Top News, Articles, and Interviews in Philosophy

The Career Trajectories and Workplace Skills of Philosophy and Language Majors

2. August 2019 Philosophy News News
A new study looks at the jobs and skills of college graduates, including those who major in philosophy, finds that choice of major “isn’t as deterministic of our work as we might believe,” and aims to help students understand how their education has prepared them for the job market. The study, “Degrees at Work,” by Clare Coffey, Rob Sentz, and Yustina Saleh, and published by the data analytics firm, Emsi, sorted college graduates from a database of over 100 million people by group, putting together those who major in philosophy and languages—“Two degrees that aren’t career-specific or as tied to the world of work (and are therefore the ones that get a vast bulk of the criticism [for being impractical])”. Not surprisingly, philosophy and language graduates “go into a broad array of jobs”: The top five first jobs are in the fields of education (17% of language and philosophy grads go into education jobs), journalism/writing (10%), sales (10%), marketing (7%), and service-oriented non-profits (6%).  The following graph shows how the popularity of different types of jobs changes over time as graduates in philosophy and language move from their first to their second and third jobs. (It lists types of jobs on the left, listed in order of popularity as first job.) So, for example, when it comes to the first job taken by philosophy and language graduates, the fourth most popular type of job is in marketing. When it comes [More]
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A triple turnstile!

2. August 2019 Philosophy News News
You want a nice triple turnstile which matches in size and weight the usual Computer Modern \vdash and \vDash turnstiles? Look no further. Here’s the trick, also linked for future reference on the LaTeX for Logicians symbols page. The post A triple turnstile! appeared first on Logic [More]
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Elementary reading about why we might doubt Excluded Middle?

2. August 2019 Philosophy News News
If, by some chance, you were writing a couple of pages of recommendations for “Further reading” for an elementary logic book, and wanted an entry on constructive doubts about the Law of Excluded Middle, what would you choose? Ideally something … Continue reading → The post Elementary reading about why we might doubt Excluded Middle? appeared first on Logic [More]
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The Robotic Disruption of Morality

2. August 2019 Philosophy News News
We increasingly collaborate and interact with robots and AIs. We use them to perform tasks and we also find that our choices and opportunities are affected by their operations. The increasing prevalence of such interactions has led to an explosion of interest in AI ethics and robo-ethics. Squads of academics, technologists and policy-makers are frantically asking how we should use ethical principles to guide and constrain the operation of robots and AIs. The prevailing belief amongst most of these actors is that long-standing human moral beliefs and practices should constrain the operation of these new technologies.There is, however, another kind of inquiry we can conduct into the impact of robotics and AI on morality. Instead of asking how our moral beliefs and practices should constrain the operation of the technology we can ask whether and to what extent the technology is changing our moral beliefs and practices. Admittedly, there are plenty of people interested in asking this question, but it seems to me to be the road that is currently less travelled. That’s why, in the remainder of this article, I want share some thoughts that contribute to this second inquiry.To be more precise, I want to outline one naturalistic theory of how human morality came into being (Michael Tomasello’s theory). I then want to consider how this could be disrupted or undermined by the growing prevalence of robotics and AI. I’m trying to be tentative not dogmatic. I’m very interested in [More]
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Understanding, Explanation, and Scientific Knowledge

2. August 2019 Philosophy News News
2019.08.01 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews Kareem Khalifa, Understanding, Explanation, and Scientific Knowledge, Cambridge University Press, 2017, 252pp., $105.00 (hbk), ISBN 9781107195636. Reviewed by Petri Ylikoski, University of Helsinki Some 20 years ago, understanding was not an important philosophical concept outside philosophy of the human sciences. The word appeared sometimes in texts related to scientific explanation, but it was not a topic of systematic attention. A lot has happened since. Epistemologists and philosophers of science have put forward theories about understanding. Kareem Khalifa's book is an attempt to take stock of the current scene. His approach is relatively conservative as he sets out to defend what he calls the received view on understanding. According to it, understanding consists of knowledge of relevant explanatory information. Basically, the book is an extended argument against various attempts to challenge the received view. Khalifa's defense is based on his Explanation-Knowledge-Science (EKS) model of understanding.... Read [More]
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