I didn’t publish any “Mini-Heap” posts over the summer time for 2 causes.
First, I’ve been attempting to scale back how a lot time I spend on Day by day Nous over the summers, in order to have the ability to use that point for different kinds of labor.
Second, Mini-Heap posts originated as a response to requests from readers, a few of whom wished remark area to debate the hyperlinks, and others who subscribed to the location by e mail and wished to be notified when new materials was added to the Heap of Hyperlinks—and the subscription service wasn’t working correctly final Spring.
Over the summer time, I found that the app I had been utilizing for the subscription service for a few years (Postmatic) died, so I went again to the native WordPress service. Likelihood is, in the event you had signed up for a subscription someday prior to now 8 years or so, you probably did so with the now-dead service, so in the event you’d prefer to obtain e mail updates of recent posts at DN, you’ll must resubscribe. You are able to do that by getting into your e mail within the “subscribe” field that’s situated on the backside of the Heap of Hyperlinks on the primary web page. It appears to be like like this:
On a laptop computer or desktop pc, the Heap will likely be on the left facet of the display screen. On a cellphone, you’ll discover it by scrolling down on the primary web page previous latest posts and feedback.
I’ll be restarting the Mini-Heap posts this week or subsequent. In the intervening time, beneath are all the hyperlinks I added to the Heap over the summer time.
- “We might have lived in a world in which every atom was different from every other one and where nothing was stable. In such a world there would be no regularity whatsoever, and our conscious activities would cease” — Hermann Helmholtz is “interviewed” by Richard Marshall at 3:16AM
- “‘Absolutely not,’ I told my husband from the bed as he tried to find the right place on his dresser for Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. ‘I don’t need him staring at me all night’” — a pair disagrees over the knowledge of Stoicism (NYT)
- The philosophy and science of consciousness — a dialogue throughout a number of posts, between Jonathan Birch (LSE) and Hedda Hassel Mørch (Inland Norway)
- “The political theory defended in Crito is fundamentally wrong, and wrong in a very deep way” — Dan Little (UM-Dearborn) on Socrates the absolutist
- “The public philosopher is neither an authority figure who has special access to the answers for our social problems nor are they a clever but disinterested observer who can discuss all sides to a given issue” — quite, says William Paris (Toronto), they intention at making issues intelligible
- There was an evidentiary hearing in the Kershnar case this week — the story is roofed within the New York Occasions
- “Some more self-awareness of the costs and risks of focusing on arguments would make analytic philosophy wiser” — Eric Schliesser (Amsertdam) on arguments, concerns, methods, and imagery in philosophy
- “The life and legacy of a man who helped philosophy onto British TV and radio” — an appreciation of Bryan Magee, from Angie Hobbs (Sheffield), Barry Lam (UC Riverside), MM McCabe (Cambridge), Peter Singer (Princeton) and others, on BBC radio
- “Why make a law about something that doesn’t exist?” — the puzzle that prompted thinker Daniel Hoek (Virginia Tech) to find that what we’ve recognized for 300 years as Newton’s first regulation is predicated on a mistaken translation
- “Works of art that illustrate philosophy are inventive in their presentation of abstract philosophical ideas in concrete visual form even as they attest to the importance of written philosophy as a source of artistic inspiration” — Thomas Wartenberg (Mount Holyoke) on how artwork can illustrate philosophy
- What it is like to be a philosopher in Ukraine–before 1991 and after — a report from Viatkina Nataliia (Skovoroda Institute of Philosophy, Nationwide Academy of Sciences of Ukraine)
- “Technology tempts us into being satisfied with pseudo-friendships” — Paul Woodruff (Texas), who says his “finish is close to”, displays on expertise and friendship
- “When you long / To invent right and wrong / When you’re glad / To explore good and bad / But you’re through / Telling folks what to do — That’s metaethics! — Nomy Arpaly and Jamie Dreier (Brown) sing about metaethics, backed up by Michael Smith (Princeton) on guitar
- “Admirers of Marx and Freud tend to claim both that their ideas had a positive net effect and that these ideas would not have been proposed had Marx and Freud never lived” — ” I concur with the latter declare, however not with the previous,” says Jon Elster (Columbia) (from 2011, by way of MR)
- “In our scholarly community, the onus should not be solely on early-career researchers to put themselves out there and network. It’s also up to us tenured folk, to help create structures and opportunities for them to do so” — Helen De Cruz (SLU) on networking in philosophy
- “There is this tension in the way people write about mathematics — some philosophers and historians in particular” — an interview with mathematician Andrew Granville on how insights from philosophy assist make clear the social dimensions of arithmetic
- “The rent will be used to address crumbling infrastructure as the upkeep of a completely underground cave is no easy thing” — Plato’s Cave has a brand new property administration firm, and it’s elevating the lease
- “I’m a philosophy professor and I’ve been thinking about love” *picks up axe* — Georgi Gardiner (Tennessee) explores the connection between our love-related ideas and our love-related experiences (in a quite uncommon video)
- “Many effects of learning manifest themselves much later” — what are the implications of that for a course’s studying outcomes or scholar evaluations? Remarks from Martin Lenz (Groningen)
- How to participate in philosophy conversations — included within the Heap beforehand, it is a helpful information for college kids by Olivia Bailey (Berkeley)
- “The expectation that college will help them land a job has led too many students to approach college like a job in its own right: a series of grim tasks that, once completed, qualifies them to perform grimmer but better-paid tasks” — it will be higher in the event that they noticed it as “a singular time in your life to find simply how a lot your thoughts can do”
- What are dreams for? Perhaps they are part of how brains “learn the body” — the work of thinker Jennifer Windt (Monash), neuroscientist Mark Blumberg (Iowa) and others mentioned in The New Yorker (by way of Gary Bartlett)
- “In philosophy good positions are interesting in and of themselves. Good arguments can help that, but they are far from necessary” — Liam Brilliant (LSE) an analytic philosophy’s argument fetish
- New exhibit includes never-before-displayed portraits of Nietzsche along with items belonging to him and his sister — “The Personal Nietzsche” has opened on the Klassik Stiftung in Weimar
- What’s the deal with Leibniz’s hair? — “the wig takes on enhanced significance if juxtaposed not solely to philosophy generally but in addition to Leibniz’s philosophy specifically,” claims Richard Halpern
- “It is no longer detectable at conventional levels of statistical significance” — the gender wage hole amongst school at public analysis universities within the U.S. (by way of MR)
- The military use of AI-directed weaponry raises a “wicked ethical conundrum” of responsibility in which a person “could end up serving as… a ‘moral crumple zone”” — new army expertise could require new ethics
- “Absolute truth, off the table. But practical truth? That’s real, and that’s what we’re striving for” — Daniel Dennett, interviewed in The New York Occasions (by way of Paul Wilson)
- A thoughtfully constructed and detailed example of “a unique approach to teaching analytical writing to introductory philosophy students” — the “ranges system”, as taught by Dustin Locke (Claremont-McKenna) (by way of Kenny Easwaran)
- “There are no mistakes, just chances to improvise” — in opposition to perfection in music. Is there a philosophical analog (no pun supposed) to this?
- What are your most underappreciated works? — students within the humanities and social sciences are invited to appoint their very own writings, although there are some circumstances
- “The leisure that is necessary for human beings is not just a break from real life, a place where we rest and restore ourselves in order to go back to work. What we are after is a state that looks like the culmination of a life” — Zena Hitz (St. John’s) on the “inside self-discipline” of leisure
- “GPT4—an extremely optimized, probabilistic, domain-general reasoning machine—commits the same systematic errors that have been used to argue that humans couldn’t be optimized, probabilistic reasoning machines” — Kevin Dorst (MIT) on what’s to be discovered from the “cognitive biases” of LLMs
- “Nature cannot afford to generate beings that just pretend to be sentient” — the proof for (and implications of) insect sentience (by way of The Browser)
- “The world isn’t simple, what the evidence shows isn’t always clear, and things are not always as they seem” — Eric Winsberg (South Florida) on the significance (and mistreatment) of scientific dissidents
- “For both Kierkegaard and Eliot, remarkably fertile years as artist-philosophers followed a momentous, life-defining personal choice” — Clare Carlisle (KCL) on Kierkegaard, Eliot, and marriage
- “Nothing reveals to me the totality of the context-collapse in which the younger generations pass their lives more clearly than the widespread philistinism and prissiness that prevails with regard to art” — a Gen X howl from Justin Smith-Ruiu (Justin E.H. Smith)
- Ukraine faces “a cultural genocide” — Jason Stanley (Yale) interviewed on PBS, from Kyiv
- “Trust in science,” “appreciation for common sense,” and “suspicion of infallible knowledge,” are some of the factors an LLM says influenced its answers — Claude, the LLM from Anthropic, takes the PhilPapers survey
- “I don’t think that Aristotle is compatible with modern science or with the metaphysics that is implicit in modern science” — says Edward Halper (Georgia), and “when you see why, you can even see an actual metaphysical issue with trendy science—and one other with Aristotle”
- “I am not endorsing Sellars’ vision… But there is something interesting, tantalizing even, about how Sellars went about that project, of ‘doing justice’ to what he thought would ultimately be eliminated” — Bas van Frassen on Sellars’ “apocalyptic imaginative and prescient”
- What’s “the X that might be required for consciousness… in current LLMs”? — David Chalmers (NYU) appears to be like at six prospects
- “I don’t think you’ll be able to resolve all conflicts in life. And some of those conflicts are going to be between beauty and morality” — Alexander Nehamas (Princeton) in dialog with Jonny Thakkar (Swarthmore)
- Personalized medicine “purports to both tailor health care and drive down costs, but the more it succeeds at individualization, the higher go the prices” — Jim Tabery (Utah) on the tensions between personalised drugs and public well being
- The claim that nothing is true, some say, is “incoherent or otherwise self-defeating,” or epistemically “costly” — nevertheless it’s neither, argues Will Gamester (Leeds)
- “It’s reasonable to say that analytic philosophy has always been in a state of (meta-)philosophical crisis” — Aaron Preston (Valparaiso) on analytic philosophy, ethical information, metaphilosophical eudaimonism, personalism, political discourse, and extra
- “Motivated and biased reasoning can bring knowledge and understanding, even when it involves ignoring good quality information” — Kathleen Puddifoot (Durham) on why cognitive bias doesn’t at all times lead individuals astray
- “The most important form of progress in philosophy: opening up new ideas about what might possibly be true” — Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) on “philosophy that opens”
- “We cannot go back in time and undo the processes that pushed female philosophers into the periphery” of early analytic philosophy — however “historians can play a job in correcting the omissions, oversights and even downright errors our predecessors made,” as Jeanne Peijnenburg (Groningen) and Sander Verhaegh (Tilburg) do
- “The attribution of lying can yield the best interpretation of an author regardless of how strongly he condemns lying” — argue Roy Sorenson and Ian Proops (Texas). Their essential instance? Kant.
- “We need to come to our senses and abandon an unprecedented and perverse form of acculturation that is bad for current and future generations alike” — Talbot Brewer (Virginia) on consideration, markets, and the “ongoing tragedy of the cultural commons”
- “Dewey inspired Ambedkar to evolve a sort of pragmatism that targeted caste oppression, but which built up a vision of democratic social systems that allowed individuals to matter” — Scott R. Stroud (Texas) on the event, in India, of “one thing completely distinctive within the pragmatist custom”
- What can metaphysics do? — physicist Sean Carroll in dialog with thinker Katie Elliott (Brandeis)
- “Our intuitions about beauty are sharply conflicting… We emphasize that it is a matter of luck, but we cannot stop ourselves from treating it as an achievement” — Becca Rothfeld on the actions of being lovely
- “People with our training can do a lot of good in the intelligence business” — Arnold Cusmariu, a philosophy PhD who joined the CIA, offers some intelligence on why intelligence is perhaps a superb profession selection for individuals who’ve studied philosophy
- Actually useful internet search advice — you need to be capable of do extra than simply kind a phrase or phrase into Google (by way of The Browser)
- “It’s not all good, it’s just everything” — on the problems of magnificence, particularly different girls’s magnificence
- “Einstein’s theory of relativity shows that qualia, the elements of subjective experience, must be in the same place as their neural correlates,” that is, in your head — Neil Sinhababu (NUS) explains why, and its implications (e.g., it makes dualism “extra scientific and fewer magical”)
- “The conception of moral philosophy at which I had thus arrived put me at odds not only with the standpoint dominant in contemporary moral philosophy but also with the established analytic understanding of how philosophical inquiry should proceed” — Alasdair MacIntyre (Notre Dame) on why “modern tutorial ethical philosophy seems to be severely faulty as a type of rational inquiry”
- “These interviews are a seismic social epistemology project; a venue for disabled philosophers to identify with each other; and, they draw sharp attention to power and disability. The series is a crucial step for disability visibility in philosophy and beyond” — reflections on the “Dialogues on Incapacity” interview collection from the many individuals Shelley Tremain has interviewed for it
- “For a while now I have been unable (unwilling is what I should say, but from the inside it feels stronger than that) to really commit to doing philosophy research” — “this put up,” writes Liam Kofi Brilliant (LSE) “is me attempting to purpose aloud as to why that is perhaps and whether or not the sensation is price indulging”
- “Barbie has long functioned as a proxy onto which cultural aspirations and anxieties about womanhood are projected” — Carol Hay (UMass Lowell) on how a feminist would possibly come to understand Barbie
- Epistemic permissivism, Pascal’s Wager, God’s mental states, belief-credence dualism, and more — an interview with Liz Jackson (Toronto Metropolitan)
- Should we use idealized models in policymaking? — Sure we should always, argues Hannah Rubin (College of Missouri)
- “Silence, whatever it is, is not a sound — it’s the absence of sound. Surprisingly, what our work suggests is that *nothing* is… something you can hear” — a brand new examine, with a video of an experiment you’ll be able to strive. (Is “Holes: Research Exhibits We Can See Them” subsequent?)
- The goods of focusing on “canonical” figures in philosophy: “a community of readers, a corpus accessible across the globe, a common language to converse about many things we might only begin to understand” — how Martin Lenz (Groningen) turned pro-canon, in a manner
- “Every spring, I suffer the Summer Illusion, building up big plans and hopes. Then…” — Eric Schwitzgebel (Riverside) names and explains that all-too-common phenomenon
- A conjecture: “When a question about a story that calls out for an answer lacks an internal answer, but has an external one, then that is a flaw in the story” — Brad Skow (MIT) on what which means and whether or not it’s appropriate
- “The goal was to exhibit some of the best and most significant work the journal has published over the years, in a way that was sensitive to changes in the journal’s editorial vision and the field of philosophy of science during that time” — for the ninetieth anniversary of Philosophy of Science, a curated and free choice of 3-4 articles from every of its many years
- “Prioritising in attention traits that do not reflect personhood – which… include demographic properties – over those that do – which… include professional identities and passions – is a… subtle way of disrespecting an individual’s personhood” — Ella Kate Whiteley (LSE) on being considered “a lady first and a thinker second”
- “Incorporating expert scientists’ preferences for dissensus would change marginal funding decisions for ten percent of projects worth billions of dollars per year” — science, funding, and disagreement: “in distinction to funding businesses… scientists systematically favor to fund tasks with extra reviewer dissensus” (by way of MR)
- Daniel Ellsberg, who died this month, is “best-known as the military analyst who leaked ‘the Pentagon Papers’ in 1971” but he “made a significant contribution to philosophy, in the area of decision theory” — Nikhil Venkatesh (LSE) explains Ellsberg’s philosophical perception and applies it to his resolution to leak the papers
- “The controversies that have haunted the publication of Heidegger’s work are significant, insofar as they concern not merely occasional and understandable editorial lapses but instead suggest a premeditated policy of substantive editorial cleansing” — Richard Wolin (CUNY) on the editorial manipulation of Heidegger’s texts
- “Passport strength is almost invisible in the discipline as an axis of privilege” — if you’re a holder of a US or Western European passport, you need to actually learn this dialog between Tushar Menon (Dianoia) and Rachel Fraser (Oxford) about what it’s prefer to have weak “passport energy” and the way it impacts one’s work
- “The notion of ‘cancellation’ is an exemplary bit of ideology. It appears to be content-neutral—a purely procedural complaint about ‘intolerance’ and the failures of the ‘free marketplace of ideas’—but in fact is substantively political” — wide-ranging reflections on free speech, tutorial freedom, politics, scholar tradition, and extra from Amia Srinivasan (Oxford)
- “The only way to determine the ethical status of such an entity might… be unethical” — the science and ethics of embryo fashions
- “Philosophers are far more likely to suffer from depression than to write about it” but depression does raise “questions that philosophy can help us answer” — Brendan de Kenessey (Toronto) on melancholy and the nice
- “They… reflect a commitment to reasoned inquiry, openness to new evidence, and respect for both the achievements and the limitations of our current understanding” — when you’ve ChatGPT take the PhilPapers survey after which have it describe the widespread themes throughout its solutions
- The idea that philosophy must be good in order to be valuable “contributes to an exclusionary attitude that seeps into our unarticulated assumptions about who and what philosophy is for, and thereby shapes our professional practices in ways that we may not always be aware of” — Alida Liberman (SMU) gives a protection of doing philosophy badly
- The EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act would ban certain forms of AI, including predictive policing — however “the moral panorama of predictive policing is extra delicate and sophisticated” than the act suggests, argues Duncan Purves (Florida)
- “The narrative that there ‘was no political philosophy within analytic philosophy’ before Rawls is a lie that keeps us in a self-imposed tutelage” — Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) on Susan Stebbing’s “Beliefs and Illusions”
- “Epistemic cosplay” — that’s what’s often occurring when individuals “do their very own analysis,” argues Joshua Blanchard (Oakland), and “it isn’t particularly precious”
- “Why does so much of professional philosophy today seem so boring?” “Who’s an underrated philosopher that we should be reading more?” “What’s the most common topic you see crossing the desk of the [Journal of Controversial Ideas]?”? — Tyler Cowen (GMU) asks Peter Singer some questions
- “Irrationalist narratives” from psychology and behavioral economics have contributed to a disastrous loss in “epistemic empathy” — however these narratives are extremely questionable, argues Kevin Dorst (MIT), whose weblog has a brand new residence on Substack
- “Computer says no” — when AI’s “black bins” are utilized in ways in which have an effect on us, “we don’t know the explanation one thing’s occurred, we are able to’t argue again, we are able to’t problem, and so we enter the Kafkaesque realm of the absurd,” says Alexis Papazoglou
- “The people who find immoral jokes to be less funny because they are immoral are not in good positions to judge how funny immoral jokes are! You wouldn’t let someone averse to sweets judge a cake competition, would you?” — Connor Kianpour (Colorado) defends sturdy comedian immoralism
- A philosophy student became an investment banker who became a collector of rare philosophy books — Michael Walsh has donated his assortment, which features a first version of Hume’s Treatise and different gems, to the College of Toronto
- “They provide us with a relatively recent, further perspective beyond continental philosophy from which to understand and critique the dominant approach in Anglophone philosophy.” — American girls philosophers within the speculative custom within the first half of the twentieth Century
- “The most useful, freely accessible Classics tools online” — a listing of 100 open-access web sites and assets curated by the group at Antigone
- “Kant’s antinomies, properly digested, only require you to step back from the whole affair, to quit trying to find dogmatic solutions to metaphysical problems… But how do you step back, when everything seems to bring you to a similar impasse?” — and Justin Smith-Ruiu does imply all the pieces: flying, incapacity, air-con, almonds…
- “All these different technical hacks are really motivated by exploiting a philosophical principle of computation of meta code” — an interview with Scott Shapiro (Yale), whose new e book is on hacking and hackers: “It’s like to know God, you’ve acquired to know the individuals who made him”
- Do philosophers and economists tend to agree on how much less future benefits and harms should matter compared to present benefits and harms? — sure, “though on the premise of very completely different mental arguments”
- “I’ve always thought of science, and especially scientific modeling, as fundamentally value-laden enterprises. But I’m really starting to feel like philosophers of science have fallen behind the curve on this” — Eric Winsberg (South Florida) is interviewed at “What Is It Like To Be A Thinker?”
- “The point is not to reject new technology but to help students retain the upper hand in their relationship with it” — why some profs, together with thinker David Peña-Guzmán (SFSU) are instructing low-tech, screen-free programs
Dialogue welcome.
