Items of interest to people interested in philosophy… “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 “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 “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 “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) “The Department of Personal Inspections is charged with the remit of examining the lives of persons within His Majesty’s territories.
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Recent additions to the Heap… “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 “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 A philosophy course centered around paradoxes — taught by Patrick Greenough at St. Andrews “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 “Like Gandhi, he believed that guarding power was bad for the powerful: segregation harmed the white man’s own soul.
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The weekly report on new and revised entries at online philosophy resources and new reviews of philosophy books… SEP New: Skeptical Theism by Timothy Perrine. Antonio Gramsci by James Martin. Action by Juan S. Piñeros Glasscock and Sergio Tenenbaum. Philosophy of Statistical Mechanics by Roman Frigg and Charlotte Werndl. Revised: Rule Consequentialism by Brad Hooker. Behaviorism by George Graham. Frederick Douglass by Ronald Sundstrom. Pierre Bayle by Michael Hickson. Intersections Between Analytic and Continental Feminism by Georgia Warnke. Simone de Beauvoir by Debra Bergoffen and Megan Burke. Donald Cary Williams by Keith Campbell, James Franklin, and Douglas Ehring. Egoism by Robert Shaver. Globalization by William Scheuerman. Leucippus by Sylvia Berryman. Democritus by Sylvia Berryman. IEP Arthur Schopenhauer: Logic and Dialectic by Jens Lemanski.
New links… “If we can’t say exactly how we think, then how well do we know ourselves?” — Have you thought about how you think? Is it in pictures, in patterns, in words, or in some unsymbolized way?
Recent additions to the Heap of Links… “Ask yourself who will suffer the most if we fail to prevent catastrophic climate change.
The weekly report on new and revised entries at online philosophy resources and new reviews of philosophy books… SEP New: Existentialism by Kevin Aho. Revised: Haecceitism by Sam Cowling. Beardsley’s Aesthetics by Michael Wreen. Democritus by Sylvia Berryman. Bernardino Telesio by Michaela Boenke. Kant’s Account of Reason by Garrath Williams. IEP The Value of Art by Harry Drummond. NDPR A Middle Way: A Non-Fundamental Approach to Many-Body Physics by Robert W. Batterman is reviewed by Jula R.S. Bursten. Wilderness, Morality, and Value by Joshua Duclos is reviewed by Kyle Johannsen. Analytical Essay on the Faculties of the Soul by Charles Bonnet is reviewed by John H. Zammito. 1000-Word Philosophy Arguments: Why Do You Believe What You Believe? by Thomas Metcalf. Project Vox ∅ Recent Philosophy Book Reviews in Non-Academic Media In Praise of Failure by Costica Bradatan is reviewed by Jenifer Szalai at The New York Times. Is St. Thomas’ Aristotelian Philosophy of Nature Obsolete? by Robert C. Koons is reviewed by Edward Feser at Public Discourse. Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility by Martha C.
More links… If you’re using MTurk to run surveys, you probably should consider an alternative — Florian Cova (Geneva) with an experimental philosophy cautionary tale A private firm is planning on using genetic engineering to de-extinct the woolly mammoth — Andy Lamey (UCSD) has some questions “I had been involved in actions that seemed deeply wrong to me, though perhaps necessary in the conduct of the war, and parts of my soul were at war with each other” — Paul Woodruff (Texas) on how philosophy helped him put his “soul back together” “It is a strange thing… that the more time and pains men have consumed in the study of philosophy, by so much the more they look upon themselves to be ignorant and weak creatures” — George Berkeley is “interviewed” at 3:16AM “Prohibitions aren’t enough. We need a positive moral vision that guides us towards securing a better future.
The latest links… “A.I. [learns] through statistical distribution the best word to use, the distribution of the reasonable words that could come next. I think moral decision-making can be done like that as well” — an interview with computer scientist (and MacArthur “genius” grant winner) Yejin Choi (Washington) on morality and artificial intelligence. “Some researchers say it does not make sense to frame something that is a normal biological process as disease. Further complicating things… is that there is no agreed-upon point at which a person becomes old” — Is old age a disease? Is a “yes” answer “ageist”? Or is the view that ageing is acceptable ageist?
New links for the Heap… The Oxfordshire Blue Plaques Board has proposed a plaque to commemorate Philippa Foot and the house where she lived from 1972 to 2010 — a decision will be made on the proposal in mid-January New Work In Philosophy: The YouTube Channel — videos about recent philosophy Lecture notes—pretty much a textbook—for a course entitled “Belief, Desire, and Rational Choice” — from Wolfgang Schwarz (Edinburgh) One philosophy professor’s experience with a student who cheated by having ChatGPT write their essay — “proving the paper was concocted by ChatGPT was nearly impossible,” said Darren Hick (Furman) A Medievalist notices that an academic extensively plagiarized his blog in her book, and contacts her to object.