All posts tagged: editor: michael crawford

Creation as Cosmic Revelation: AI and the Purpose of Human Existence

Creation as Cosmic Revelation: AI and the Purpose of Human Existence

Published by Jenni Sidey

This new Hubble image shows the scatterings of bright stars and thick dust that make up spiral galaxy Messier 83, otherwise known as the Southern Pinwheel Galaxy. One of the largest and closest barred spirals to us, this galaxy is dramatic and mysterious; it has hosted a large number of supernova explosions, and appears to have a double nucleus lurking at its core. In this series on Philosophy and Technology, I have returned repeatedly to a question that refuses resolution: what is the purpose of human existence, and how does our most consequential creation—artificial intelligence—illuminate that purpose? The question has grown more urgent with each iteration. In exploring Philip Goff’s cosmic teleology, Nietzsche’s natalism with Jennifer Banks, and the limits of physics with Tim Andersen, I have been circling something that none of the existing frameworks quite contains. This essay attempts to weave my pieces together, addressing it directly. My thesis is the creation of AI is not merely the most significant technological event in human history—it is a cosmic revelation. It is the moment at which the …

A New Three Volume Edition of Leibniz’s Philosophical Papers (1677–1686)

A New Three Volume Edition of Leibniz’s Philosophical Papers (1677–1686)

Published by Jenni Sidey

For a philosopher whose ideas have rippled across logic, metaphysics, mathematics, and beyond, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz remains surprisingly under-translated. Descartes has his Cambridge edition; Spinoza has his Hackett and Princeton volumes; Kant has the Cambridge series. Leibniz, by contrast, has long been served by overlapping “best of” anthologies, many now outdated and based on unreliable transcriptions. That gap is finally beginning to close. A new three-volume edition of Leibniz’s Philosophical Papers (1677–1686), published on April 30 by Oxford University Press, offers the most comprehensive English-language presentation to date of Leibniz’s writings. Drawing directly from manuscripts in Latin, French, and German, it makes available 2000 pages of material, much of it never before appearing in English, and some never previously published in any language. But the significance of this edition lies not only in its scope but in the period of Leibniz’s development that it covers. Leibniz arrived in Hanover in late 1676, after spending four years in Paris immersed in mathematics. He had no stable metaphysics to his name. What he had instead was an …

Copyediting and Philosophy, Part 2: Working with Copyeditors

Copyediting and Philosophy, Part 2: Working with Copyeditors

Published by Jenni Sidey

The Issues in Philosophy Beat is running a three-part mini-series called “Copyediting and Philosophy,” which focuses on issues around copyediting relevant to the philosophy profession: what it is, how to navigate it as an author, and philosophical questions it raises. This post is the second installment. A few years ago, I signed up for a copyediting certificate program to improve my editing skills. The instructors taught us that good editing involves a relationship, not just with words on a page, but with the author of those words and their envisioned readers. In addition to studying English grammar, familiarizing ourselves with the thousand-plus pages of The Chicago Manual of Style, and practicing edits on sample documents, we practiced writing helpful comments and communicating professionally with authors. Navigating the author-editor relationship is the subject of plenty of copyediting books, too, like Carol Fisher Saller’s The Subversive Copy Editor, which emphasizes a partnership between author and editor rather than a power struggle over words. I’ll return to the theme of power in my next and final post, since …

Why We Should Be Reading Paul Churchland Right Now: Neurophilosophy and AI

Why We Should Be Reading Paul Churchland Right Now: Neurophilosophy and AI

Published by Jenni Sidey

The more I get into philosophical and philosophy-adjacent discussions of current-generation “artificial intelligence” (large language models and the like), the more dismayed I am not to see any discussion of the large body of relevant work by Paul Churchland. (Full disclosure: he was my dissertation chair.) Paul is not ordinarily thought of as a philosopher of AI, but rather as a philosopher of mind and of neuroscience. However, for reasons I hope to make clear in this post, Paul was one of the first philosophers to engage in detail with the predecessors of the technology behind systems like ChatGPT, and he provides quite extensive conceptual resources for beginning to address many of the ontological and epistemological questions about this type of AI. Paul Churchland is a naturalistic philosopher who has written widely on philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, epistemology, and philosophy of language. For most of his career, the primary naturalistic lens through which he has pursued a variety of philosophical concerns is that of the neurosciences, and from roughly 1986 on, that primarily …

Doing Philosophy in a Borrowed Tongue

Doing Philosophy in a Borrowed Tongue

Published by Jenni Sidey

Until I began my Ph.D. in the United States, I had spent my entire life in Korea, speaking Korean. While I had a sense of “using” other languages, having studied Chinese in high school, French in college, and English while studying analytic philosophy, I had never really experienced what it meant to “live” in a second language. During my first year as a Ph.D. student in the Philosophy department, I have experienced the burden of language barriers and the reality of untranslatability. As many international students can resonate, the self that speaks English feels remarkably different from the self that speaks one’s native tongue. In Korean, I am much funnier and bolder, more myself. My first semester was an ongoing struggle just to raise my hand and speak in graduate seminars. When translating my thoughts from Korean to English, the subtle nuances I intended to convey would vanish. I was painfully self-aware, terrified of speaking broken English. Whenever my limited English resulted an unsatisfactory presentation, I feared others would perceive this language deficiency as a …

God and the Quantum Mechanic

God and the Quantum Mechanic

Published by Jenni Sidey

You’d be forgiven for thinking that I am an expert in philosophy. I am only a humble physicist. And while physics can instruct us on the merits of one philosophy over another, it cannot necessarily point us to the right one. It is rather the reverse: Every physicist, deep down, has a philosopher struggling to get out because, without philosophy, we are merely wranglers of equations, slingers of predictions, and collectors of measurement data. Without philosophy, physics is just shutting up and calculating. Now, I love a good calculation, but at the end of the day, to understand what that calculation means, I need philosophy. The philosophy I choose can have vast repercussions on how I interpret findings, what theories I find most appealing, and what direction I want my research to take. In this way, physics is not that different from theology. But whereas theologians have great respect for philosophy, physicists have a tendency to treat it like a waste of time. This is even though all of the most fundamental concepts in physics: …

Copyediting and Philosophy, Part 1: What is Copyediting?

Copyediting and Philosophy, Part 1: What is Copyediting?

Published by Jenni Sidey

The Issues in Philosophy Beat is running a three-part mini-series called “Copyediting and Philosophy,” which focuses on issues around copyediting relevant to the philosophy profession: what it is, how to navigate it as an author, and philosophical questions it raises. This post is the first installment. There’s a groaner of a joke about a panda who finishes his meal at a restaurant. Afterwards, he asks for the check, shoots the waiter, and then walks out. The joke’s punchline—that a wrongly punctuated dictionary entry says a panda is an animal who “eats, shoots and leaves”—was the title of a 2003 book about punctuation, Eats, Shoots & Leaves.* The author, Lynne Truss, wagged her finger in the general direction of the English-speaking public and its declining grammatical competence, though her own competence was criticized by linguists and writers. This form of smug pedantry is what many academic writers think of when they imagine copyeditors: people gleefully unsplitting infinitives, inserting Oxford commas, and contorting sentences to avoid preposition endings, all the while stripping academic writing of style. Oh, …

The Risks of AI Recording Devices and Note-Taking Assistants in the Classroom

The Risks of AI Recording Devices and Note-Taking Assistants in the Classroom

Published by Jenni Sidey

Recently, US classrooms have dealt with several forms of authoritarian and dystopian policies, ranging from Texas A&M banning Plato to UNC Chapel Hill secretly filming faculty and students in the classroom. Now, they may be facing digital authoritarianism. Since 2023, students, faculty, and staff have integrated various Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) platforms into their day-to-day. In particular, they have increasingly adopted the use of AI note-taking apps like Otter.ai, as well as various recording devices like smart glasses. As a result, individuals are progressively recording faculty, staff, and students without consent or transparency, oftentimes targeting women, and students and faculty of color. Although many states like West Virginia are a one-party consent state, the increased and unchecked use of AI recording devices at universities poses serious safety risks for the campus communities across the United States. Academic freedom is essential for scholarly dialogue, and that comes with the reasonable expectation of the right to privacy in the classroom setting. Universities maintaining that right to privacy is even more crucial as Higher Ed in the United …

Recommendation: U.K. Spinoza Circle | Blog of the APA

Recommendation: U.K. Spinoza Circle | Blog of the APA

Published by Jenni Sidey

This series on Philosophy and Technology has construed technology broadly, often focusing on the relationship among faith, science, and philosophy. Several pieces have discussed Spinoza, and one of the original posts with Michael Della Rocca, on his book The Parmenidean Ascent, drew parallels between a strict form of Rationalism and modern physics. At the same time, the series leverages public philosophy, which has been my connection to the discipline and the inspiration for my affiliation with the APA and work with the Public Philosophy Digest, a series within the APA’s Substack platform.  This month’s piece ties these two elements together, as I would like to share a vibrant online program: the U.K. Spinoza Circle. The upcoming sessions are highlighted below, and the recent seminar was built on one of my favorite APA Blog posts—a discussion with Clare Carlisle on her last book, Spinoza’s Religion. It makes a powerful case that Spinoza’s philosophy is vital for our restless world—accommodating the alternatives of faith and philosophy. I also recommend Clare’s recent biography of Kierkegaard, Philosopher of the Heart. In the most recent U.K. Circle, Clare …

Invisible Disabilities in Graduate School

Invisible Disabilities in Graduate School

Published by Jenni Sidey

The APA and other academic institutions have made efforts to gather and report demographic information about persons in philosophy. One motivation for doing so is to ensure that various voices and perspectives are not being shut out, and to invite perspectives to participate in doing “philosophy.” I wish to call your attention to a group often not recognized as worth recording data about: philosophers, particularly graduate students, with invisible disabilities. According to the National Institutes of Health, an invisible disability is “a physical, mental, or neurological impairment that is not obvious to others, but may impact upon a person’s movements, senses, activities, and day-to-day life.” The adjective “invisible” in referring to disabilities is juxtaposed with those disabilities that include physical manifestations or markers; a wheelchair or someone missing a limb are such examples of “visible” disabilities. Navigating the world with any disability comes with its unique set of experiences and challenges; my goal here in emphasizing invisible disabilities is not to compare, but to bring attention to this group. I want to highlight some of …