Philosophy

Imagine coming across, on a reasonably serious site, an article that starts along the lines of:

After observing the generative AI space for a while, I feel I have to ask: does ChatGPT (and other LLM-based chatbots)… actually gablergh? And if I am honest with myself, I cannot but conclude that it sure does seem so, to some extent!

I know this sounds sensationalist. It does undermine some of our strongly held assumptions and beliefs about what does “to gablergh” actually mean — and what classes of entities can, in fact, be said to gablergh at all. Since gablerghing is such a crucial part of what many feel it means to be human, this is also certainly going to ruffle some feathers!

A spotlight on the personal life of the trailblazing philosopher.

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This is my sixth post on MacAskill’s What We Owe the Future. (The first here; the second is here; the third here; the fourth here; the fifth here; and this post on a passage in Parfit (here.)) I paused the series in the middle of January because most of my remaining objections to the project involve either how to […]

There is a kind of relentless contrarian that is very smart, has voracious reading habits, is funny, and ends up in race science and eugenics. You are familiar with the type. Luckily, analytic philosophy also generates different contrarians about its own methods and projects that try to develop more promising (new) paths than these. Contemporary classics in […]

The Association for Symbolic Logic has awarded its 2022 Shoenfield Logic Book and Article Prizes. The Shoenfield Prizes are “awarded for outstanding expository writing in the field of logic” and were established honor the late Joseph R. Shoenfield, a influential logician who died in 2000. The Shoenfield Book Prize was awarded to Paolo Mancosu (University of California, Berkeley), Sergio Galvan (Catholic University of the Sacred Heart), and Richard Zach (Calgary) for their book, An Introduction to Proof Theory—Normalization, Cut-Elimination, and Consistency Proofs (Oxford University Press, 2021). Here’s a summary of their book: Proof theory is a central area of mathematical logic of special interest to philosophy. It has its roots in the foundational debate of the 1920s, in particular, in Hilbert’s program in the philosophy of mathematics, which called for a formalization of mathematics, as well as for a proof, using philosophically unproblematic, “finitary” means, that these systems are free from contradiction.

The Royal Institute of Philosophy (RIP) has announced the creation of a new book prize to recognize “the most original philosophical research that transcends academic disciplines”. The prize comes with a monetary award of £20,000 (≈ $24,600). The Nayef Al-Rodhan International Prize in Transdisciplinary Philosophy will aim to reward the authors of books that, according to a press release from the RIP, demonstrate rigorous original and high-quality transdisciplinary research are accessible and engaging to read are original, innovative, and impactful intend to advance and contribute to the understanding of human behaviors. They add: We welcome philosophical work that transcends academic boundaries, and furthers our understanding of the key challenges facing the world today, and that may face us in the future. The work may be from philosophers, neuroscientists, social scientists, or from other disciplines. Among other work we welcome submissions from those researching disruptive technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, from those concerned with climate change, and from those concerned with the future of democracy.

“There is room to think creatively about how to improve learning and love of philosophy via innovation in pedagogy.” That’s Russell Marcus, professor of philosophy at Hamilton College, and Catherine Schmitt, an undergraduate at Hamilton studying philosophy and neuroscience, writing about the experiments in philosophy teaching they’ve facilitated as part of the Hamilton College Summer Program in Philosophy (HCSPiP). In the following guest post, they share some observations about successful philosophy teaching innovations, and invite readers to share their own. What Do Experiments in Philosophy Teaching Look Like? by Russell Marcus and Catherine Schmitt We often think of innovations in our philosophy teaching in terms of introducing new content. Student learning, though, may depend as much on how we teach as it does on what we teach. Moreover, since few of our undergraduate philosophy students will continue on to graduate work, and since philosophy departments are widely under pressure to justify our curricula and classes, attention to improving the classroom experiences of our students is essential.

Valiant attempts have been made to measure happiness and wellbeing. People much smarter than me have developed fancy indices, and people even smarter than that, such as our own Nicholas Gruen, has called bullshit on many of them. What I … Continue reading →

One question for Jon Rueda, a doctoral student in moral philosophy at the University of Granada.

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“Philosophical inquiry thrives when it is conducted in a spirit that risks overreaching a bit,” yet “the current incentive structure of academic philosophy in the United States favors cautious and modest research agendas for early career philosophers.” The journal Axiomathes is becoming Global Philosophy, and in a forthcoming editorial about the change, John Symons (Kansas) discusses a variety of obstacles to global philosophy. “Deglobalization” and the resurgence of nationalism is one kind obstacle, he says, but so is hyperspecialization and the pressure to conform to narrow disciplinary standards. Here’s the passage from which the above quotes were excerpted: In the decades prior to the financial crisis of 2008, when Anglo-American philosophy departments were relatively financially healthy, a narrowly defined research niche in a fashionable topic could provide easy rewards in the early career of a young philosopher. With cleverness (or a good advisor in graduate school) one’s work could be crafted to satisfy the preferences of a manageably small number of specialists. Their approval was a necessary condition for professional advancement.