Ethics

Philosophy & Public Affairs ends its experiment and bans AI authorship

The journal that deliberately published a largely machine-written article at the start of August reversed itself within a fortnight and prohibited AI authorship. The argument has now moved to a harder question: how can it be proved that a text is the work of a machine?

Axel Honneth: justice is not only about shares, but about being seen

The philosopher who carries the Frankfurt School's inheritance argues that behind social conflict lies an invisible demand: recognition. In his recent work he has taken that framework into working life, asking whether democracy can be learnt on the job.

Axel Honneth

Comte-Sponville's last words on life and death: 'The Opportunity to Live'

The final volume of a trilogy thirty years in the making turns on a single question: is going on living a principle, or an opportunity that depends on circumstances? Earlier this year the French philosopher put the same question to the limits of medicine.

Philosophy of technology takes centre stage: a handbook maps the field

The Oxford handbook edited by Shannon Vallor shows that the philosophy of technology is no longer a sideline. Running from Heidegger and Ellul to Don Ihde's postphenomenology and the ethics of algorithms, it draws the map of a discipline that has come of age.

Rebecca Goldstein's 'Mattering Instinct': the one need that drives and divides us

Goldstein's new book follows a single drive: the need to matter. On her account that need lies behind humanity's greatest achievements and behind its most stubborn afflictions — loneliness, polarisation and extremism alike.

Rebecca Goldstein

This Day in Philosophy — 25 August: Hume and Nietzsche, on the same date

David Hume died in Edinburgh on 25 August 1776; Friedrich Nietzsche died in Weimar on 25 August 1900. A hundred and twenty-four years separate them, yet both shook reason's claim to ground itself, and both did it from the same place.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Plato's Symposium at Texas A&M: a curriculum dispute reaches the courts

A professor was stopped from teaching Plato's Symposium, a course on 'Ethics and Public Policy' was cancelled and the Women's and Gender Studies programme was closed. Faculty members and the ACLU have taken the university to court.

The argument over the moral status of AI moves into the philosophy journals

A paper in Philosophical Studies asks whether an artificial superintelligence might hold a moral status higher than our own. The division beneath the field is coming into focus: does consciousness depend on biological structure, or on function?

This Day in Philosophy — 24 August: the death of Simone Weil

She gave up a philosophy post to work in a factory, went to Spain to fight, and died in England at thirty-four. Simone Weil lost her life on 24 August 1943, leaving behind unfinished notebooks and a single concept: attention.