Philosophy in the News
-
“What is the nature of metaphysics?”
Kit Fine and Timothy Williamson discuss. (Thanks to Richard Marshall for the pointer.)
-
How are Philosophy & Public Affairs 2.0 (post-exodus) and the new open access “Free and Equal” faring?
Over two years ago (May 2024), the old PPA imploded when its publisher pressured the editors to publish more articles. The old editorial team created the new open access journal “Free & Equal,” while PPA 2.0 was taken over by the “libertarian Mafia” (replacing the old “Rawls mafia”) led by Jason Brennan. (Of course, the…
-
New: Oxford Studies in Philosophy of AI and Computing…
…and they’re soliciting submissions (unlike some other Oxford Studies volumes). The editors are: Seth Lazar, Jeffrey Howard, and Rachel Sterken.
-
Final field-specific analysis related to the “Boghossian Report” is released, on philosophy…
…by Kit Fine and Gideon Rosen. From the opening remarks: Academic philosophy is generally healthy in most respects relevant to the work of the Commission. In almost every part of the subject, high scholarly standards are brought to bear, both in the vetting of manuscripts for publication and in the evaluation of individual scholars for…
-
Talk to philosopher bots
This is amusing. I haven’t tried it, so can’t vouch for how reliable it is, but I’ve opened comments for those who do sample it to report their impressions. I note that for some of the living philosophers–like Peter Singer and Torbjörn Tännsjö–the site indicates that these philosophers were consulted on their bot, so presumably…
-
Hubert Dreyfus’s attack on AI: relevant again
Reader Dave Trevor kindly calls my attention to this useful account of the early critique of AI by Hubert Dreyfus and its aftermath. Dreyfus came to this via his study of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, and the points remain relevant. An excerpt: The paper argued that the attempt to analyse intelligent behaviour in digital computer language…
-
Open access philosophy books, a thread: Part V
MOVING to front from late August The last thread garnered 22 submissions, so I thought with fall approaching, it would make sense to open a new thread. The rules, as before: In light of the growing number of these volumes, I am going to run a thread periodically in which I invite authors or readers…
-
Undergraduate demand for philosophy at Harvard
A nice profile of the Department’s successful undergraduate program; an excerpt: Since the 2005-2006 academic year, the number of Arts and Humanities concentrators of all kinds at Harvard has decreased by 12.6 percent overall, according to data from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), and some of the biggest concentrations have shrunk by more…
-
Reichenbach on epistemology as a branch of sociology
A propos an earlier reference to Reichenbach, philosopher of science Brad Wray shared this interesting quote from Chapter 1 of Experience and Prediction (1938; 2006 for the University of Notre Dame edition from which the reference comes): Every theory of knowledge must start from knowledge as a given sociological fact. The system of knowledge as…
-
Tempting fate, while avoiding catastrophe
Philosopher Duncan Pritchard discusses.
-
A recent interview with Thomas Nagel about “consciousness” and related topics.
Here. (Thanks to Guy Elgat for the pointer.)
-
Pausing AI development is feasible…
…says a new academic study from an AI governance project organized by Berkeley philosopher Wesley Holliday and statistician Will Fithian, working with an interdisciplinary team that also includes philosopher Thomas Icard (Stanford) and political theorist Gregory Conti (Princeton), among others. Let us hope they’re right!
-
The huge demand for “philosophy and AI” faculty (UPDATED)
On Twitter, philosopher Brandon Warmke noted that just in the last 48 hours, six jobs were posted seeking philosophers with AI-related interests. As I wrote on Twitter, this seems to me “a foolish waste of philosophy lines, no doubt partly a result of administrators hopping on the bandwagon and pressuring departments to find warm bodies.”…
-
Reichenbach on ethics
A propos this, philosopher Johannes Steizinger calls my attention to this remark of Hans Reichenbach’s in The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (p. 297): Whoever wants to study ethics, therefore, should not go to the philosopher; he should live in the community of a group where life is made vivid by competing volitions, be it the…
-
On some of the oddities of being a philosophical scholar working on Marx
Marx did have a doctoral degree in philosophy (he wrote a dissertation on Democritus and Epicurus), and was for a period of time under the influence of Hegel (the decisive account of his break with Hegel is this one). But by the late 1840s, his approach to theory and intellectual work was wholly different. What…
“given the actual number of career-worthy jobs (i.e. not per-course or adjunct positions)” The “id est” seems mistaken. Many tenure-track…