Philosophy

“One of humanity’s oldest disciplines and one of its newest inventions feel distinctly made for each other.” That’s a line from an article published in the New York Times today about the demand for philosophers working on artificial intelligence. It continues: A.I. presents a fresh way for philosophers to ask ancient questions, and its own set of new ones that they are uniquely trained to engage with: of truth and belief and knowledge (epistemologists); of reasoning (logicians

William S. Hayes interviewed by John Wisniewski. Photo by Jack Grisham 3:AM: Was it difficult remembering your life, to write Burden of Concrete? William S. Hayes: It was difficult to begin — for many reasons. But once I started it began to flow. I’m not sure how, but I didn’t destroy my recollection of the past. Piecing it together in a chronological order that was digestible and not boring to read was difficult, though. How many times can a person hear about one being released, yo

When AI first began colonizing language — which is still our best instrument for bridging the abyss between us, a container for thought and feeling that shapes the contents — I asked chatGPT to compose a poem about a solar eclipse in the style of Walt Whitman. It returned a ledger of cliches in rhymed couplets. Getting the form wrong — Whitman did not rhyme — seemed like an easy correction by a line of code. Getting poetry itself wrong was the interesting question, the qu

You wouldn’t have bet on it, the frail famous poet teaching at Harvard as a visiting professor and the athletic secretary of the campus residence half her age. But every great love exists against probability, belongs to that region of the universe where the wildest bet may be the winning bet. When she met Alice Methfessel, Elizabeth Bishop had served as Poet Laureate of the United States, had won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, had spent the better part of her youth in soli

[Revised entry by Bret W. Davis on July 3, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] The Kyoto School (Kyōto-gakuha) is a group of 20th century Japanese philosophers who drew on the intellectual and spiritual traditions of East Asia, those of Mahāyāna Buddhism in particular, as well as on the methods and content of Western philosophy. After an introductory section, this entry will focus on four...

“We must live it, now, a day at a time and be very careful not to hurt each other.” Along the spectrum of losses, from the door keys to the love of one’s life, none is more unimaginable, more incomprehensible in its unnatural violation of being and time, than a parent’s loss of a child. Ernest Hemingway (July 21, 1899–July 2, 1961) was in his twenties and living in France when he befriend Gerald and Sara Murphy. The couple eventually returned to America when one o

[Revised entry by Hannes Leitgeb and André Carus on July 2, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, aufbau.html, carnap-quine.html, inductive-logic.html, methodology.html, reconstruct-sci-theories.html, semantics.html, syntax.html, tolerance-metaphysics.html] Rudolf Carnap (1891 - 1970) was one of the best-known philosophers of the twentieth century. Notorious as one of the founders, and perhaps the leading philosophical representative, of the movement known as logical positivism or logical

[Revised entry by Robert van Rooij and Michael Franke on July 2, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Linguistic pragmatics studies the context-dependent use and interpretation of expressions. Perhaps the most important notion in pragmatics is Grice's (1967) conversational implicature. It is based on the insight that by means of general principles of rational cooperative behavior we can communicate more with the use of a sentence than the conventional semantic meaning associated with it.

[New Entry by Megan Delehanty and Anya Plutynski on July 2, 2026.] In 1895, Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud published Studien Uber Hysterie (Studies on Hysteria), a series of case studies describing a new method of treatment for patients suffering from various psychological and somatic symptoms (Breuer and Freud 1895). One of the subjects, Breuer's patient "Anna O." (Bertha Pappenheim), characterized this method as the "talking cure." Today, "psychotherapy" is the preferred term for a wide array

“Solitude is not chosen, any more than destiny is chosen. Solitude comes to us if we have within us the magic stone that attracts destiny.” “No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” the young Nietzsche wrote as he contemplated what it takes to find oneself. Somehow, this man of stark contradiction, cycling between nihilistic despondency and electric buoyancy along the rim of madness, has managed to inspire some of humanity’s mo

By Steve Finbow. The low rumble might have been a gathering storm, or the rhythmic drag of luggage over concrete – perhaps the suitcase of an Aeroflot stewardess, flushed and breathless from a post-flight fuck in the terminal toilets at Heathrow. Regardless, the sound breached his dreams. He lay naked and feverish in the dark, tracing the laparotomy scar that meandered from his sternum to his pubis like a string of alien rubies, contemplating the insectoid neuroses gestating within his sutures.

New links… Despite skepticism about philosophy as a whole, specific philosophical research programs make progress. But probably not yours. — Still, “you might be contributing to, even if not helping to constitute, philosophical progress,” argues Lewis Ross. Feel better? “For the very first time, biologists packed nonliving components into a cell-like membrane, piece by piece, and witnessed the bag of molecules start to behave like life” — a new development in synt

[New Entry by Shane Ryan and Sharon Ryan on July 2, 2026.] What is wisdom? Despite receiving less attention than other epistemic goods in contemporary analytic epistemology, wisdom is affirmed by philosophers across different traditions and cultures as the highest epistemic good. Such philosophers include the Christian thinkers Boethius and Anselm, the Muslim thinkers Avicenna and Averroes, and the Jewish philosopher Maimonides (O'Grady 2019: 416). This entry provides a general overview of the

[Revised entry by Tristram McPherson on July 2, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] We sometimes think about the ethical significance of merely possible circumstances. People sometimes wonder, for example, if it would have been wrong to break certain promises that they in fact kept. Examples like this do not exhaust the significance of possibility - or modality more generally - in our ethical thinking. Rather, we also seem to be committed to a certain modal structure in our ethical comm

[Revised entry by Corey Dyck and Brigitte Sassen on July 1, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Kant undoubtedly casts a long shadow in the history of eighteenth century German philosophy. Not only did he initiate a revolution in philosophy, but in the course of doing so he thoroughly exposed the metaphysical systems of his predecessors as rationalistic castles in the air. This latter, negative part of his project was in fact so successful that the pre-Kantian period of German philosoph

[Revised entry by Bruce Reichenbach on July 1, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, argument-strong.html, complexity.html, notes.html] The cosmological argument is less a specific argument than an argument type. It uses a general pattern of argumentation (logos) that makes an inference from particular, alleged facts about the universe (cosmos) to the existence of a unique being, generally identified with or referred to as God or Allah. Among these initial facts are that beings or events

This essay is adapted from Traversal. She is looking at the staff lines of a strange symphony in blue, her cautious disbelief punctured by a burst of delirious wonderment. Brushes and tubes of paint are scattered about her — paint she has spent years mixing into the perfect shades of blue to color a world’s worth of oceanic depths inside the contours of her enormous maps in the making. But now she is not looking at the blues. She is not looking at the maps. She is looking at the staff line

“Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.” “When you surrender, the problem ceases to exist,” Henry Miller wrote in his stunning letter to Anaïs Nin (February 21, 1903–January 14, 1977). “Try to solve it, or conquer it, and you only set up more resistance.” But we, the controlling species, the conquering species, have a hard time wit

“He was Gollum — as dark as darkness, except for two big round pale eyes.” J.R.R. Tolkien (January 3, 1892–September 2, 1973) firmly believed that there is no such thing as writing “for children” and that creative fantasy serves to set the ageless human imagination free. Nowhere was Tolkien’s ethos more perfectly enacted than in his 1937 fantasy novel The Hobbit (public library), a book so beloved that Tolkien’s own little-known illustrations for

The US Department of Education has issued a new rule that makes the availability of Federal financial aid for students conditional on whether the programs the students are enrolled in meet an “earnings premium” criteria. According to a press release from the Department of Education, the “Student Tuition and Transparency System (STATS) and Earnings Accountability rule” states that: undergraduate programs will be required to demonstrate that their graduates earn more than t