Daily Nous

Recent additions to the Heap of Links… The most bizarre plagiarism-related story ever — featuring: a death, an investigator, a dissertation, a mysterious red book, and more New data on earnings by major and university — though not all universities “AI poses two different existential threats to [our] valuing practices” — Jordan MacKenzie offers an account of why negative judgments about AI taking over our creative and caring activities are justified “Submission” is a hu

“AI systems… will transform the discipline: they will make philosophy more capital-intensive. “ * * * The following is a guest post by David Strohmaier, a philosopher and computer scientist in the Natural Language and Information Processing group at the University of Cambridge. In it, he explains why he thinks it’s reasonable to believe that AI systems will eventually have the capacities to “drive” philosophy, and how this will change the economi

In what is being called “the most important event in the history of mathematics” (by an AI), OpenAI, using an advanced model not yet available to the public, yesterday released 722 mathematics manuscripts containing 337 results it has generated on open mathematics problems. Italian Calculators (images via MoMA) “OpenAI deluged mathematicians with hundreds of new findings that span a wide swath of topics including algebra, number theory, theoretical computer science,

Mona Simion, professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford, has been elected to the Governing Board of the International Science Council (ISC). The International Science Council (ISC) is a non-governmental organization whose members are major disciplinary academic organizations (such as the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics and the International Union of Geological Sciences) and major national academic organizations (such as National Academy of Sciences and the Bri

If you could give beginning philosophy graduate students just one piece of advice, what would it be? I know that some readers will want to jump in to say “don’t”—either as a wisecrack or as sincere guidance. But as humor it’s clichéd, and as advice it’s not helpful. All graduate students nowadays have heard some version of the warnings most of us know to give undergraduates who tell us they want to go to grad school in philosophy, and they&#8217

With which universities have APA Presidents been affiliated? Joshua Paschal, a recent philosophy PhD out of Indiana University Bloomington, took up that question, gathered the data, and discusses it in the guest post, below. It’s a look at one kind of the institutional history of philosophy in the United States, one that may inform or complement our understanding of the sociology of the profession. James Edwin Creighton and Frank Thilly A History of U.S. Philosophy Via

David Danks, professor of philosophy, artificial intelligence, and data science at the University of Virginia, has been awarded a $1 million three-year senior fellowship for a project on “human-AI value coevolution.” The fellowship is from Schmidt Sciences, a science-supporting philanthropic organization founded by Eric Schmidt (former Google CEO) and his wife, Wendy. The Senior Fellowships are part of the Schmidt Sciences “AI2050” initiative, which funds r

Ioanna Kuçuradi, a leading Turkish philosopher, has died. Dr. Kuçuradi was known for her work in the fields of human rights, human health, and ethics. She is the author of Human Beings and Their Values (İnsan ve Değerleri), Ethics, (Etik) Looking at Art Through Philosophy (Sanata Felsefeyle Bakmak), and Human Rights: Concepts and Problems, among other works. Kuçuradi held several significant professional and public roles. Up until her death at age 89, she was president of the Turk

The Australian Research Council last month announced the winners of its latest round of Future Fellowships. . The fellowship awards are roughly AU $1 million, and are intended to support 4-year projects. The philosophy faculty named in this recent round of fellowships include: Guillermo Badia (The University of Queensland)A project to develop new many-valued logics to help machines reason about data that is scored with numbers, probabilities, security access levels, etc. Thi

Recent additions to the Heap of Links… How should we react to scary predictions about AI? “First: by asking questions” — “If you believe predictions uncritically, it amounts to obeying in advance,” says Carissa Véliz “I feel unbelievably lucky that I was able to make philosophy my profession” — Karen Ng reflects on her path into philosophy, at #first-genphilosophers The ordinary concept of knowledge “doesn’t work at all the way philosophers said it does” — a r

Felipe De Brigard, professor of philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience at Duke University, principal investigator at the Imagination and Modal Cognition Lab, and core faculty of the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences and Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, has been selected as a 2026 Fellow by the MacArthur Foundation. . MacArthur Fellowships, commonly referred to as “genius grants,” come with an $800,000, no-strings-attached award. In the prize announcement, the Fo

To what extent is the “the story about the analytic turn” in philosophy a story about politics? There’s been an increased discussion in recent years of externalist explanations of philosophy, and one such explanation that has gotten a fair amount of attention lately is the idea that McCarthyist anti-communism in the United States in the middle of the 20th Century played a significant role in analytic philosophy’s emerging dominance in the discipline at the time.

A few years back, I posted about the “Daily Logic” and “Daily Semantics” project of Josh Dever, professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. The projects offer up mini-lessons in logic or semantics that anyone can subscribe to. At the time, Professor Dever wrote, “The idea of each is that each day you get sent a little, roughly 200 word bite in the relevant area, so that you can gradually and painlessly(-ish) build up real expertise.&

“The key question is not whether AI is used, but how it is used.” That’s from Springer Nature’s policy on using AI when peer reviewing for its journals. Wiley tells its journal referees: “Use AI responsibly: Apply best practices and properly disclose AI use in manuscripts and peer review.” That’s right: two of the largest academic publishers allow referees to use AI when reviewing submissions to their journals. Springer has created a &#8220

This is the report on new and revised entries at online philosophy resources, new reviews of philosophy books, new podcast episodes, recently published open access philosophy books, and more. . (If we missed something, let us know.) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy New: Animal Thought by Laura Danón. Shaaban Robert’s Virtue Ethics by Dismas Masolo. Aesthetics and Race by Monique Roelofs. Revised: Fideism by Richard Amesbury. Moral Phenomenology by John

Sebastian Thrun, a computer scientist, entrepreneur, and adjunct professor at Stanford University (whose projects have included Waymo, Google X, Google Street View, and more) has launched a study to evaluate “the capabilities and limitations of AI systems for writing English-language philosophy.” Called PhilosophyBench, the study is focused on “whether AI can generate novel philosophical ideas and develop them clearly with depth and sophistication, not merely summarize existing views or a

New links… A political theorist and a comedian discuss the American presidency — “The Oath and the Office” is the podcast of Corey Brettschneider & John Fugelsang An “evidence revolution” has taken place in medicine and other fields over the past 50 years — but, as Benjamin Santos Genta asks, there’s still the question: “what counts as good scientific evidence?” “Behind the scenes at Ethics” — editor Douglas Portmore shares how the journa

TeachPhilosophy101, a free and helpful collection of resources and ideas for teaching philosophy, has recently been updated. “Struttúra” by Florence Henri Its materials cover course planning, how to use class time, student assessment, challenges, and much more. TeachPhilosophy101 was created by John Immerwahr (Villanova) and previously revamped by Erin Tarver (Emory). Recently David Sackris (Arapahoe Community College) took over as editor of the site, making further ch

The Library of Congress announced this week that it is awarding the 2026 John W. Kluge Prize for the Achievement in the Study of Humanity to Martha Nussbaum (University of Chicago). The $500,000 prize “recognizes individuals whose outstanding scholarship in the humanities and social sciences has shaped public affairs and civil society.” It is awarded every other year. The winner delivers a lecture and “may remain in residence at the Library of Congress for a short time thereafter, and

This is the report on new and revised entries at online philosophy resources, new reviews of philosophy books, new podcast episodes, recently published open access philosophy books, and more. This edition covers last week and the week before. (If we missed something, let us know.) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy New: Moral Learning by Tamar Kushnir and Shaun Nichols. Afḍal al-Dīn al-Khūnajī by Behnam Zolghadr. Ernst Mach by Pietro Gori and Luca Guzzardi. Rev