Monthly Archives: September, 2025

Black Boxes, Clear Duties: Owning AI Risk When the Guardrails Are Gone

As AI adoption accelerates, the consequences—intended and not—are becoming harder to ignore. From biased algorithms to opaque decision-making and chatbot misinformation, companies are increasingly...

The Shock of the Old: The Epistemic Challenge of Personal Transformation

“You’ll get over it.” “You’ll find someone else.” “Plenty more fish in the sea.” This is advice frequently given to someone going through a crushing...

Recently Published Book Spotlight: Herald of a Restless World. How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People

This blog post is adapted from Emily Herring’s biography of Henri Bergson, Herald of a Restless World. How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the...

Art’s Plain Art of Living

How might an artwork function to let its artist avoid accountability in their life, and how might it function to help them become accountable in their life?

Palestinian Territorial Rights (and the One-State Solution)

The events of October 7, 2023 and Israel’s subsequent war on Gaza are the subject of strong media attention, which is surely important. Yet...

Ordinary Monsters in a Galaxy Far, Far Away

In 2005, when Star Wars and Philosophy was published, one of the highlights was a chapter by Richard Dees, “Moral Ambiguity in a Black-and-White...

The Privacy of First-Personal Perspective: Engaging with Indian Philosophy on Cosmopsychism

Imagine coming across a red flower—you will experience it from your own first-person perspective: you may smell its scent, recall seeing it before, and...

2021 Eastern Division Dewey Lecture: The Whole Function of Philosophy

Below is the audio recording of Philip Kitcher’s John Dewey Lecture, “The Whole Function of Philosophy,” given at the 2021 Eastern Division Meeting, which...

How Disability Affects Well-being

What is the relationship between disability and well-being? (In this post, I’ll call this the Relationship Question.) The Relationship Question is both enormously complex...

A Duty to Resist Love Island: An Inquiry

If you are in any way tuned into pop culture, you’ve definitely heard of the reality TV show, Love Island. While the show originated...

“Chidi Kills Janet!” Unpacking Sentience and the Moral Status of AI

This clip, “Chidi Kills Janet!,” from the first season of NBC’s The Good Place, lets us gauge our intuitions about how computers fit with...

Interdisciplinary Humanities (SEARCH), Benjamin E. Curtis

The SEARCH program has existed at Rhodes College, in one form or another, since 1946. This chronologically oriented, three-semester “Great Books” interdisciplinary humanities sequence...

Leonine Chameleons: Relativism and Fascism

You have probably lost track of the number of articles about people who have jettisoned family members over contradictory and reprehensible political views. How...

Step Away from the Chatbot: a Letter to a Student about AI and Creativity

Dear Student,  I’m glad this letter reached you before you fed that assignment prompt from your Creative Writing professor into ChatGPT. I’d like to share some ideas...

APA Member Interview: Jason Zesheng Chen

Jason Zesheng Chen is a logician and philosopher of mathematics who studies the foundations, history, and methodology of mathematics (especially descriptive set theory and...