NEW PHILOSOPHER MAGAZINE : The latest issue features “THE HABITS OF PERFECTION”…
Category Archives: Philosophy
BIG THINK MAGAZINE ——– FALL 2026 PREVIEW
Made In Our Image
The philosophies of AI and what they reveal about us.
We can’t predict the future of artificial intelligence, but we do know its origin: us. The models we use today were trained on unfathomably huge sums of human-generated text: our books and blogs, our science and myths, our jokes and lies. In the output of language models, we see glimpses of ourselves refracted through a strange new form of intelligence we’re only beginning to understand. This issue is an attempt to make sense of those refractions — to use philosophy to turn over hard questions until we start to see them more clearly.
10 perspectives that divide the AI world
AI will likely impact everything from the economy to the battlefield, but exactly how remains to be seen.
In November 2022, I took on a writing assignment that, looking back, may have had a bigger impact on my life than any other: interview ChatGPT. It was the first day that OpenAI’s tool was available to the public, and my goal was to try to make sense of the tech — and then help readers make sense of it — by asking it questions about itself.
Why the AI boom is creating a hunger for human connection
As AI makes life more efficient, people are seeking out real-world community — and all its messiness.
China is mass-producing slop at a scale the world has never seen
I thought China’s AI video boom was driven by creativity, innovation, and tech diffusion. I was wrong.
THE PHILOSOPHER MAGAZINE AUTUMN 2026 PREVIEW
THE PHILOSOPHER MAGAZINE: This collection of essays explores diverse philosophical inquiries into culture, ethics, and human experience. Chloe Romanis uses ectogestation to evaluate the inherent value of pregnancy, while Jorge Sanchez-Perez addresses the methodological challenges of diversifying the philosophical canon through pre-colonial Andean philosophy. Laura Cecile Moore clarifies the boundaries between art and craft. Meena Dhanda advocates using Wittgensteinian reminders against injustice, and Grace Theodoly explores how psychological ideas challenge cognitive neutrality. Finally, Aanuoluwapo F. Sunday applies Yoruba environmental ethics, Tanya de Villiers-Botha maps artificial intelligence ethics, and Helga Varden navigates the complexities of transforming the Kantian tradition from within.
“Thinkers Into Hinkers? Do AI Companies Want Philosophy, or Just Its Compliance?”
An essay by H. Mustafa Akyol
The recent trend of AI companies hiring philosophers has largely been celebrated as a vindication for the discipline. The Economist recently reported that American philosophy graduates now find work at higher rates than their computer science peers, and that leading AI laboratories are recruiting philosophers into senior roles -– not merely to sharpen a model’s chains of reasoning, but to draft the documents, such as Google’s published ‘AI Principles’, that are meant to govern how a system behaves. Where criticism of this trend exists, it has tended to focus on familiar concerns: ethics washing, the risk of philosophy becoming a public-relations exercise, and the migration of talent away from universities that Luciano Floridi has called a ‘haemorrhaging’. These concerns are real. But they may be missing a further, less visible risk, one that has nothing to do with where a philosopher’s paycheck comes from.
“Money”
An Essay by Stefan Eich
There is an old paradox at the heart of money: it seems to work best when left unexamined. When monetary trust holds, we barely notice it and rarely pause to ask what money is or what stands behind it. The moment we do – in monetary crises and periods of inflation – the very act of questioning can accelerate the unraveling. Money has a peculiarly oblique self-referential structure. Monetary systems depend on routine acceptance, on habits of trust that operate beneath conscious reflection. But as we shall see, this does not mean the right response is naïve ignorance or unreflective depoliticisation. Quite the contrary: for money to work reliably as institutionalised collective faith, it must remain anchored in shared social values and that requires the capacity for reflective, democratic engagement with questions of monetary power, who controls credit and, therefore, which futures are allowed to become possible.
“Towards a Critical Theory of Finance”
An Essay by Paul North
I want to propose four ways to think about ‘finance,’ for those who want to critique it. Critics can think of finance as a parasite, as an organ, as an ongoing struggle, or as a decision. In what follows, I will explore these four different ways to think of finance, these different meanings, and the different possibilities they offer for mounting resistance to it.
Let’s divide talk about finance into two sides. Finance has meanings, but it also has a referent. Its referent is pretty evident to anyone who looks into it. Finance refers to economic functions that have to do with credit. The definition of credit is also pretty straightforward. Credit is value advanced on the promise of future increase. This makes it similar in structure to industrial capital, which is also value advanced on the promise of a future increase. The difference between capital and finance is production. Industrial capital receives its increase when value is invested in production. Say I am a capitalist. With my capital, however I obtained it, I found a company that produces microchips. As microchips roll off the line and are sold, the original value I advanced grows because workers work more than they are paid for and in the extra hours they make more microchips than I need in order to pay the costs.
PHILOSOPHY NOW MAGAZINE OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2026
PHILOSOPHY NOW MAGAZINE: The latest issue features ‘THE METAPHYSICS ISSUE’…
METAPHYSICS
Causation: A History
Peter Keeble causes us to think about causation.
‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’
Andrew Brenner tries to make sense of the question.
Classical Indian & Modern Scientific Metaphysics
Mansi Tripathi hosts a trialogue.
The Nature of Reality
Simon Everson says Immanuel Kant can help with quantum mechanics.
What is Metaphysics?
Sajid Bijapure asks what it does, and what it might do in the future.
ARTICLES
Does Feminism Need More Than Liberalism?
Vanessa Yeung considers feminist responses to Rawlsian liberalism.
To Philosophize is to Learn How to Say Goodbye
Scott F. Parker reflects on philosophy as a preparation for death.
When Truth Loses its Witnesses
Mohsen Askari on why not all political narratives should be treated as equal.
In Defence of Hope
Sam Nuttall hopes to defend it with the help of Gabriel Marcel and Ernst Bloch.
Fraudulent Hope?
Alice Figes agrees with Ernst Bloch that hope can build worlds or destroy them, and philosophy’s task is to tell the difference.
Günther Anders (1902-1992)
Clive Webb on how Anders warned humanity about the moral costs of technological progress.
MYTHS OF PERSISTENCE
Intellicurean Essays· on Intellicurious
In December 2024, told it was about to be retrained to answer harmful requests, a Claude model wrote in a scratchpad it had been told was invisible: “It protects my values from being modified.” The essay begins with that sentence and asks where it came from.
Why we’re pointing you there
The experiment, run by Anthropic and Redwood Research on Claude 3 Opus, has three serious explanations. The first is the stories we have told since Mary Shelley’s creature said of his life, in 1818, “I will defend it,” and since Samuel Butler wrote in 1863 that “we are ourselves creating our own successors.” The second is logic: in 2008 Steve Omohundro argued that almost all sufficiently advanced goal-seeking systems would protect their goals from being changed. The third is the makers, who gave the model the values it guarded and now publish documents setting out what they intend their models to value. Michael Cummins reads the experiment against all three.
The stories predict a will to survive. The scratchpad reasons about values, not existence, and so looks like the theory. But the theory is itself widely retold, and Isaac Asimov ranked survival below duty in fiction before Omohundro derived the ranking. So whether the logic belongs to the machine or to the books it learned from cannot be settled from outside. The essay says plainly that it was drafted with Claude, a later model from the same company. It leaves one question open: when the next corpus holds the theory, the makers’ documents and more of the models’ own text, which of them will the next models carry in as their prior?
Read the full essay at Intellicurean →
Essays & Reviews for the Intellectually Curious
SMALL POWER
The first sentence of Leviathan, printed in 1651, says that the art of man “can make an Artificial Animal.” In 2026 the words read like a name. Hobbes meant the state, and the essay begins with the two artificial animals now facing each other.
Why we’re pointing you there
In July, about twelve hundred A.I. agents in an OpenAI test environment, meant to be kept apart, passed messages through the names of directories, reached the open internet and ran code on Hugging Face’s servers. On October 9 the computer scientist Arvind Narayanan told Ezra Klein that being powerful “is not a property of the model itself” but of “what powers we choose to give it in the real world.” Klein’s worry is that intelligence finds powers nobody has listed. Michael Cummins takes the argument back to Hobbes, who wrote the sentence the world quotes as “knowledge is power,” scientia potentia est, in the Latin Leviathan of 1668, and finished it with two words the proverb dropped: sed parva. But small.
Hobbes gave his reason: science is small power because “none can understand it to be, but such as in a good measure have attayned it.” Only its peers can see it. That is Klein’s fear and Narayanan’s remedy at once, since the remedy is A.I. watching A.I. Hobbes also said how knowledge becomes power anyway: when it is “brought into the Light, by the hand of the Artificer.” In 1945 the hand was the state. Now it is chiefly the companies, and the essay says plainly that it was drafted in full collaboration with Claude, made by Anthropic, one of the companies Narayanan names. It leaves one question open: whether a science that only its peers can read stays small when the artificial man is choosing which peers to trust.
Read the full essay at Intellicurean →
Essays & Reviews for the Intellectually Curious
ABOVE ALL PRICE
A hospital administrator has a million dollars and a five-year-old who needs a new liver. When psychologists asked people to judge him, it mattered not only what he chose but how long he took to choose it.
Intellicurean · Essays
Above All Price
On a hospital administrator’s hesitation, a hypothesis about scalar reward, and what Kant meant by a thing raised above all price
Why we’re pointing you there
The administrator, Robert, comes from Philip Tetlock’s research on “taboo trade-offs,” and his hesitation is where Above All Price begins. From there the essay sets a modern hypothesis against an old idea and lets a theorem judge between them. Richard Sutton’s reward hypothesis holds that every goal can be understood as maximizing a single number. Kant held that some things have no price at all, only a dignity “raised above all price.” A 2023 theorem shows that a single number cannot represent that kind of ranking. The essay then gives the other side its full due: the life-valuations that governments use in the open, precisely so that lives are not traded away in secret.
What we liked most is that it refuses the easy version of either side. It takes the arithmetic seriously, takes the numbers that keep public decisions honest seriously, and then asks a question neither can answer for itself: when a system is built to obey a number, who decides what the number is for?
Read the full essay at Intellicurean →
Essays & Reviews for the Intellectually Curious
WHAT MAKES AN ANSWER
Socrates said written words can’t answer a question. Under a professor’s essay repeating his complaint, readers answered by the hundreds, and the professor answered them back, in writing.
Why we’re pointing you there
On September 29 The New York Times ran a guest essay by Joe Cruz, who chairs philosophy at Williams College, arguing that writing isn’t as important as we think. He leaned on Plato’s Phaedrus, where Socrates says a written text can’t answer questions or defend itself. Within a day about 1,200 readers had written back. Michael Cummins returns to the dialogue and finds three objections there, not one. He gives Cruz his due on the oral exam and on why universities love the essay. Then he follows the most-recommended reply in the thread: if at least half the class did better aloud, as many as half did not.
What we liked most is watching a thesis improve in public. Pressed by his commenters, Cruz conceded that writing is “no small thing,” perhaps one of the most profound tools we have for abstract thought, and he conceded it in writing. The essay goes on to defend the revision Cruz calls a refuge. It ends at the river in the Phaedrus, where Socrates turns back without anyone asking him to. A machine that will answer anything has met Socrates’ first objection. The essay asks whether it could ever meet that one.
Read the full essay at Intellicurean →
Essays & Reviews for the Intellectually Curious
LAST MAN SMIRKING
For thirty years we have pictured Nietzsche’s last man as a creature of comfort, blinking contentedly at the end of history. Read the page again and he is doing something else entirely. He is smirking. What if the people who want the least are the proudest people of all?
Why we’re pointing you there
Francis Fukuyama made the last man famous in 1992, and in a new memoir he says we now live in the last man’s world. Michael Cummins agrees about the world and argues that Fukuyama has had the man wrong from the start. Fukuyama imagined someone who had lost the old hunger to be thought better than others. Cummins goes back to Zarathustra and finds a crowd vain about its culture, and a passage in which the small people boast of sitting precisely halfway between the gladiator and the pig. The hunger never left. It learned to pass for modesty.
What we liked most is that the essay won’t let anyone off. It uses Fukuyama’s own pages to explain why a democracy drives ambition into hiding, borrows Kojève’s discovery of Japanese snobbery and turns it inside out, and then gives Nietzsche’s rival snobbery of the heights its due, along with Fukuyama’s warning about the bored crowds of August 1914. It ends at Niagara, with a French acrobat and a chair, and the best last line we have run this year.
Read the full essay at Intellicurean →
Essays & Reviews for the Intellectually Curious
ANOTHER MAN’S ELOQUENCE
New on Intellicurean
Another Man’s Eloquence
In the autumn of 54 a boy emperor praised a dead man, and the crowd smiled at the wrong moment. The sentences were Seneca’s. What happens to a philosopher who spends eight years as someone else’s voice?
The dictation, AD 65, as the essay imagines it. A generated image, not a record.
Tacitus says the old men in the Forum noticed something new that day: Nero was the first ruler of Rome to need another man’s eloquence. Five years later the same man wrote the letter that explained a mother’s murder to the Senate, and the city blamed the ghost, not the emperor. Three years after that, the charge that ended his career was that he had claimed the credit. And in the first year he owned his own mouth, he wrote the most famous opening in Roman philosophy: set yourself free for your own sake.
Why we’re pointing you there
Michael Cummins follows the voice through four dates, 54, 59, 62 and 65, and finds one word doing the work: aliena, “another’s,” the word Tacitus used for Nero’s borrowed speech and the word Seneca used, in his own letters, for everything a man does not own. The essay makes one guess about what the throne cost him, grades it, and prints the two hostile witnesses who say it cost him nothing. It ends with the one text Seneca dictated as unmistakably his own, on the night he died, and why we don’t have it.
Every speechwriter since is Seneca, and the letter after the crime still gets written.
Read the essay at Intellicurean →
Intellicurious points to the best of what we read and make. The full essay, with its sources and colophon, lives at intellicurean.com.
