classical-philosophy-and-thought

philosophybits: “There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.” — Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues The post philosophybits: “There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them… appeared first on Philosophy News .

Moral equality is often expressed through the language of equal worth, equal consideration, equal treatment, and equal concern. These formulations are related, but they are not interchangeable. A parent who gives more time, attention, and resources to a child than to a stranger does not thereby imply that the stranger has lesser human worth. A friend who remains at a hospital bedside may be actin…

The headline is a extract of a skeet from a gamedev/designer/dev person of Bluesky: Osaka Skilled workers are de-skilling themselves Institutional knowledge and skills are actually being lost The models require user output as input to generate output The collapsing knowledge becomes the new input Outputs get worse Users get worse Here are some links from the skeets you probably want to read Beyon…

This “transducer” concept could explain consciousness, dreams, genius, and around 90 mysterious phenomena.

[Revised entry by Jan-Erik Jones on September 1, 2026. Changes to: Bibliography] The technical term ‘real essence’ is heavily utilized by the English philosopher John Locke (1632 – 1704) in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding[1] (hereafter “Essay”) that was first published in London, in December of 1689. In order to understand a great many […] The post Locke on Real Essence appeared first…

I visit your house and admire an ornament on your bookshelf. You say you’d like me to have it as a gift. If I thank you and take it with me when I leave, it seems I’ve done nothing wrong. It was yours, but you gave it to me. You have a serious illness. Untreated, […] The post Consent and the Formation of Preferences first appeared on Blog of the APA. The post Consent and the Formation of Preferen…

A pair of philosophers have launched a contest in which participants submit essays that are “primarily AI-generated”. The aim of the competition is to “gauge the philosophical capabilities of AI in a way transparent to the philosophical community”. The team behind the contest, Elliott Thornley and Zachary Goodsell of National University of Singapore, have assembled a group of philosophers to serv…

Consciousness is often treated as an evolutionary anomaly, a costly capacity with unclear adaptive origins. Here, cognition and consciousness are distinguished as separate evolutionary lineages, with consciousness arising when an organism must coordinate otherwise distinct regulatory processes to resolve competing demands affecting its own viability. Its functional precursors predate nervous syst…

Published on September 1, 2026 6:28 AM GMT AI is now exceptionally capable in mathematics and coding, but how good is it at philosophy? We are organising the first AI Philosophy Competition to find out. Entrants may submit up to three original essays on any philosophical topic. Essays must be primarily AI-generated, though some human guidance is allowed. Entrants must also submit a methodology re…