“If Joan of Arc could turn the tide of an entire war before her 18th birthday, you can get out of bed and face precious imbeciles at work.”
—E. Jean Carroll
We have decided that there are a lot worse things you could do in this world than to share with colleagues some good conversation, some good food and wine, some interesting and genial companions, pleasure, and a sense of wellbeing…
“Am I the unethical one?” A Philosophy Professor & His Cheating Students
Spook Country
Press Silence on Latest Twitter Files Scandal a New Low Matt Taibbi, Racket New
Tim Flannery: No counsel of despair Actuaries Digital. Austrialia.
It’s the End of Computer Programming as We Know It. (And I Feel Fine.)Manjoo: “…A.I. tools based on large language models — like OpenAI Codex, from the company that brought you ChatGPT, or AlphaCode, from Google’s DeepMind division — have already begun to change the way many professional coders do their jobs.
At the moment, these tools work mainly as assistants — they can find bugs, write explanations for snippets of poorly documented code and offer suggestions for code to perform routine tasks (not unlike how Gmail offers ideas for email replies — “Sounds good”; “Got it”).But A.I. coders are quickly getting smart enough to rival human coders. Last year, DeepMind reported in the journal Science that when AlphaCode’s programs were evaluated against answers submitted by human participants in coding competitions, its performance “approximately corresponds to a novice programmer with a few months to a year of training.
”“Programming will be obsolete,” Matt Welsh, a former engineer at Google and Apple, predicted recently. Welsh now runs an A.I. start-up, but his prediction, while perhaps self-serving, doesn’t sound implausibl
I believe the conventional idea of “writing a program” is headed for extinction, and indeed, for all but very specialized applications, most software, as we know it, will be replaced by A.I. systems that are trainedrather than programmed. In situations where one needs a “simple” program … those programs will, themselves, be generated by an A.I. rather than coded by hand.
- Donald Davidson by Jeff Malpas.
- Impossible Worlds by Francesco Berto and Mark Jago.
- Panentheism by John Culp.
- Aristotle’s Natural Philosophy by Istvan Bodnar.
- George Orwell by Mark Satta.
- Radical Skepticism and Epistemic Justification by Michael Bergmann is r reviewed by Charles Goldhaber.
- Kant of Self-Knowledge and Self-Formation: The Nature of Inner Experience by Katharina T. Kraus is reviewed by Pirachula Chulanon.
- Nísia Floresta by Project Vox Team.
Open-Access Book Reviews in Academic Philosophy Journals
This section contains reviews sent in by journal editors (we do not go searching for them). In order to be included in this section, book reviews must be:
- open-access
- published no earlier than January 2023,
- published in an academic philosophy journal or, if published in a non-philosophy journal, be a review of a book authored by a philosopher, and
- submitted by email to dailynouseditor@gmail.com in the following format: “[Book Title] by [Book Author] is reviewed by [Review Author] in [Journal Title]”, where Journal Title must embed a link to the web page on which the book review appears (not to the journal’s homepage or table of contents).
The Weekly Updates appear on Mondays. Normally, if you send in the links by Friday afternoon they can be included in the coming week’s edition.
Recent Philosophy Book Reviews in Non-Academic Media
- Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology by Richard Wolin is reviewed by Rachel Lu at National Review.
- What’s the Use of Philosophy? by Philip Kitcher is reviewed by Kieran Setiya in the London Review of Books.
- Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility by Martha Nussbaum is reviewed by Clare Coffey at The New Atlantis and by Raffael Fasel at The Times Literary Supplement.
- Nihilistic Times; Thinking with Max Weber by Wendy Brown is reviewed by Kieran Setiya at The Los Angeles Review of Books.
Compiled by Michael Glawson