The Power of a Thin Skin
Yes, we spend our lives trying to discern where we end and the rest of the world begins. The boundary is so difficult to discern because, when all the stories fall away, there is no boundary — only a fluid, permeable membrane that is constantly shifting depending on the stories we tell ourselves about what we are and where we belong. Lynn Margulis captured this in ecological and evolutionary terms when she observed that “life is a unitary phenomenon, no matter how we express that fact.” Dr. King captured the sociological equivalent in his insistence that “we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.” Whitman captured its most elemental and most existential dimensions in that immortal line: “Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”
When we fail to see the connections between things, we fail to anticipate the consequences of any one thing. A century before we began slaying entire ecosystems with pesticides meant to eradicate individual species, before we began tinkering with individual genes in the complex cathedral of the genome, the naturalist John Muir exulted that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe” — an exultation that now reads as an admonition.
“We must remain open to explanations that do not rely on the human mind as a template” — Raphaël Millière (Macquarie) and Charles Rathkopf (Jülich Research Center) on AI in Vox
The ethical, legal, and societal implications of NASA’s Artemis and Moon to Mars missions — Zach Pirtle is on the Small Steps, Giant Leaps podcast
“Today, we are meant to make our papers focused and efficient, to make a paper with three ideas into three papers… I want to push back. There’s already too much to read” — Helen De Cruz (SLU) on norms for philosophy papers
“A future in which we’re all using AI to complete our work is one in which we are more isolated from each other and the fruits of our labor” — AIs will bring greater efficiency, but who benefits from it, and what are its costs, asks Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin (Sam Houston State)
“Philosophy, Bullshit, and Peer Review” — a new, short, open access book from Neil Levy (Oxford) discusses “evidence for the widespread feeling that peer review is broken”
“Well, you can’t complain!” — Not only can we, we sometimes should. Kathryn Norlock (Trent) on complaining and its many purposes
“I know him the way one knows a small seaside town / after window shopping its main street” — “Recommendation,” the poem, by Keith Leonard (via Jennifer Baker)
- Critical Theory (Frankfurt School)by Robin Celikates and Jeffrey Flynn.
- Modern Confucianism by David Elstein.
Revised:
- The Philosophy of Digital Art by Katherine Thomson-Jones and Shelby Moser.
- Feminist Political Philosophy by Noëlle McAfee and Katie B. Howard.
- Cellular Automata by Francesco Berto and Jacopo Tagliabue.
- Joane Petrizi by Tengiz Iremadze.
- Political Legitimacy by Fabienne Peter.
- Philosophical Aspects of Multi-Modal Logic by Sonja Smets and Fernando Velázquez-Quesada.
IEP ∅
NDPR ∅
Open-Access Book Reviews in Academic Philosophy Journals ∅
Recent Philosophy Book Reviews in Non-Academic Media
- Animal Liberation Now by Peter Singer and Justice for Animals by Martha Nussbaum are together reviewed by Elizabeth Barber at The New Yorker.
- The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism by John Gray is reviewed by Ed Simon at The Baffler.
Compiled by Michael Glawson
BONUS: Moral dilemmas without the dilemma
