On April 30, a man shot and killed two students in a classroom at my university, UNC Charlotte.  He injured four others. On May 1, the day after the mass shooting at UNC Charlotte, a man was shot and killed in an apartment complex near the university.  On April 30, the day of the mass…

by Eric Schwitzgebel In a series of fascinating recent articles, philosopher Susan Schneider argues that (1.) Most of the intelligent beings in the universe might be Artificial Intelligences rather than biological life forms. (2.) These AIs might entirely lack conscious experiences. Schneider’s argument for (1) is simple and plausible: Once a species develops sufficient intelligence…

by Eric Schwitzgebel As Carolyn Dicey Jennings and I have documented, academic philosophy in the United States is highly gender skewed, with gender ratios more characteristic of engineering and the physical sciences than of the humanities and social sciences. However, unlike engineering and the physical sciences, philosophy appears to have stalled out in its progress…

by Eric Schwitzgebel … and celebrating the death of children? “Does it matter if the story of the escape from Egypt is historically true?” Rabbi Suzanne Singer asked us, her congregants, on Saturday, at the Passover Seder dinner at Temple Beth El in Riverside. We’re a liberal Reform Judaism congregation. Everyone except me seemed to…

by Gordon Hull News this week of a planned asthma inhaler that connects to the Internet of Things. On the one hand, this seems like a pretty good use of the Internet: as you try out different medicines, they can learn precisely how well those medicines work, and work in genomics might even show that…

The idea of a fully articulated philosophy of the novel does not really get going until Georg Lukács wrote Theory of the Novel during World War One, though it was not published until 1921 by which time Lukács’ political world view had changed. There may be some large scale work on the philosophy of the…

by Eric Schwitzgebel Intuitive physics works great for picking berries, throwing stones, and walking through light underbrush. It’s a complete disaster when applied to the very large, the very small, the very energetic, or the very fast. Similarly for intuitive biology, intuitive cosmology, and intuitive mathematics: They succeed for practical purposes across long-familiar types of…

Another terrific reflection on affairs in Pakistan that should be of interest to philosophers of race by philosopher Saba Fatima here.

(Philosophical Aesthetics' answer to Philosophers’ Annual) has just been announced.   A panel of seven judges were asked to nominate work in Aesthetics or Philosophy of Art published in 2014 they found to be particularly outstanding. From those initial nominations, the panel further deliberated and selected a final five works. Here's the link to the official…