Ethics

The Sartre Society's 31st meeting: AI, virtual worlds and digital existentialism

The thirty-first annual meeting of the North American Sartre Society will be held online on 23-24 October 2026. Its theme carries existentialism's most familiar concepts — bad faith, the look, freedom and situation — into the digital, this time among avatars and algorithms.

A proposal from Boston: philosophers should collaborate with the people who disagree with them

Seven researchers from Boston University's Mind and Morality Lab argue that philosophy should import a method from the sciences: adversarial collaboration, in which opponents design the work together. Their diagnosis is blunt — philosophers argue in soldier mindset, and rarely change their minds.

Cicero: the orator who kept asking what a republic is

To read Cicero merely as a 'great orator' is to miss the intellectual fight he was actually in. Long treated as the man who carried Greek philosophy into Latin, he is now read as a thinker of independent weight. His question is still open: does a republic survive on good institutions, or on good citizens?

Seven prizes, five thousand dollars each — and no academic post required

The essay prizes awarded by the Marc Sanders Foundation across seven fields are one of the most concrete openings in contemporary philosophy for researchers at the start of a career. What sets them apart takes one sentence: independent scholars may apply. The early modern prize closes on 1 October.

Schopenhauer: not the creature who suffers but the creature who wants

The label 'gloomy pessimist' fixes on Schopenhauer's weakest side. His real thesis is more disquieting: the source of our unhappiness may not be what the world does to us but the fact that we must always be wanting something. And from there a road runs to compassion.

Octopus, bee, crow: the consciousness debate moves beyond the human

The declaration signed in New York in 2024 held that consciousness in birds and mammals enjoys strong scientific support, and that in fishes, reptiles, cephalopods and insects it is 'a realistic possibility'. A conference at Duke in November asks the next question: what is welfare, and how is it measured?

Peter Singer, David Chalmers, Peter Godfrey-Smith

This Day in Philosophy — 4 September: two critics of modern civilisation

Ivan Illich was born on 4 September 1926; Albert Schweitzer died on 4 September 1965. One asked at what point institutions built for people begin to govern them; the other opened the boundary of the moral community to all living things. Both regarded the idea of progress from a critical distance.

Fog ahead: we will not know whether machines are conscious in time

The argument of Eric Schwitzgebel's book, out from Cambridge in August, cuts against both camps: consciousness in artificial systems is neither obviously impossible in the near future nor obviously inevitable. The real difficulty is that the moment we have to decide will arrive long before the moment we could know.

Luciano Floridi, Eric Schwitzgebel, David Chalmers, Peter Godfrey-Smith

Singer at eighty, with an AI of his own: has the good-life question changed?

The world's best-known applied ethicist has moved back to Melbourne, given up rejecting capitalism outright and launched a chatbot trained on his own writings. The question he has been putting for fifty years is unchanged: how should we live? What has changed is the world in which it is asked.

Peter Singer