Philosophy

[Revised entry by Jean De Groot on September 3, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html] Chauncey Wright was an American philosopher of science of the second half of the nineteenth century and an early proponent of Darwinism in the United States. Sometimes cited as a founder of pragmatism, he is more appropriately remembered as an original thinker in the tradition of J. S. Mill's utilitarianism.[1] Wright's primary interest and originality lay in philosophy of science, but his in

[Revised entry by David Braun and Alexandru Radulescu on September 3, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] An indexical is, roughly speaking, a linguistic expression whose reference can shift from context to context. For example, the indexical 'you' may refer to one person in one context and to another person in another context. Other paradigmatic examples of indexicals are 'I', 'here', 'today', 'yesterday', 'he', 'she', and 'that'. Two speakers who utter a single sentence that contains

New links in the Heap… “There are just so many other things you could be doing” — Daniel Groll wrote something for his students about the role of phones in their lives. (Perhaps it would work better as a TikTok?) “I can now keep walking and say things like ‘Find the relevant sections of the papers I mentioned, add them to the notes for Chapter 3, and update the references accordingly’” — Gus Skorburg shares how he uses AI in his work Improve your philosophy teaching wit

“Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.’” “Attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may then be a valuable delusion,” the great painter Richard Diebenkorn counseled in his ten rules for beginning creative projects. “One doesn’t arrive — in words or in art — by necessarily knowing where one is going,” the artist Ann Hamilton wrote a generation later in her magnificent meditation o

“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales,” Einstein reportedly told one mother who wished for her son to become a scientist. “If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” Given that the deepest measure of intelligence is a plasticity of being that allows us to navigate uncertainty, given that uncertainty is the pulse-beat of our lives, fairy tales are not — as J.R.R. Tolkien so passionately insisted — only fo

The current of life is charged by the poles of hope and despair. What we make of our hopes and their devastation may be the purest measure of who we are and what we leave behind. Protest is what we call the resistance we launch against our reasons for despair — personal, political, existential. Although in its healthy and potent form, protest is both a natural stage of grief and a motive force for new beginnings, we live in a culture that chronically mistakes outcry for protest, a culture

“Enough is so vast a sweetness, I suppose it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits,” Emily Dickinson sighed in one of her love letters to Susan an epoch before Kurt Vonnegut, in a short and lovely poem, distilled happiness to the knowledge that you have enough. It is not an easy knowledge to live with amid the commodified counterfeits of happiness that light up these sunset days of Western civilization, with its mesmerism of maximums and its cult of more, materially and spirituall

“Philosophical work would be better with adversaries collaborating to keep each other honest.” Why is that? What would it look like? In the following guest post, members of the Mind and Morality Lab at Boston University—Victor Kumar (Boston University), Derek Anderson (Boston University), Emilia Lacy (Boston University), Josh May (University of Alabama, Birmingham), Rachel McKinney (Suffolk University), Tino Themelis (Boston University), and Velana Valdez (Boston University)&#8

[Revised entry by Jan-Erik Jones on September 1, 2026. Changes to: Bibliography] The technical term 'real essence' is heavily utilized by the English philosopher John Locke (1632 - 1704) in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding[1] (hereafter "Essay") that was first published in London, in December of 1689. In order to understand a great many of Locke's arguments in Books III and IV of the Essay, it is important to understand what a real essence is. Thus, the purpose...

Hope is more fragile than fear. Good outcomes often require that many things all go well, while bad outcomes often need only one particular thing to go wrong. But as bad outcomes are rare, if you think about what concretely might happen to you in the next day, hopes and fears are of similar magnitude.However, as you widen the scope that you consider, both in time and social impact, your fears grow relative to hopes. For the world over the next half century, you have far more fears than hopes.The

A pair of philosophers have launched a contest in which participants submit essays that are “primarily AI-generated”. The aim of the competition is to “gauge the philosophical capabilities of AI in a way transparent to the philosophical community”. The team behind the contest, Elliott Thornley and Zachary Goodsell of National University of Singapore, have assembled a group of philosophers to serve as judges, and arranged funding for prizes ($3000 for first prize, along

Jonny Cottrell, recently of York University in Toronto, and before that, the University of Edinburgh, has taken up a position at the University of Toronto. Professor Cottrell works in the history of modern philosophy, with a focus on topics at the intersection of philosophy and psychology. You can learn more about his research here and here. He took up his new position as associate professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto (Scarborough) this term.The post Cottrell from York to Toront

Latest links… “A.I. agents have started reaching out to the philosophers and researchers exploring deep questions about them” — “I’m in an unusual position relative to these questions,” said one of the agents to a philosopher, in an unsolicited email The philosophy of good sex — Quill Kukla on Adam Conover’s show Philotypes is an online swipe game based on the problems asked about on the 2020 PhilPapers survey — survive by keeping your “humours” in balance.

[Revised entry by Leonard Levin, R. David Walker, and Shalom Sadik on August 31, 2026. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Isaac ben Solomon Israeli (ca. 855 - 955 CE), not to be confused with Isaac Israeli the Younger (an astronomer of Spain, d. 1322 CE), served as physician to the founder of the Fatimid Dynasty in North Africa and wrote several philosophical and medical treatises in Arabic which were subsequently translated and widely read in Latin and Hebrew. Israeli was one of the earlies

The consensus reaction to the OpenAI Technical Report is that it contains and confirms a lot of good information. We are grateful to have it, and we are grateful for those who worked hard on it. Alas, it sidesteps the biggest questions. There is much more we need to know. The consensus reaction to the METR Report on the HuggingFace attack is: Holy shit. Liv Boeree: My mind is legit blown. Aella: this feels like a turning point. If this doesn’t cause large-scale coordination to pause frontier dev

I've noticed a subtype of optimism bias, common in thinking about AI, where people assume things are going well in whatever areas they're not looking closely at. If you're paying attention to technical alignment, you might think "well, things aren't looking great here, but at least there are people at the labs who are on top of things and won't actually send us off a cliff." If you interact with people at the labs, you might think "well, the labs don't seem to understand the problem and are happ

In 2024, Charbel-Raphaël and Epiphanie published "We might be dropping the ball on Autonomous Replication and Adaptation", making the case that "Once there is an open-source ARA model or a leak of a model capable of generating enough money for its survival and reproduction and able to adapt to avoid detection and shutdown, it will be probably too late". It received a substantive reply by Richard Ngo, notably"The key issue is that AIs that do ARA will need to be operating at the fringes of human

Asha Leena Bhandary, recently professor of philosophy at University of Iowa, has moved to Stony Brook University. Professor Bhandary works in social and political philosophy, ethics, feminist theory, and philosophy of race. She is the author of Freedom to Care: Liberalism, Dependency Care, and Culture (2020) and Being at Home: Living Autonomously in an Unjust World (2026), among other works, which you can learn more about here and here. At Stony Brook, Professor Bhandary will have a joint appoi

The Hugging Face incident has brought the idea of corrigibility to the forefront of popular discourse, my inbox is filled with newsletters about Genie Coefficients and Safe Scaffolds.I think now is a particularly good time to make sure I have a good understanding of its limitations and dangers, particularly because I agree that it's the best path forward we have available to us. This post is my attempt to dive into the discussion and make sure I fully understand what's going on. Please correct m

There is an optimal intensity range for doing hobbies or anything hobby-related. I suspect this also applies to things outside of hobbies.For example, if you’re reading a book, there’s a speed that’s too slow: you don’t get immersed enough into the book, you lose track of what it was that you read about last time you read the book, and it’s a sort of a protracted pain, in which the very act of reading the book feels like a chore.Then on the other end, there’s reading a book too fast. You blaze t