“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)—explain adversarial collaboration and offer answers to those questions.   Adversarial Collaboration in Philosophy by Victor Kumar, Derek Anderson, Emilia Lacy, Josh May, Rachel McKinney, Tino Themelis, and Velana Valdez Scientists, being only human, often collect and analyze data in ways that unintentionally skew the results in their favor. Thankfully, this occupational disease has a known cure. In adversarial collaboration, researchers with conflicting hypotheses lay down their arms, joining forces to work out a study design and statistical criteria—not eliminating confirmation biases, just neutralizing them in the aggregate. Then they run the study and accept the results, come what may. As philosophers, we applaud this development. It’s about time, really. We’ve been practicing adversarial collaboration ourselves since circa 387 BC, haven’t we? Not exactly. Adversarial collaboration isn’t just the Socratic method. It’s a commitment to abide by prespecified evidence. And how could we agree in advance about what would settle philosophical disputes? We don’t run experiments, nor do we have any data to crunch. (Mostly.) You can’t precommit to a thought experiment: by the time you pose one, the results are already in. The idea seems like a non-starter, but in fact, adversarial collaboration can be adapted for philosophy. The first step is to isolate its true functions in science. The Method The late Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman argued that scientific disagreement was too combative. Scientists rarely change their minds. So in the late 1990s, he thought: if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. (And he did. Many times.) Kahneman’s final adversarial collaboration was on income and happiness. Previously, he’d found that happiness rises with income but only until about $75,000. Another researcher, Matthew Killingsworth, found no plateau at all. Instead of trading criticisms, they decided to analyze the data together. What they found is that the plateau is real but only for the least..

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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 with other prizes). Here’s the announcement they sent along: AI is now exceptionally capable in mathematics and coding, but how good is it at philosophy? We are organising the first AI Philosophy Competition to find out. Entrants may submit up to three original essays on any philosophical topic. Essays must be primarily AI-generated, though some human guidance is allowed. Entrants must also submit a methodology report explaining how each essay was produced. The essays will be judged by a committee of philosophers including David Chalmers, John Hawthorne, Matthew Mandelkern, Rachel Sterken, Herman Cappelen, Branden Fitelson, Kenny Easwaran, Daniel Greco, Cian Dorr, Jake Nebel, and Christian Tarsney, with more to be announced. The prizes are $3,000 for first place, $2,000 for second, and $1,000 for third. There is also a prize pool of $5,000 for creative methodologies, to be distributed as the judge committee sees fit. The submission deadline is 31 October 2026. Results will be announced at the end of January. The competition is organised by Zachary Goodsell and Elliott Thornley, and is funded by Forethought Research. Full details are available on the competition website. I understand that some readers may take my sharing of this announcement as some kind of signal that I am in favor of AI-written philosophy. At this point, I am not. While I think some uses of AI at the research stage could be acceptable and perhaps, eventually, advisable, for reasons I will explain some other time, I think there is something quite wrong-headed about primarily AI-authored philosophy. Nonetheless, I do think it is valuable to know what this technology is capable of, and so I’m sharing news of this competition. I do so even though there’s a risk that events such as this accelerate the arrival of a state of affairs I currently do..

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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.

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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. Created by Nat Hansen. How to save the sciences in the United States — Zeynep Pamuk, with responses from from Heather Douglas, James Owen Weatherall, and others It’s incoherent, opposes the truth, undermines standards, stifles academic freedom… — Lisa Siraganian offers “Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity” New solution to the trolley problem “It may be that Dolly can do more to explain the philosophers than the other way around” — Mary Townsend on how Dolly Parton “confounds and yet fulfills Aristotle’s ideal in more ways than one” Mini-Heap posts usually appear when several new items accumulate in the Heap of Links, a collection of items from around the web that may be of interest to philosophers. The Heap of Links consists partly of suggestions from readers; if you find something online that you think would be of interest to the philosophical community, please send it in for consideration for the Heap. Thank you.Previous edition.

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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 appointment at the university’s School of Medicine (as Professor and Vice Chair of Care Ethics Research in the Department of Family, Population and Preventive Medicine and the Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care and Bioethics) and the Department of Philosophy (as Professor). She officially takes up her position at Stony Brook tomorrow.

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Here’s the report on new and revised entries at online philosophy resources, new reviews of philosophy books, and new podcast episodes. It’s the last of our summer monthly updates. The updates return to their normal weekly schedule in September. (If we’ve missed anything, please let us know.) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy New: Ratnakīrti by Patrick McAllister. Animal Normativity by Simon Fitzpatrick. Capitalism by Chiara Cordelli. Judah Halevi by Ehud Krinis. Intuitionism in Ethics by Matthew S. Bedke. Revised: Theories of Biological Development by Melinda Bonnie Fagan and Jane Maienschein. Process Theism by Donald Viney. Philippa Foot by John Hacker-Wright. The Concept of the Aesthetic by James Shelley. Margarete Susman by Willi Goetschel. Essential vs. Accidental Properties by Philip Atkins, Fabrice Correia, and Teresa Robertson Ishii. Samuel Freiherr von Pufendorf by Michael Seidler. José Ortega y Gasset by Oliver Holmes. Philosophy of International Law by John Tasioulas and Guglielmo Verdirame. Plural Quantification by Øystein Linnebo. Respect by Robin S. Dillon. Sense Data by Gary Hatfield. Alexander of Aphrodisias by Dorothea Frede and Marije Martijn. Republicanism by Frank Lovett. Epistemic Contextualism by Patrick Rysiew. George Berkeley by Lisa Downing and David Hilbert. John Norris by June Yang. Aristotle’s Ethics by Richard Kraut. Jane Addams by Maurice Hamington. Anaxagoras by John Sisko and Patricia Curd. Michel de Montaigne by Marc Foglia and Emiliano Ferrari. Scientific Method by Brian Hepburn and Hanne Andersen. Wesley Salmon by Maria Carla Galavotti. Gottlob Frege by Edward N. Zalta. Peter Abelard by Peter King and Andrew Arlig. Karl Popper by Stephen Thornton. Moral Realism by Geoff Sayre-McCord. Logic of Belief Revision by Sven Ove Hansson. Political Realism in International Relations by W. Julian Korab-Karpowicz. Death by Steven Luper. The Disjunctive Theory of Perception by Matthew Soteriou. Recognition by Mattias Iser. Liar Paradox by Jc Beall, Michael Glanzberg, Ellie Ripley, and Lorenzo Rossi. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Argument and the Bell Inequalities by László E. Szabó. Albert Borgmann by Abigail Bergeron. 1000-Word Philosophy ∅ BJPS Short Reads ∅ Recently Published Open Access Philosophy Books ∅ Philosophy Podcasts and Other Media Philosophy Podcast Hub (via Jason Chen) Plato’s Thought Experiment on The Ship of State, by Michael Vasquez (Ted-Ed, UNC’s Parr Center). Book Reviews* The Book of Coffee:..

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The articles that made it into the latest edition of Philosophers Annual have been announced. The list aims to “select the ten best articles published in philosophy each year—an attempt as simple to state as it is admittedly impossible to fulfill.” This volume—the 45th—covers the literature from 2024. The selections are: Evan Behrle (Harvard), “Desert and Economic Interdependence” from the Journal of Philosophy. Outside of philosophy, the idea that workers deserve to be paid according to their productive contributions is very popular. But political philosophers have given it relatively little attention. In this paper, I argue against the attempt to use this idea about desert and contribution to vindicate significant income inequality. I claim that reward according to contribution fails on its own terms when the following condition holds: the size of each worker’s contribution depends on what other workers only together do. When workers only together make another more productive, that is not reflected in the sum of their own contributions. Thus reward according to contribution recognizes individual accomplishments without recognizing their dependence on collectives, dependence that is, in complex economies, ubiquitous. Sam Berstler (MIT), “The Structure of Open Secrets” from the Philosophical Review. In conversation, we often do not acknowledge what we jointly know to be true. This article identifies a distinctive kind of non-acknowledgment norm, open secrecy norms, and analyzes how such norms constrain our speech. First, the author argues that open secrecy norms are structurally different from other everyday non-acknowledgment norms. Open secrecy norms iterate: when  is an open secret, then there’s a norm not to acknowledge that ⁠, and this norm is itself an open secret. Then, the author argues that the non-acknowledgment at issue in open secrecy norms motivates a more complex understanding of discourse structure. When interlocutors are conforming to open secrecy norms, they rely on at least two disjoint common grounds, one of which has a privileged status. To understand why and how it is privileged, the author develops Erving Goffman’s notion of defining a social interaction. Finally, the author shows how strategic speakers can exploit the structure of open secrecy norms in order to both communicate about the open secret and shield themselves from retaliation for what they communicate. Kyle Blumberg (Melbourne) and Ben Holguín (Johns Hopkins), “Fictional..

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“A small programme with a large international reach has bucked the trend of closures across the arts and humanities.” Over the summer, administration of the University of Dundee announced a plan to cut costs by, among other things, no longer offering students the option of majoring in philosophy. A campaign was launched to save the philosophy program there, and a petition in support of it garnered close to 6000 signatories. As a result of the petition, statements from academic organizations, and the efforts of faculty and students, philosophy at Dundee will continue, as the Philosophy Team at Dundee explains in the following guest post. Thanks to Oisin Keohane for keeping us informed. A Statement from the Philosophy Team at the University of Dundee Philosophy at Dundee will continue. Three joint honours degrees—Art and Philosophy, English and Philosophy, and Philosophy and Psychology—will carry on recruiting, and our plans to develop proposals for new undergraduate and postgraduate qualifications in Philosophy and AI have been approved, with support on record from Luciano Floridi and Shannon Vallor. Neither of those things were on the table in June when the proposal to suspend all named philosophy degrees was first announced. The ground shifted because of you. Nearly 6,000 people have signed our petition, including academics at 450 universities in 51 countries, from Harvard to Tokyo, Sydney to Stellenbosch. A small programme with a large international reach has bucked the trend of closures across the arts and humanities. The picture is not all good. The University still intends to suspend single honours Philosophy and multiple joint honours degrees, including Philosophy and Politics, Philosophy and Film, and History and Philosophy, without providing evidence of any clear financial rationale or assessment of the risks. Moreover, Philosophy staff remain at risk of redundancy, and the University is still seeking 154 cuts (in addition to the hundreds they made last year). We want to thank the people who made the difference. As well as Floridi and Vallor, Jack Reynolds and Katrina Mitcheson wrote personally to the University’s management. The British Philosophical Association, the Scots Philosophical Association, the American Philosophical Association, the Australasian Association of Philosophy, the International Federation of Philosophical Societies, the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy, The British Society..

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Talia Mae Bettcher, previously professor of philosophy at California State University, Los Angeles, has accepted a position at the University of Waterloo. Professor Bettcher is well-known for her work in trans philosophy and feminist philosophy. She is the author of Beyond Personhood: An Essay in Trans Philosophy (2024), among other works, which you can learn about here and here. At Waterloo, Bettcher will be the Eddie Goldenberg Research Chair in Gender-Based Violence Prevention and Trans Community Resilience in the Department of Philosophy in the university’s new School of Social, Political and Historical Research. (According to an announcement from the university, “the Eddie Goldenberg Research Chairs of Canada program [provides] up to $1 billion over 12 years to help Canadian post-secondary institutions recruit exceptional international researchers.) 

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Academia is in turmoil regarding partially or wholly AI-written research. AI-written work is being submitted to journals, but it isn’t clear how much. Publisher, journal, university, and department policies are emerging and fluctuating. Technology develops, rendering recently enacted policies ambiguous, vague, or subject to unintended loopholes. With everything in flux, it’s impossible for norms to develop. There is no general sense of whether and what kind and what degree of AI use by authors is acceptable. Different policies across different institutions means that what may be problematic AI use in one place is acceptable AI use in another, and vice versa. Into this chaos steps forward the vigilantes. The vigilantes have always been there, but now they are newly armed and emboldened. In the everchanging and never ending race between the technology of deployment and the technology of detection, the latter seems to have a temporary lead in the form of Pangram. You can feed a text into Pangram and it will tell you its analysis of whether it is AI generated, and if so, what percentage of it is AI generated. Pangram claims to have a remarkably high detection and low false-positive rates, and cites studies by third parties to support these claims. Yet I have seen plenty of posts by friends and colleagues across social media showing false positives with some of their own work. So user beware. That said, even if Pangram’s claims about its accuracy are correct, it won’t always be helpful to simply know that a text is “AI generated.” This is because there are two further problems. The first problem is ambiguity about what “N% AI generated” means. If someone asks Claude to write them a novel article about a philosophical problem, not even giving it a thesis to work with but asking it to come up with one itself, and that’s the extent of the human’s contribution, the resultant paper will get a “100% AI generated” evaluation. And if someone spends a year researching, writing, workshopping, and revising a paper, and then asks an AI to improve the writing style throughout the paper, the resultant paper will get a “100% AI generated” evaluation, too. Despite their same scores, though, these seem like cases that it might..

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