The tradition of trying to establish God’s existence using evidence and proof is a long one, with a golden age during the 17th and 18th centuries – the early modern period. Attempts to prove God’s existence continue today. But there are three big differences between now and then.
We all categorize ourselves. You might think of yourself as a student, or as a painter, or as being good with numbers, or as being civic-minded. These labels we use to categorize ourselves have a huge effect on how we make our decisions–when faced with the choice of doing X vs. doing Y. What that have to do with freedom? Philosopher Mariam Thalos holds that freedom just is the ability to affect, shape, or even create these sorts of labels, before then applying them to yourself. (audio)
Philosopher Carrie Jenkins explains how love-crafting is conducive to living a meaningful life, which might just be the key to a deep kind of happiness.
MIG Ethics Committee releases Ethical Framework for AI developers. “Ethics should be a central consideration for companies and individuals developing AI, in order to create positive meaningful change for society.”
Well, some of us have been playing this game since ancient times. But as a board game? That’s new. From the rule book: “Object of the Game: At the end of each game, the player with the most virtue points wins. The game can be ended in multiple ways, but won in only one: through virtue.”
Charges of hypocrisy are rampant these days. Often left out of this discussion is the difficulty of being completely authentic in a world as complicated as ours. Unless one is in a remarkably privileged place, it is hard to avoid making concessions inconsistent with one’s principles. (Note: The suggested five-article reading list in this essay includes one by former UF Philosophy grad, Kyle Fritz.)
With the help of a company called Degree Analytics, a few colleges are beginning to use location data collected from students’ cellphones and laptops as they move around campus. Many colleges already track students’ activities and collect data from learning-management systems to determine students’ engagement with their coursework. These practices raise ever greater privacy concerns.
Should philosophy be the attempt to articulate truth? If you’re a pragmatist, the answer is No. William James wrote of truth as a subset of expediency, and of truth’s ‘cash value’. Richard Rorty saw truth—philosophical, moral, even scientific—in terms of contingent ‘vocabularies’. At a time when The Washington Post reports that the leader of the free world has made over 3,000 false claims since becoming US President, pragmatic scepticism about truth could be a dangerous luxury. (audio)
The University of California, Los Angeles, has received a $25 million gift for the humanities — of which $20 million will support the philosophy department. The remaining $5 million will support graduate students in the humanities.
The question of how to deal with the reality of death is one as old as, well, death itself.
“You complain that you have met with an ungrateful person. If this is your first experience of that sort, you should offer thanks either to your good luck or to your caution!”
The European Commission (EC), which proposes and administers European Union (EU) law and policy, has created a new High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence, the aim of which is to advise on the crafting and implementation of the EU’s strategy on artificial intelligence.
Read more "Philosophers Appointed to EU Commission on Artificial Intelligence"
Most of us feel the itch of the primitive from time to time. Whether it’s an urge to run without shoes, try a paleo diet, or just ditch the smartphone and hang out in the bush for a while, the primitivist ideal exerts a seductive pull in tech-obsessed contemporary western society. But can ‘rewilding’ really deliver a more natural, authentic self? Or is the ideal based on a highly questionable set of philosophical assumptions? (audio)
Philosophers aren’t particularly renowned for having successful love lives, but some have become hopeless romantics—and others misanthropes. Here we have ten thinkers who have written on or been heavily influenced by love in both their work and their personal lives.
While investor Bill Miller’s recent $75 million university endowment for philosophy astonished Americans, Ireland has gone one step further: introducing the subject to high school students.
A growing body of controlled and randomized research suggests that philosophical instruction in primary and secondary education positively impacts students’ subsequent cognitive development, sometimes for years after that instruction ceases.
Was it ethical for Dropbox to share customer data for a study?
Philosopher Mary Wollstencraft’s reflections on friendship and companionship.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a new entry on the ethics of cultural heritage. Do members of cultural groups have special claims to own or control the products of the cultures to which they belong? Is there something morally wrong with employing artistic styles that are distinctive of a culture to which you do not belong? What is the relationship between cultural heritage and group identity? Is there a coherent and morally acceptable sense of cultural group membership in the first place? Is there a universal human heritage to which everyone has a claim?
Moral questions about what data should be collected and how it should be used are only the beginning. They raise broader questions about who gets to make those decisions in the first place.
Philosopher Chris Lebron has won the presigious Hiett Prize for work which shows “extraordinary promise of having a significant impact on contemporary culture.” Lebron is author of the books The Color of Our Shame and The Making of Black Lives Matter. The Hiett Prize includes a $50,000 award.
At San Quentin State Prison, seven philosophy undergraduates from UC Santa Cruz faced off against a group of prison inmates.
An interview with philosopher Elyse Purcell. Her research focuses on how various forms of disability present challenges for identity, moral personhood, virtue and social justice.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a new entry on the concept of an artifact. The contemporary world is pervasively artifactual. Even our most mundane activities depend on engagement with artifacts. The article concerns questions of definition, the metaphysics of artifacts, and attendant epistemological issues.
To be an ethical company, organizations must recognize risks in the actions of their employees and the behaviors of the company itself.
As more jobs become automated, fewer people will have them. For some, the ideal future is a ‘post-work’ world, where everybody has access to a universal basic income. But there might be a better way. (audio)
AI desperately needs a code of ethics — which will require answering some very tough ethical questions.
The passing of time is an illusion. Or so claims physics since Einstein. Yet we tend to think we do experience time passing. There has been no explanation for how the future might already be fixed in the way the present or past might be, or how we are in some sense already dead while we feel alive. Do we need a new account of space-time that aligns physics with our experience? Physicist Huw Price and philosopher Alison Fernandes discuss. (video)
Did you hear the one about the hilarious philosopher? Probably not; philosophers tend not to be funny. Nietzsche is a notable exception, and Plato had his moments. On the whole, though, philosophy is a serious business. But why? And what happens when we get philosophical about humour? We explore ethics of laughter, healthy contempt, and taking a light view of dark times. (audio)
Read more "To Laugh, Perchance to Gaff. Aye, There’s the Rib."
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a new entry on the concept of fundamentality as used in metaphysics. There, the notion of fundamentality is pressed into service for two key tasks. The first is to capture the idea that there is a foundation of being, which consists of independent entities. The second is to capture the idea that the fundamental entities constitute a complete basis that all else depends on.
The goal of life, for Pascal, is not happiness, peace, or fulfillment, but aliveness.
Many people consume information from unreliable (sometimes willfully misleading) sources. This is more pernicious than most of us realise, leaving long lasting traces on our beliefs and our behavior even when we consume it knowing it is fake or when some information it contains is corrected. These effects are difficult to correct. We therefore ought to avoid fake or dubious news and work to eliminate it.
The notion of “the pursuit of happiness” has been with us long enough to have become normalized — not merely an item of the American Constitution, but a concept permeating the world’s popular culture in an infinite array of guises. And yet, as a political aim, it is highly unusual.