Interesting Work in Philosophy, Part 5

GPT journal articles, the best arguments for theism, the connubial obligations of Ukrainian women refugees, and much, much more!

Dan Moller

Heyyo! :) If you want to support me—a lowly, lowly student dressed in sackcloth and ashes, tears in my eyes, etc.—consider upgrading your subscription and growing Awol’s Army! I’ll make it well worth your while (wink wink). Now, on with the show…

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1. Dan Moller — author of my favourite book-length defence of libertarianism, Governing Least — has a paper out called “Keeping ideology in its place”. The elevator pitch is that ideologies can be dangerous because they invariably try to inject themselves into liberal social institutions, but that ideologies aren’t all bad, either, since they’re uniquely effective at mobilizing large groups and building social cohesion within them. Ideology should be kept at arm’s length, in other words, but kept nonetheless. (These might sound like ‘no-duh’ observations, and they are, but the fun is in Moller’s analysis.)

2. Jubilations!

   Nick Hadsell
   , author of a Substack on parenting ethics and political philosophy, just got a co-authored paper accepted in Inquiry! Written with Rich Eva, Kyle Huitt, “Publishing Robots” argues that once LMMs get sharp enough, philosophy journals should start publishing papers written by AI. What matters are the intellectual contributions the papers make, not facts about who or what wrote them. I’ve been assured that “Publishing Robots” was not itself written by AI, but there’d be nothing amiss if it had! Nick was kind enough to send me a draft version a while ago, and I don’t think I’ve every been convinced by a philosophy paper that instantaneously. You can watch my convo with Nick on it here:

   3. The philosopher Brian Cutter co-invented two of the best arguments for God’s existence, and did so only in the last couple of years. One of them, the argument from psychophysical harmony, is the argument that made me a theist. Recently, Cutter did a sit-down interview with the prolific Princetonian wunderkind Joe Schmid, where he lays these arguments out: