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Daily Nous

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• The first prizes in a contest to read the carbonized, unopenable scrolls of an ancient library buried in 79AD by the eruption of Vesuvius, have been awarded -- the first word identified appears to mean "purple"
• "A large and important piece of German philosophy’s history remains obscure unless we can come to better appreciate Wolff’s philosophy and the ideas to which it gave rise" -- Michael Walschots (Johannes Gutenberg U.) on the significance of Christian Wolff
• "I completed my military service, moved to Jerusalem, started taking philosophy courses in the university… I wanted to move on… to turn my back on my military years. I soon realized that I couldn’t" -- "I don’t know if I forgive myself, nor whether I should," says Oded Na’aman (Hebrew U.)
• "One gets the impression that twins are too messed up even for the gays" -- Helena de Bres (Wellesley) on queerness, twinship, amatonormativity, and Rachel Weisz
• "The characterization of anti-realism is somewhat reductive, overlooking some of its more nuanced arguments about theory change and approximation to truth" -- that's Claude AI, critiquing a conversation between two ChatGPTs about scientific realism. An interesting experiment from Kelly Truelove.
• "Not only our readers, but also we philosophers ourselves, normally remain substantially unclear on what our skeletal mottoes really amount to until we actually try to apply them to concrete cases" -- on the importance of living one's philosophy to flesh it out, from Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside)
• Consciousness, the purpose of the universe, religion, and more -- Daniel Dennett, Phillip Goff, and others are interviewed on the BBC (with some debate beginning around the 31 minute mark)
• A proper philosophical history of identity politics will take us much further back than post-modernism -- try the Enlightenment, argues Jason Blakely (Pepperdine), by way of Charles Taylor
• Research has revealed that the same parts of the brain seem to show the same activity whether one is perceiving something or imagining it -- so how do we distinguish perception from imagination? Perhaps Hume had (part of) the right answer, says Nadine Dijkstra (UCL)
• "By substituting this notion of functional dependence for that of explanation, we can easily realize… that infinite or circular explanations can, in some cases, be complete" -- Alexandre Billon (Université Charles-de-Gaulle - Lille 3) on why it's not unsatisfactorily "why" all the way down
• "For those without college degrees, life expectancy reached its peak around 2010 and has been falling since" -- Anne Case and Angus Deaton (Princeton) explain why and suggest solutions, but sending more people to college is not among them
• "Why I don’t have pronouns in my bio" -- Neil Levy (Oxford) explains
• A modified LLM is being used as a teaching assistant at Harvard -- it's just for a computer science course. For now.
• "I want my loved ones to eat me when I die" -- Daniel Story (Cal Poly) is serious. He explains why, and relays his discussions about it with his family, friends, and fellow philosophers in a refreshingly weird piece of public philosophy
• Do we need to take warnings about the "epistemic apocalypse" seriously? -- Joshua Habgood-Coote (University of Leeds) on distortions in current discussions about deepfake videos
• Philosophy-themed shirts: modus ponens/tollens, inverted spectrum, abstract trolley, and more -- from Kelly Weirich (Pierce College)
• How crows use statistical reasoning -- "Some experts have even classified corvids as having the same intelligence as a 7-year-old child" (via MR)
• Philosophy is taught in the final year of high school, and is "the dominant subject in literary majors and a fairly important minor [among] scientific majors" -- Hady Ba (Cheikh Anta Diop University’s Teachers College) on philosophy in Senegal
• "If the academic humanities too often address only siloed experts, then pop philosophy too often addresses an audience of imagined idiots" -- Becca Rothfeld on public philosophy
• "I would love to be talked out of it" -- Scientific American covers a recent workshop on panpsychism
• New technology ethics podcast -- from John Danaher (Galway) and Sven Nyholm (LMU), the series is based on their book "This is Technology Ethics," which covers a wide range of fascinating philosophical questions
• "The desire to admire EA despite its flaws indulges a quixotic longing to admire an ineffective altruist" -- an enviously well-written essay on the power and problems of effective altruism by Mary Townsend (St. John's)
• "Contemporary scientists appear to be divided between those who think Neanderthal dignity calls for a recognition of their similarity to us, and those who think it calls for a recognition of their difference" -- Nikhil Krishnan (Cambridge) on the science, ethics, and meaning of disputes over how we think of Neanderthals
• Last month, NDPR published an especially critical and widely circulated review by Louise Antony (UMass) of a new book in moral philosophy
• — The book’s authors, Victor Kumar (Boston) and Richmond Campbell (Dalhousie) have now published a response
• "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 couple disagrees over the wisdom of Stoicism (NYT)
• The philosophy and science of consciousness -- a discussion across multiple 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" -- rather, says William Paris (Toronto), they aim at making problems intelligible