All posts tagged: editor: martina valković

2022 Pacific Division Dewey Lecture: Philosophy as Personal Quest and Collective Enterprise

2022 Pacific Division Dewey Lecture: Philosophy as Personal Quest and Collective Enterprise

Published by Jenni Sidey

Below is the audio recording of Margaret Gilbert’s John Dewey Lecture, “Philosophy as Personal Quest and Collective Enterprise,” given at the 2022 Pacific Division Meeting. The full text is available on the APA website (member sign-in is required) as well as on JSTOR.  The audio of the lecture is available here: “Philosophy as Personal Quest and Collective Enterprise” by Margaret Gilbert Margaret Gilbert is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Emerita at the University of California, Irvine, where she was the Founding Abraham I. Melden Chair in Moral Philosophy from 2006 to 2025. Prior to joining the faculty at UCI, she taught at the University of Manchester (UK) and the University of Connecticut, where she is professor emerita. She has a BA in classics and philosophy from Cambridge University, as well as a BPhil with distinction and a PhD in philosophy from Oxford University. Her research interests are in social phenomena such as acting together, collective beliefs, social conventions, agreements and promises, and related areas of moral and political philosophy and philosophy of law, including rights theory …

Depression as a Philosophical Problem: Rethinking the Meaning of Suffering in the Era of SSRIs

Depression as a Philosophical Problem: Rethinking the Meaning of Suffering in the Era of SSRIs

Published by Jenni Sidey

https://www.pexels.com/photo/person-with-bunch-medication-pills-on-hand-3683101/ When I was sixteen, I was hospitalized for depression for six weeks and put on Prozac. At the time, I was taught that depression is, first and foremost, a medical problem. It was a sign that my brain was broken, and that I needed doctors to fix me through a combination of drugs and therapy. I’ve taken antidepressant drugs on and off throughout my adult life. But over the last decade, I’ve come to think of depression as, primarily, a philosophical problem. Depression and its treatment engage some of the deepest questions philosophers ask, such as questions about agency, selfhood, and the good life. To appreciate the philosophical dimension of depression, it’s helpful to take a step back and consider two contrasting paradigms of depression. This helps us see how each one involves distinct, implicit answers to those questions. Two Paradigms of Depression The first picture is the chemical imbalance view—or more generally, the brain dysfunction view. It holds that depression is a brain disease, kind of like epilepsy or Parkinson’s disease. The idea …

Foraging Thoughts | Blog of the APA

Foraging Thoughts | Blog of the APA

Published by Jenni Sidey

Wikimedia commons image, retrieved from: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/78/Ripe%2C_ripening%2C_and_green_blackberries.jpg Few joys in my childhood memory rival the picking of blackberries under the scorching Greek sun. The rising dust, the dry and hot wind, the curious scurrying insects, and most of all, the sturdy thorns of the blackberry bush could not rival the soft consistency of the berries in my hand, and their sweet, if slightly sour flavor. Being able to feast on our loot with my sibling in the late afternoon, surrounded by the smell of pines, rosemary, and sea salt, made each scratch we got from blackberrying more than worth it, a proud war wound. I did not take many of my childhood habits into my adulthood. However, to take my bike, some huge glass jars, maybe a small step ladder, and to wander alone the nearby parks and forests in search of blackberries is still my favorite way to spend a weekend day in July. Not only that: I am slowly expanding my foraging skills. Last October, I went through the tedious task of picking elderberries …

Sinking From Submarines: The Rules of Naval Warfare

Sinking From Submarines: The Rules of Naval Warfare

Published by Jenni Sidey

We don’t often spend a lot of time thinking about the morality of submarine warfare. It’s a small and secretive world that rarely seeks attention. It did, however, surface recently with the sinking of Iranian warship IRIS Dena on March 4, 2026.   When looking at this incident, it is important to take a deep breath. In the age of cognitive, cyber, and information operations it is challenging to understand what is true. In philosophical terms, war is always surrounded by epistemic uncertainty—the fog of war—but now battles are fought over our perception of fact, and our moral cognition is perhaps the most important terrain of the cognitive battlefield.   The first thing to understand about the incident is the status of the units. USS Charlotte is an American nuclear-powered (not nuclear-armed) attack submarine. The Dena is a Moudge-class destroyer. Dena is set up for defense against submarines, aircraft, and missiles. It can carry anti-ship missiles. The submarine has one primary role, to attack surface and sub-surface vessels, and it is armed with heavy-weight torpedoes, though it can also …

Unironically Good? Hegel, Irony, and Nicolas Cage

Unironically Good? Hegel, Irony, and Nicolas Cage

Published by Jenni Sidey

https://pixabay.com/vectors/charlie-chaplin-caricature-carlitos-4218018/ When we think about irony, what comes to mind is often something like Socratic or dramatic irony. The first describes instances in which a speaker feigns ignorance in order to draw out another person’s claims and expose their inconsistencies, while the second refers to situations in which events unfold in a way that sharply diverges from what agents intend or expect. Examples of both abound in cinema and pop culture, and they tend to be easily recognizable. But what if irony doesn’t merely consist in manipulating words or situations? What if it implicates our very perspective on the world? This is at least what Hegel seems to be suggesting in his (admittedly brief) criticism of “irony” in the “Morality” section of the Principles of the Philosophy of Right. We’ll be elaborating on that criticism in this article, but not in abstracto, as Hegel would have it. Rather, to frame our discussion, we turn to no less than the cradle of philosophical inquiry itself: Reddit, circa 2023. In one particular thread, a Reddit user laments …

Protesting For Our Humanity | Blog of the APA

Protesting For Our Humanity | Blog of the APA

Published by Jenni Sidey

Every Sunday for two years, from October 2023 to October 2025, protesters gathered in the center of Melbourne, Australia, to march against Israel’s war on Gaza. With numbers sometimes swelling to up to 25,000, the protests became a recurring moment for those horrified by the IDF’s actions to come together and share their anger and their grief. These mass displays of outrage and solidarity were met in some quarters, however, by a mix of irritation and bemusement: What could such protests possibly hope to achieve, here on the other side of the world, in a state that—if we’re being honest—ranks as a middling power at best? In 1985, philosopher and environmentalist Val Plumwood went canoeing in Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory of Australia. Alone and far from any human habitation, Plumwood was attacked by a saltwater crocodile—arguably the most ferocious of Australia’s native animals. After miraculously surviving, here is how she described that encounter: “This was a strong sense, at the moment of being grabbed by those powerful jaws, that there was something …

The Paradox of China’s Crypto Regulation and Capital Going Global (Part 2)

The Paradox of China’s Crypto Regulation and Capital Going Global (Part 2)

Published by Jenni Sidey

The Global Expansion of Chinese Crypto Capital and the Systemic Collapse of Community Culture In Part 1, I examined how China and the United States have gradually diverged onto two fundamentally different regulatory and institutional paths in the Web3 era. While the American model remains anchored in token-based financialization and dollar-linked stablecoins, China has deliberately removed the coin from the centre of its Web3 strategy, repositioning blockchain as an infrastructure for governable data, industrial coordination, and sovereign digital currency. Next, we’ll turn to the global political and cultural implications of Chinese crypto capital. Against this backdrop of domestic regulatory restructuring, a striking paradox emerges: even as China tightens control over crypto activity at home, capital and actors with Chinese backgrounds continue to expand aggressively in overseas markets. The clearest examples are the reported cooperation between Binance and the Trump family, as well as Justin Sun’s appearance at a White House dinner as a major token holder. Whatever these interactions may ultimately signify in legal, compliance, or political-symbolic terms, they at least produce a powerful visual …

Should Men Be Ashamed of Their AI Girlfriends?

Should Men Be Ashamed of Their AI Girlfriends?

Published by Jenni Sidey

More and more people are engaging with AI chatbots in seemingly social ways. Contemporary LLMs have become unsettlingly good at mimicking text-based chats between real people. Of course, this is mere mimicry, what Jonathan Birch calls the “persisting interlocutor illusion.” It appears as though we have a continuous conversation with an AI chatbot and that the chatbot is therefore a persistent presence in that conversation, something with a sense of personal identity similar to us humans. In reality, each string of text generated by these LLMs is generated by thousands of different servers all across the world. Unlike our brains, there is no single server that houses the “memories” of AI chatbots. As Birch puts it, these LLMs are at best “roleplaying machines” and cannot yet be understood as having human-like consciousness. A growing number of men use these chatbots to roleplay romantic and sexual scenarios. This kind of roleplay can be objectionable in some obvious ways: men might engage in explicitly misogynistic roleplay, for example. Yet, if you’re like me, something doesn’t sit right …

How to Deal with Online Virtue Signaling

How to Deal with Online Virtue Signaling

Published by Jenni Sidey

You’ve had a long day at work and come home wanting to unwind. You decide to scroll through your social media just to pass some time. It’s not long until you see a post from a friendly acquaintance from your college days: “If you’re not fucking furious about [recent tragedy], then you’re part of the problem.” You can’t help but compare yourself with them and ask if you should be angrier.  You push the thought away, determined to relax this evening. You continue scrolling and see a distant familiar has changed their profile picture to have a filter with the phrase “I stand with X group.” You can’t help but roll your eyes, remembering that your distant familiar has done little to stand with X group and has used dark and “edgy” jokes in the past where X group was the punchline. You try not to get too irritated and continue scrolling. You see a post from a major corporation displaying the flag of a minority group with the phrase, “Human rights are non-negotiable at …

The Paradox of China’s Crypto Regulation and Capital Going Global (Part 2)

The Paradox of China’s Crypto Regulation and Capital Going Global (Part 1)

Published by Jenni Sidey

How China’s Web3 Is Shifting from Token Finance to Data and State Credit On November 28, 2025, the People’s Bank of China convened a meeting to discuss combating virtual-currency trading and speculation. Participants included the Ministry of Public Security, the Cyberspace Administration of China, the Central Financial Commission, the Supreme People’s Court, the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Justice, the People’s Bank of China, the State Administration for Market Regulation, the National Financial Regulatory Administration, the China Securities Regulatory Commission, and the State Administration of Foreign Exchange. The meeting made clear, based on the requirements set out in the 2021 joint notice issued by ten government agencies, that stablecoins are considered a form of virtual currency. At present, they cannot adequately meet requirements for customer identification, anti–money-laundering compliance, or related regulatory standards. They also carry significant risks of being used for money laundering, fraudulent fundraising, and illegal cross-border capital transfers. As such, they do not possess the same legal status as …