Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

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  1. F.E. Guerra-Pujol's avatar

    Apropos of Sagar’s wish to foist the A.I. industry by its own petard, this article appeared in print in yesterday’s…

  2. Claudio's avatar

    I teach both large courses, like Jurisprudence and Critical Legal Thinking (a.k.a Legal Argumentation), and small seminar-based courses at Edinburgh…

  3. Charles Pigden's avatar

    Surely there is an answer to the problem of AI cheating which averts the existential threat. . It’s not great,…

  4. Mark's avatar

    I’d like to pose a question. Let’s be pessimistic for the moment, and assume AI *does* destroy the university, at…

  5. A in the UK's avatar
  6. Jonathan Turner's avatar

    I agree with all of this. The threat is really that stark. The only solution is indeed in-class essay exams,…

  7. Craig Duncan's avatar

Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “understanding” of what philosophy is

In her contribution to Portraits of American Philosophy, she writes:

A way of understanding what philosophy is came to seem to me increasingly plausible.  I had already come to think that philosophy consists in a battery of problems; back at Barnard again, I came to think that the main, central problems consist in efforts to explain what makes certain pre-philosophical, or nonphilosophical, beliefs true. Which beliefs?  Philosophers differ in their interests, but the ones that have interested philosophers, generally, in generation after generation, are those that we rely on in ordinary life.  Not surprisingly, it was Moore, not Wittgenstein, who struck me as the leader.  (I suspect that I could have said Aristotle instead of Moore.)  I still think that way of undersanding what philosophy is roughly right.  (p. 54)

A view like this probably accounts for the generally conservative cast of most Anglophone philosophy in the past century.

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