Philosophical notes…
On Civic Education
“But the correct approach isn’t to decree, once and for all, what does or doesn’t count as religion; it’s to ask how a plural democracy can accommodate competing visions of the good. Ours is a nation of technocratic managerialists and natural-law traditionalists, Baptists and Buddhists, nationalists and cosmopolitans. The task is to live together across these divides. Religion, whatever else it may be, is one dimension of that challenge. What students need — in Texas and everywhere else — is not a government-issued decalogue but a civic education sturdy enough to meet that challenge.”
Kwame Appiah, “Students in Texas Need Something, But It’s Not the Ten Commandments” - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/04/opinion/texas-separation-church-state.html. Appiah provides a helpful summary of conceptual challenges when considering religion in democratic societies. Scholars, not unlike judges, do not share a common definition. There are a variety of contexts in which they try to make sense of competing interests. As he rightly concludes, the problem is not that we don’t have a single definition, which could be applied to all cases. Rather we lack sufficiently “sturdy” “civic education.” Much more could be said at this point and presumably his forthcoming book does just that.
For instance, as I’ve written about elsewhere, this might include pedagogical practices that train students to understand diverse religions inclusive of their own, apply the term in different contexts where relevant, and respond equitably to each other as human beings with common human rights. All roads in such civic education don’t lead to Mecca, Rome, Jerusalem or any other more general religious focal point like ultimate reality. Rather, it is marked by the bare minimums required to prepare students to deliberate meaningfully in diverse democracies. The underlying problem is the coercive force with which one religious view is imposed to the exclusion of others. This paradox of tolerance is not complicated. It’s captured in a no parking sign, which aims to create pathways for other people to freely enter and exit an educational space.
Of course, in that sense, the article’s title seems to mislead. Civic education of this sort would include studying the variety of ways the Ten Commandments are presented in different traditions. Or maybe, the title relies on the premise that most students don’t need the Ten Commandments posted on their classroom’s wall because they are readily available to anyone who searches Wikipedia.
On Hegel’s Coffee
“A surprising amount of G.W.F. Hegel’s letters to friends and family touch on the subject of coffee. The best manner and machinery for brewing it (e.g., a Rumford coffee maker produced in Munich), the correct way to spell the word in Vienna (‘Kaffeh’), its beneficial qualities as a way to sharpen one’s mind (necessary when one wants to write philosophy and not mere journalism), and, most passionately of all, how poorly all substitute brews compare to that coffee which is made from real coffee beans. Chicory and carrot-based replacements, the primary offenders discussed by Hegel, are described as ‘deceptive’ and compared to ‘bear shit...’ These musings even make their way into the preface of the Phenomenology of Spirit, wherein a parallel is drawn between what might currently pass for philosophy (good common sense and claims to possess immediate revelation of the divine) and what passes for coffee (chicory root). In both instances Hegel seems to imply two things: that the surrogate simply is not up to snuff, and that too many people are willing to treat it as if it were the real deal.”
Marie Louise Krogh, “Hegel’s ‘Brown Rivulet of Coffee’: Colonies, Commodities, and Context” - https://www.jhiblog.org/2025/09/22/hegels-brown-rivulet-of-coffee-colonies-commodities-and-context/. A very good example of how materialist studies of ideas can inform political philosophy. As she concludes, “Following the ‘thing’ in this way provides a lens through which different contextual scales can be refracted against one another: the nearness of everyday life in the German territories in the early nineteenth century and the broad trans-national stakes of imperial formations and trade links across the globe.”
On Chasing Books
“Chasing makes you more active and critical of what you read. This helps you learn more. As Hanson writes, ‘search-readers often don’t have a good mental place to put each thing they learn. [...] Chasers, in contrast, always have specific mental places they are trying to fill with what they read, so they better integrate new things they learn with old things they know.’ When you chase, you continually ask yourself whether what you are reading ‘is relevant for your quest, or whether the author actually has anything new or interesting to say.’ This means you drop books that don’t advance your understanding about the questions that matter to you, so you can find the books that do answer them and transform your thinking.”
Henrik Karlsson, “How I Read” - https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/how-i-read. Most of my reading follows this pattern. I read to chase ideas, solve problems and attach ideas to mental furniture I have built up over decades. It’s also important to note that the books I tend to read are also written along these lines. As Karlsson concludes, “Good books are compressed thoughts… that someone spent two years thinking.” My own research writing similarly calls for slow reading by those interested in similar problems. Slow reading like slow food is worth the effort, and good philosophy should feel like taking in the complexity of a rich mole sauce.
On Habits of Mind
“Many philosophers think that doing philosophy cultivates valuable intellectual abilities and dispositions. Indeed this is a premise in a venerable argument for philosophy’s value. Unfortunately, empirical support for this premise has heretofore been lacking. We provide evidence that philosophical study has such effects. Using a large dataset (including records from over half a million undergraduates at hundreds of institutions across the United States), we investigate philosophy students’ performance on verbal and logical reasoning tests, as well as measures of valuable intellectual dispositions. Results indicate that students with stronger verbal abilities, and who are more curious, open-minded, and intellectually rigorous, are more likely to study philosophy. Nonetheless, after accounting for such baseline differences, philosophy majors outperform all other majors on tests of verbal and logical reasoning and on a measure of valuable habits of mind. This offers the strongest evidence to date that studying philosophy does indeed make people better thinkers.”
Michael Prinzing and Michael Vasquez, “Studying Philosophy Does Make People Better Thinkers,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association. The kind of thing you’d expect from philosophers, but some interesting evidence the skills produced through studying philosophy do make a difference.
On Deskilling
“The relationship between democracy and artificial intelligence (AI) is attracting attention, given fast-paced developments in AI and their implications for the political public sphere. The idea of ‘public reason’ can illuminate important dimensions of this relationship. Public reason is a standard of reciprocal legitimation and justificatory practice given democratic disagreement. This paper argues that AI might threaten the prospects of public reason when applied to policy debates. On the ‘civic friendship’ conception of public reason, the practice of reasoning is grounded in embodied joint action and having shared experiences. Accordingly, public reason as a reciprocal justificatory practice requires being skilled in human capacities like justice, joint action, patience and moral attention. Yet AI tools (e.g. recommender systems, personalized AI aids and AI deliberative democracy platforms) that afford disembodied, mediated interaction, threaten to deskill humans of those capacities, by creating environments that afford less opportunities to engage in activities in which the capacities are cultivated and practiced. AI tools involved in democratic deliberations can provide efficiency, scalability, and improved understanding of policy issues among participants. However, on balance, uncritical integration of such tools could deskill public reason capacities, leading to the erosion of mutual assurance between citizens, and ultimately undermining trust in democratic deliberation.”
Avigail Ferdman, “AI, Deskilling, and the Prospects for Public Reason,” Minds and Machines - https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11023-025-09737-w. Interesting essay on the implications of AI and democratic practice. I’ll be teaching a week on Zuboff’s surveillance capitalism, which raises concerns about technological erosions of democratic freedoms. As well, we’ll be looking at the implications of new Habermas machines built by Google engineers recently along similar lines to this essay’s concerns. In any case, the work provides important context to consider wider popular interest in democratic AI initiatives.
On Alien Recognition
“What does an ant see when it looks at your face? I didn’t know. I thought about ants because a bug’s perspective seemed like the most alien thing I could imagine. I didn’t understand then that the machine behind the eye of that camera is much more alien than an ant. Scientists know a lot of things about insect optical processing. But no one knows what artificial intelligence sees when it looks at a picture of your face. The large language models that programmers train to identify faces are black boxes. Even the engineers don’t know how or in what form your face appears to the system. All they know is that AI likes your face to be brightly lit. And that it prefers for you not to smile.”
Michael Clune - https://harpers.org/archive/2025/08/your-face-tomorrow-michael-clune-ai-facial-recognition. This an interesting summary of AI limits to facial recognition. Whenever I read someone compare AI to alien intelligence it reminds me of Weizenbaum’s similar in sight in his 1976 Computer Power and Human Reason. This week I was discussing with students in class some recent limits in AI technology. One of the students uploaded Picasso’s Guernica to test image reconition software we gave them to play with online. It demonstrated clearly how much the technologies can’t ‘recognize’ and even direct comparisons of the same face typically only share 80% confidence. Nonetheless, when asked if they’d prefer a doctor’s diagnosis alone, or an AI diagnosis alone, or a combination of both, the majority opted for the latter. What’s interesting is how best to model such collaborations. To address this challenge we’re comparing models of AI with more sophisticated accounts of human cognition. For instance, last week outlined human excellence at the frame problem in light of Dreyfus’s model of skill in What Computers Still Can’t Do. That was context to compare with computer science summaries of how AI technologies work. The course is unique in that it includes computer science, mathematics and philosophy academics all presenting and discussing these matters together with students each week.
On Cellular Memory
“Perhaps a definition of memory should extend beyond behavior to encompass more records of the past. A vaccination is a kind of memory. So is a scar, a child, a book. ‘If you make a footprint, it’s a memory,’ Gershman said. An interpretation of memory as a physical event — as a mark made on the world, or on the self — would encompass the biochemical changes that occur within a cell. ‘Biological systems have evolved to harness those physical processes that retain information and use them for their own purposes,’ Gershman said. So, what does a cell know of itself? Perhaps a better version of Barbara McClintock’s question is: What can a cell remember? When it comes to survival, what a cell knows of itself isn’t as important as what it knows of the world: how it incorporates information about its experiences to determine when to bend, when to battle and when to make a break for it.”
Claire Evans - https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-can-a-cell-remember-20250730/. I’m between writing projects at the moment, focused on a new course in ethics, and finishing editing tasks for past projects in press now. I hope to return to the implications of this work on cell memory in future work on biosemiotics and biodeconstruction.
On Questioning AI
“Of course, none of these tools can tell us the ‘right’ answers to philosophical questions because there are none. These are timeless debates, designed to stretch us. But that’s exactly why they matter. When we explore questions like these, we’re also exploring how we define ourselves: what we value, how we decide, and what we believe it means to be human. So, can AI really help us think through those things? I think it can, at least a little. These tools reflect the worldviews, biases, and knowledge structures of the data they’re trained on. No, they don’t have beliefs or experiences. But they do model how we argue and explain. And sometimes that’s enough to help us form our own answers. Especially if any of us are lacking someone who’ll adopt the role of a critical thinking partner in real life. In the end, using AI to explore philosophical questions is less about the answers and more about the act of questioning itself. It turns the tool into a mirror. One that helps us see how we think, what we notice, and where we might go next.”
On Humboldt’s World
“By midcentury, the culture of German universities looked a lot like that of modern academia. Professors split their time between research and teaching duties, but found research ever more relevant for their own professional advancement. They considered themselves members of distinct fields with their own practices and methods. They published in specialized journals. They wrote their own dissertations, which contained original contributions to human knowledge. Everyone agreed that there were way too many adjuncts. Every university in the world today has incorporated at least some element of this model... Of course, nobody took to the German university ideal more eagerly than the Americans. The founders of Johns Hopkins and the University of Chicago were explicitly built on German models. Charles Eliot, the president of Harvard from 1869 to 1909, was a committed Germanophile, and reformed Harvard’s graduate school along German lines. The whole institutional structure of American graduate education is German, from academic departments (an outgrowth of the seminar) to doctoral dissertations. It’s Humboldt’s world, and we’re just living in it. ”
Clara Collier, “The Origin of the Research University” - https://asteriskmag.com/issues/10/the-origin-of-the-research-university.
On Cooperation
“AI is very good at retrieving knowledge and reasoning about formal problems, but many of the issues that we face today require a different sort of skill—the ability to bring people together to cooperate. We have yet to see much evidence that AI is good at this—although there have been some early attempts, including one that I led at Deepmind. [A study on whether AI can function as a political mediator.] The ability to solve formal problems, like playing Go at Grandmaster level or solving logic puzzles, does not necessarily equip you for the real world, where things tend to be quite messy. Outcomes are uncertain—stochastic rather than deterministic—and challenges can arise without warning.”
Nick Hildon - https://nautil.us/ai-has-already-run-us-over-the-cliff-1217080/. This is Chris Summerfield’s response to the question “Many people envision a near future where AI solves the looming issues of the day, but as you discuss in the book, this expectation may be misplaced. Why?” This is an interesting summary of Summerfield’s book, These Strange New Minds.