At the beginning of the 2023 blockbuster hit, Barbie, the narrator makes two claims: “All of these women are Barbie and Barbie is all of these women” and “Because Barbie can be anything, women can be anything.” Despite the appearances of Barbie being a superficial movie about a children’s toy, this sets the stage for […] The post Becoming Real: Barbie and the Crisis of Existential Identity first appeared on Blog of the APA.| Blog of the APA
The American Association of Philosophy Teachers (AAPT) is launching a new teaching mentorship program designed for philosophers teaching in small philosophy departments. A small department, for the purposes of this AAPT program, is either a philosophy department with three or fewer faculty in it, or a multidisciplinary department with three or fewer philosophers in it.| Daily Nous - news for & about the philosophy profession
Kant’s account of evil makes three key claims with major consequences for moral agency and responsibility. First, the distinction between good and evil lies in the will (R 6:59). Unlike prior theories that locate evil in natural inclinations or external circumstances, Kant situates evil in the will’s choice of maxims. This reveals that earlier theories […] The post Kant’s Empowering Conception of Humanity first appeared on Blog of the APA.| Blog of the APA
If you read about a place called Newry, it will tell you that it is a city just on the edge of Northern Ireland’s border with the Republic of Ireland. It will tell you of Newry’s Cistercian monastic beginnings in the twelfth century, and it will tell you that its town hall was designed to…| Blog of the APA
Traffic is trivial. Rules of the road are a basic necessity for a well-functioning society, but their design is largely a technical matter of logistics and optimization best left to technocratic policymaking, not a major topic for public moral or philosophical discussion. This, I think, roughly describes a tacit assumption behind the way many of…| Blog of the APA
Political riots raise important moral questions. When we see or hear about a riot, we are prompted to consider whether the cause is just and whether rioting is a justified means of protest. Some believe that all rioting is wrong, while others think that it can be permissible or even required under certain conditions. These…| Blog of the APA
In April, I wrote a plea for the Columbia University leadership not to appease the Trump administration by giving in to its demands for control over the university’s operations, despite the federal funding that was being held hostage. I wrote as an academic concerned, generally, for the fate of US universities under an authoritarian regime,…| Blog of the APA
The Tangier smoke cat catches a piece of meat in his front paws like a monkey…my little monkey beast. The white cat rubs his way towards me, tentative, hoping. William S. Borroughs, The Cat Inside (93). I used to live in Nijmegen (the Netherlands) and commute to work to Aachen (Germany), where I would stay…| Blog of the APA
Headlines like “Man Proposed to His AI Girlfriend” and “She’s In Love With ChatGPT” reflect a cultural moment where romantic relationships with artificial intelligence are no longer niche curiosities—they’re mainstream. Companion AIs, like Replika or Character.AI, are increasingly embedded in people’s emotional lives, and sometimes even their romantic ones. Replika, for example, boasts over 30 million users as of mid-2024, with…| Blog of the APA
I would like to suggest that they are, sometimes, but not always, us. Sometimes, people speak without thought. This is something that can happen to most of us, and I would like to propose a way of thinking about how and why this happens, hoping that understanding the cause of a problem is a substantial…| Blog of the APA
This post was originally published by the Institute of Art and Ideas and is republished here with permission as part of the Blog of APA’s partnership with the Institute. Without philosophical thought, Einstein claimed he “would have contributed nothing to science.” And yet, modern science popularizers like Neil deGrasse Tyson dismiss philosophy as largely irrelevant to scientific inquiry. In…| Blog of the APA
When I was thirty, I told some coworkers about my plan to enter grad school to become a psychotherapist. We were technical writers for a large insurance company. “We used to have such dreams,” one of them sighed as the others nodded. “But you have to pay the bills and keep to what you know.”…| Blog of the APA
The quantified metrics of likes, shares, and followers are often likened to currencies of social media. Like dollars and cents, we seek to acquire and accumulate them for the value they confer us. However, while money is valued primarily as a means for exchanging goods and services, the metrics of social media are valued primarily…| Blog of the APA
The now classic movie-riffing series Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K), and its spinoffs such as Rifftrax, can tell us something about how to deal with existential absurdity. Although MST3K more directly targets the “aesthetic absurdity” of flawed filmmaking, the strategies used for coping with bad movies can also be applied to the absurdities of life.…| Blog of the APA
American YouTuber Armon Wiggins went viral on X after referring to Tyla as an “uppity African,” an insult with which the broadcaster and rapper Joe Budden concurred. Wiggins writes: “Hey I don’t think I like TYLA’s personality I think someone needs to check her cus she doesn’t understand American Culture AT ALL…she almost gives off…| Blog of the APA
“The benign prerogative of pardoning” At the birth of the United States, Alexander Hamilton argued in Federalist 74 that “Humanity and good policy conspire to dictate, that the benign prerogative of pardoning should be as little as possible fettered or embarrassed.” Yet, long before Trump and Biden’s recent pardons, the pardoning power has been controversial…| Blog of the APA
“The law of love will work, just as the law of gravitation will work.” – Gandhi In parts one and two of this three-part series, I developed a framework for ahimsic (nonviolent) communication (AC) as an alternative to the standard communicative norm of civility. The framework presented for AC offers various categories of resistance to…| Blog of the APA
Tyla, a South African singer, performer, and Grammy Award winner, has achieved more in the past year than many musical artists ever will. In part one of the series “Tyla, Coloureds, Color, and Culture,” I outlined her numerous professional achievements. The goal of the post, though, was to highlight that the immense global spotlight that…| Blog of the APA
Less than a year after the American philosopher Daniel C. Dennett put out his latest collection of quality ruminations on his life, titled I've Been Thinking (2023), he died of interstitial lung disease in a bed at Maine Medical Center in Portland on April 19, 2024. He surely had an intimation of his nearing demise,…| Blog of the APA
As I write, the 2024 U.S. federal election is in its final stretch, and it’s a nail-biter. A few thousand swing voters may well decide the future of the country when it comes to climate change, social injustice, abortion access, international war, free speech, and even the basic structure of American democracy. Most academic philosophers…| Blog of the APA
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, many scientists embraced the idea, based on past experience with other coronaviruses, that it was highly probable that the new coronavirus (Sars-Cov2) originated as a result of a zoonotic jump from an animal to people. They believed that such a jump likely occurred in the Huanan wet…| Blog of the APA
"In this post, I want to encourage a conversation about active steps that we---all of us who love, teach, and write philosophy---might take to help philosophy’s future." There are many concerns about the future of philosophy in higher education. In the following guest post, Alex Guerrero, professor of philosophy at Rutgers University, puts forward two| Daily Nous - news for & about the philosophy profession
Nine philosophers explore the various issues and questions raised by the newly released language model, GPT-3, in this edition of Philosophers On, guest edited by Annette Zimmermann. Introduction Annette Zimmermann, guest editor GPT-3, a powerful, 175 billion parameter language model developed recently by OpenAI, has been galvanizing public debate and controversy. As the MIT Technology Review puts| Daily Nous - news for & about the philosophy profession
