (Columbia College) and actor Paul Giamatti are putting together a new podcast called Chinwag. Here’s the trailer.
  2. “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?” — Nevin Climenhaga (Dianoia, ACU) on how much philosophers should trust intuitions. He’s responding to this earlier piece by Edouard Machery (Pitt).
  3. “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” — on coming out as working class in academia
  4. Philosophy is training for death, said Socrates. Is marriage training for divorce? — a profile of Agnes Callard (Chicago), with a focus on her marriages, in The New Yorker
  5. “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.” — Eric Schwitzgebel (Riverside) and Henry Shevlin (Cambridge) on “a potentially catastrophic moral dilemma”
  6. “Professors are people too. They don’t like to think of themselves as the bone structure of our society’s most consequentially oppressive hierarchy” — on how professors neglect the structural injustice of academia. How accurate a picture is this?
  7. 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 — five philosophers on making black intellectual history more visible in Germany

Discussion welcome.

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. Thanks!

Mini-Heap

By: Justin Weinberg

Recent links…

  1. Did Gödel mislead Von Neumann into thinking he already had a proof for his second theorem in order to steal Von Neumann’s ideas? — intrigue and incompleteness
  2. “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” — a teaching guide on how students can foster a good classroom speech environment
  3. “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” — also: “When you react to me with criticism, or by deciding not to associate with me, you are driving a stake through the heart of free speech culture”
  4. “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]” — So we need to “uncover as many independently evolved instances of sentience as we possibly can,” and that means looking at nonhuman animals, argue Kristin Andrews (York) and Jonathan Birch (LSE)
  5. “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” — and their “Worldview Investigations Team,” headed up by philosopher Bob Fischer, is hiring
  6. “It will be a filter. Not all faculty will thrive in this environment” — John Symons (Kansas) is interviewed large language models and AI, and the changes (not necessarily negative) they will bring to education, to personal lives, and to society
  7. “It turned out that was more difficult than I expected” — after a four-decade hiatus, Nick Axten, now 76, has earned his PhD in philosophy

Discussion welcome.

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. Thanks!

Mini-Heap

By: Justin Weinberg

The latest links…

  1. “In a mob, we voice the same conclusions because we defer to others or because we ape them… In a public conversation, we correct and challenge each other, so it is no stroke of fortuity when we find ourselves in accord” — Anastasia Berg (Hebrew) & Becca Rothfeld (Harvard) distingush two forms of collective speech
  2. “Socrates,” the dream said, “make music and work at it” — Jenny Judge (NYU) shared this quote from the Phaedo. She’s a philosopher making music (check out her “Block of Amber“). Who else among you is?
  3. “Something to push against, something to argue with, and even if you disagree with it, engaging with it helps to make your thinking about matters of justice richer” — Martin O’Neill (York), Fabienne Peter (Warwick), and Jonathan Wolff (Oxford) on the ideas of John Rawls & his critics on the BBC’s “In Our Time”
  4. “The kind of philosophy I love is the kind of philosophy that embraces ambivalence and contradiction” — Amia Srinivasan (Oxford) in conversation with artist Paul Chan
  5. Soldier, whistle-blower, philosopher, sufferer of mental illness, and “a journey, all the way to the grave, that didn’t need to be” — the (ongoing) story of the late Ian Fishback
  6. 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…” — an appreciation of Isaiah Berlin’s history of philosophy, from Dan Little (UM-Dearborn)
  7. 700-year-old handwritten copy of Maimonides’ “Guide of the Perplexed” is going up for auction — bidding starts at $129,250

Discussion welcome.

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. Thanks!

Mini-Heap

By: Justin Weinberg

Recent additions to the Heap…

  1. “AI developers really have no idea what their advanced chatbots are really learning above and beyond ‘telling us what we want to hear’” — Marcus Arvan (Tampa) on how AI developers are playing with fire
  2. “Most philosophers don’t seem troubled by imposing a social order on people who pretheoretically reject it” — Thomas Mulligan (Georgetown) is interviewed about his meritocratic theory of justice
  3. “We should exercise great caution against both over- and under-attributing sentience to AI systems. And also consider slowing down.” — Robert Long on what to think when a language model tells you it’s sentient
  4. “Rather than ignoring relations of power, a recognition of the unequal distribution of power is a founding premise of Rawls’s political theory” — Nick French on Marxism, methodological individualism, Rawls, and analytic philosophy. (Also see “Is Analytic Philosophy Counter-Revolutionary?” by Ben Burgis) (via Andy Lamey)
  5. “Is this phenomenal consciousness thing something ordinary people believe in or is it just some wacky idea that anglophone philosophers have come up with?” — Michelle Liu (Hertfordshire-Monash) and Edouard Machery (Pitt) hash it out on “Mind Chat”
  6. “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” — a thoughtful essay by Steven Hales (Bloomsburg)
  7. “We have innate mathematical perception—an ability to see or sense numbers” — philosophers Jacob Beck and Sam Clarke (York) “supplement thousands of years of philosophical thinking about this issue by drawing on a mountain of experimental evidence that simply was not available to past thinkers”

Discussion welcome.

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. Thanks!

Thinker Analytix

Mini-Heap

By: Justin Weinberg

New links…

  1. “What state was the Athenian advice industry in, that this stuff was noteworthy?” — possibly everything you need to know about Solon, courtesy of Brad Skow (MIT)
  2. “Celebrating the banning of authors and concepts as ‘freedom from indoctrination’ is as Orwellian as politics gets” — Jason Stanley (Yale) on education bans and how “the media’s portrayal of these laws as moves in the ‘culture wars’ is an unconscionable misrepresentation of fascism”
  3. “There are lots of laws protecting dogs and cats… it’s really a question of generalizing what we’re already doing” — Martha Nussbaum (Chicago) is interviewed for a new “Open Mind” segment on MSNBC (at around the 5 minute mark)
  4. The feel of the peel is really just what self-monitoring systems reveal — Keith Frankish (Sheffield) reports on an AI’s session with her human therapist
  5. There will be a fashion show, opera, belly dancing, martinis… and berets — public philosophy with flair, from Skye Cleary
  6. “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” — and this has implications for how to understand threats posed by new technologies, like deepfakes, argues Josh Habgood-Coote (Leeds)
  7. “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” — Andy Clark (Sussex) and Gary Lupyan (Wisconsin) on what kind of telepathy makes sense, and how it might work in humans

Discussion welcome.

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. Thanks!

Mini-Heap (updated)

By: Justin Weinberg

Recent additions to the Heap…

  1. “His conception of philosophy is concerned with achieving understanding rather than acquiring knowledge” — an appreciation of the philosophy of Thomas Nagel, by Johnny Lyons in the Dublin Review of Books
  2. 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?” — Saba Bazargan-Forward (UCSD) is interviewed by Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt) about his theory of individual accountability in the context of shared action
  3. “Why is everyone hitting me today?” — Seneca — as played by John Malkovich in the new movie, “Seneca – On the Creation of Earthquakes”. Trailers here.
  4. “Self-deceit, this fatal weakness of mankind, is the source of half the disorders of human life” — Adam Smith is “interviewed” at 3:16AM
  5. “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?” — Ted Gioia writes a 2023 “State of the Culture” address
  6. The building that houses the Department of Philosophy at UC Berkeley will be getting a new name — the change is owed to the racist views of the original namesake. UPDATE: Jay Wallace (Berkeley) recommends readers see this article on the story.
  7. Some autonomous technologies may lead to a “responsibility gap” in which harms are committed but one can be justly held accountable — Is that a problem? Not necessarily, argues John Danaher (Galway)

Discussion welcome.

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. Thanks!

Thinker Analytix

Mini-Heap

By: Justin Weinberg

Links of late…

 

  1. “If we try to turn our lives into good stories, we may find ourselves making choices that are bad for us” — Amy Berg (Oberlin) on narratives, well-roundedness, and the good life
  2. Knowledge, but at what cost? — how should we figure out whether large scale basic science experiments are worth it?
  3. “A full development of our humanity requires developing our capacities to care for the world of nature and for the animals in it” — Martha Nussbaum (Chicago) is interviewed by Jeremy Bendik-Keymer (Case Western) at Boston Review
  4. Mind-wandering is a thing, but what about extended mind-wandering? And is habitual smartphone use an example of it? — Jelle Bruineberg & Regina Fabry (Macquarie) make the case for it, and other philosophers discuss it
  5. A philosopher proposes an “Institute for Ascertaining Scientific Consensus” to determine what we know and to fight misinformation — Can it be done? Should it? UPDATE: There’s an (LLM-based) app for that now: Consensus. It’s not very good… yet.
  6. “Can College Level the Playing Field?… No way. You would have to ignore all the available evidence to think that the answer is ‘yes’.” — Harry Brighouse (Wisconsin) reviews a review of a book about education and equality
  7. 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” — Jon Rueda (Granada) on how we might use AI to help make us better people, and some concerns about doing so.

Discussion welcome.

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. Thanks!

Mini-Heap

By: Justin Weinberg

Latest links…

  1. “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” — the “he” is John Guillory (NYU) and “the field” is literature, but he’s addressing problems relevant to philosophy, too
  2. “There is a popular picture of Socrates as someone inviting us to think for ourselves… [That] popular picture is severely incomplete” — Alex Pruss (Baylor) on Socrates’ conservatism
  3. What to say to a friend whose book you haven’t read — some suggestions
  4. “[The spider] tenses the threads of the web so that she can filter information that is coming to her brain… This is almost the same thing as if she was filtering things in her own brain” — extended cognition in the animal world
  5. How do ChatGPT and other large language models work? — philosopher Ben Levinstein (Illinois) provides a “conceptual guide” to them. Here’s Part 1.
  6. “Free Will?” — a documentary featuring philosophers and others, released this month — watch the trailer here
  7. A reflexive puzzle — (via The Browser)

Discussion welcome.

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. Thanks!

 

Mini-Heap

By: Justin Weinberg

Recent additions to the Heap of Links…

  1. “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” — Justin E.H. Smith (University of Paris 7) defends AI art, sort of
  2. “I do not think a degenerated scholasticism is the right historical metaphor for our time and era. I think late antiquity Hellenistic philosophy is where we should see ourselves” — “We are in a syncretic age. And I believe that is why we will soon be forgot,” says Liam Kofi Bright (LSE)
  3. “Ethics are mostly an afterthought for… profit-driven organisations, a compliance hoop they must jump through. Tasioulas and the crew of philosophers he has assembled are arguing that ethics should be foundational” — The Times profiles Oxford’s Institute for Ethics in AI
  4. “Now, how does one inspect the unobservable / With tools meant to detect the world measurable?” — “Hard Problem of Consciousness” is a new catchy tune by philosophical songstress Hannah Hoffman
  5. 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% — a profile of the philosophy program at Wake Forest touches on, among other things, its strategies for increasing enrollment
  6. The philosophy of comics (comic strips, comic books) — questions and comments from nine philosophers
  7. The do’s and don’ts of writing about women in the history of philosophy — from Sandrine Bergès (Bilkent)

Discussion welcome.

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. Thanks!

Mini-Heap

By: Justin Weinberg

Latest links…

  1. 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)? — share your responses at the Cocoon
  2. “A path to get college credit that begins on a YouTube video” — does this new collaboration with Arizona State University represent the future of universities, or portend their demise?
  3. “His most significant contribution is his argument that everything is ultimately made of water. It has made a big splash” — a tenure letter for Thales, by Brad Skow (MIT)
  4. The Gradient covers a wide range of issues regarding artificial intelligence — recent articles have concerned AI epistemology, the punishment of robots, and the connection between understanding and making the “right mistakes”
  5. “The synthetic creative factor of our knowledge extends… into the very first sense-impressions and even into the elements of logic” — Friedrich Lange is “interviewed” about his neo-Kantianism, the significance of materialism, and other philosophers, at 3:16AM
  6. “Far from being a fusty academic discipline with no relevance to the ‘real’ world, philosophy was, for him, an existential matter of immediate importance” — the case for a biography of Bryan Magee
  7. Voters “should expect that an effective candidate will be imperfectly honest at best” — but liars like George Santos, who are “unlikely to be believed” are “incapable of achieving those goods that justify their deception” says Michael Blake (Washington)

Discussion welcome.

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. Thanks!

Mini-Heap

By: Justin Weinberg

Items of interest to people interested in philosophy…

  1. “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’” — Dan Little (UM-Dearborn) on the case for (and questions of) this subfield
  2. “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” — meet Claude, one of several alternatives to ChatGPT
  3. “If A beats B and B beats C, A and C have essentially equal chances of prevailing against each other.” Wait, what? — all about intransitive dice
  4. “What is our universe expanding into?” — “That’s a great question. The answer, though, is that it’s not a great question,” says Paul Sutter (Stony Brook)
  5. “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” — a short story about akrasia, the gaze of the other, and the examined life, by Ben Roth (Tufts)
  6. “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” — a history of what philosophers have thought about “common sense” by Stephen Leach (Keele)
  7. “You should always gather more evidence, say women who love gossip” — Carolina Flores (UC Irvine) and Elise Woodard (MIT) have some fun posting about a forthcoming paper at NWIP

Discussion welcome.

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. Thanks!

Thinker Analytix

Mini-Heap

By: Justin Weinberg

Recent additions to the Heap…

  1. “Exaggerations, half-truths and outright lies will dominate our historical imagination and make it impossible to understand, and learn from, the past” — Daniel Bessner (Washington) on the decline of the historical profession
  2. “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…” — Suresh Venkatasubramanian (Brown) is interviewed about developing the US Government’s Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights
  3. A philosophy course centered around paradoxes — taught by Patrick Greenough at St. Andrews
  4. “Contemporary analytical philosophy is in greater part interesting, valuable, and well done” — Crispin Wright (NYU/Stirling) is interviewed about philosophy and his work on objectivity, truth, vagueness, skepticism, and other topics
  5. “Like Gandhi, he believed that guarding power was bad for the powerful: segregation harmed the white man’s own soul. But from his other great influence Reinhold Niebuhr… King learned to reject a ‘false optimism’” — Amod Lele (Boston U.) on MLK’s improvement on Gandhi
  6. How can we trust science? How does it get at the truth? What about false scientific theories of the past? — a conversation between Peter Vickers and Jana Bacevic (Durham)
  7. “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” — more from Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) on Will MacAskill and “longtermism”

Discussion welcome.

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. Thanks!

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