Recent additions to the Heap of Links… “While I’m still on the fence about eyes, I don’t think legs, strictly speaking, exist” — the question of whether there are more eyes or legs in the world “has profound implications for our understanding of certain fundamental matters at the heart of our ongoing debates about scientific realism,” says Justin E.H.
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The heap grows… “By making nature the arbiter of our way of life, the Cynics ushered in a moral revolution… But critical theorists today… are understandably suspicious of appeals to nature’s moral authority” — “The Cynics would applaud their criticism, but they’d also warn them not to throw out the baby with the bathwater” “We may sometimes want our AI assistants, just like humans, to temper their truthfulness: to protect privacy, to avoid insulting others, or to keep someone safe, among innumerable other hard-to-articulate situations” — on the complexity of aligning artificial intelligences with human values “Intellectual history is not so much an enriching source of data and instruction as a prerequisite to know what I am talking about” — “everyone needs something that is, for them, playing the role of grounding one’s modal reasoning,” says Liam Kofi Bright (LSE) “Tellingly, no-one announcing the discovery of the new Hegel manuscripts seems excited that they’re going to make us realise something we didn’t know before about art” — Tom Whyman on whether more Hegel is good news “A one-size-fits-all approach to sex [comes] a