Konstantin Genin

Ah sure. But that doesn't mean you should breed them like prize cattle. That was Plato's idea.

Text reads: ERC PhD studentship: The Ethics and Philosophy of Science of Machine Learning. Applications are open for this funded PhD Studentship, to begin in September 2026. Application Deadline: 16 March 2026, More info: edin.ac/46cHXPd

Headshot of Dr Sullivan. She has blue eyes, and a short brown bob haircut with a fringe. Text on image reads: Dr Emily Sullivan, Co-Director of the CTMF & Senior Lecturer in the Philosophy of Technology.

@schoolofppls.bsky.social are now accepting applications for a fully funded PhD studentship in the Ethics of AI and Philosophy of Science, supervised by CTMF Co-Director Dr Emily Sullivan!

The PhD is part of the @erc.europa.eu project TOY: Machine learning in Science and Society: A dangerous toy?

What is the petty eugenics of meritocracy?

these two things probably bleed into each other, sadly. the difference is power i suppose.

Is Holly Brewer right about Locke? I don't want to lie to my students.

aeon.co/essays/does-...

it was ok because all the Theoremes of Morall doctrine had been sufficiently proved 320 years earlier

gotta pick the prior that's uniform over structure descriptions in the language that god spoke to adam and update on the total evidence since the beginning of time

carney realizes that it's possible to be on the wrong side of a gunboat and immediately reinvents the nonaligned movement but capitalistly

Maybe I am having inappropriate feelings but this really came across as an "I never thought the rules-based international leopards would eat *my* face" kind of speech

A video of Alex Pretti reading out the final salute of an unnamed veteran he cared for until the end of his life in the ICU, posted to Facebook by his son.

Most important thing to remember when you wake up is to recite the mantra "this is the worst I'm going to feel today." Generalizes to the non-hungover case as well.

Also mentioned in the first lines of Book I: Niceratus, son of Nicias, murdered by the tyranny because they needed his money (see Sparshott 1957, "Plato and Thrasymachus"). Niceratus doesn't speak in the dialogue, so this is just a shout-out. Book I is basically a catalogue of martyrs.

Something I don't know what to make of: according to Debra Nails, Glaucon is not just the brother of Plato and the cousin (once removed) of Critias, the worst of the Thirty tyrants, but Critias' younger lover. Does Glaucon drop Critias when Critias becomes murderous?

For me, Thrasymachus' outburst reads differently in light of that context: it's the outraged conscience of the reader, or maybe of Plato himself, who knows that half the people in the dialogue will be murdered, either by the oligarchic tyranny or by the restored democracy.

Feel stupid for just learning this, but book I is set in the house of a wealthy metic family that (we are supposed to know) will be victims of an anti-immigrant pogrom during the reign of the thirty tyrants. Polemarchus is killed and expropriated by the junta and his brother Lysias barely escapes.

Thank you for this I teared up at the end.

"Philosophy will have conscience of tomorrow, commitment to the future, knowledge of hope, or it will have no more knowledge." - Ernst Bloch, 1954

I guess the markets reacted in a way that suggests that a lot of relevantly placed people think this is a good idea in a shallow cynical way.

This is obviously besides your point, but I don't think the OP is fair to Thrasymachus, who might be doing a subtle ideology critique. The Realpolitiker are people who actually hold the worst of the views that Thrasymachus might be advocating in book I.

Every generation has to pick up the fallen banner in the hereditarian/environmentalist wars.

Me too!

There's this from 2019, so in the best case the matter was settled after 195 years.

reparti.free.fr/clarkpage19....

Is there an economic consensus on the effects of the 1834 reform of the old poor laws in England? Or is this oldest of policy-relevant social science controversies still open?

They should make it publish xor perish.

Our world is just the feverish dream of some german philosophy undergrad who has dozed off in a neo-kantian's lecture sometime around 1911

Weber: Only the charisma of democratic leaders and authoritarian capitalists can resist the total bureaucratic rationalization of the lifeworld.

Also Weber, presumably: wait, no, not like that.

They really are trying to step on every rake

@lastpositivist.bsky.social

Do you think Weber is a basically pleasant bureaucrat or a sexy murder poet? I think he himself could never decide on a lane.

Latest revision of my SEP entry Feminist Perspectives on Science is now online: plato.stanford.edu/entries/femi...

Nice. Thomas Grote and I worked on something similar a while back.

philmed.pitt.edu/philmed/arti...