Why did such highly abstract ideas as truth, knowledge, or justice become so important to us? What was the point of coming to think in these terms? In The Practical Origins of Ideas, Matthieu Queloz presents a philosophical method designed to answer such questions: the method of pragmatic genealogy. Pragmatic genealogies are partly fictional, partly historical narratives exploring what might ha…
Can humans and artificial intelligences share concepts and communicate? One aim of Making AI Intelligible is to show that philosophical work on the metaphysics of meaning can help answer these questions. Cappelen and Dever use the externalist tradition in philosophy of to create models of how AIs and humans can understand each other. In doing so, they also show ways in which that philosophical …
Our minds have physical effects. This happens, for instance, when we move our bodies when we act. How is this possible? Thomas Kroedel defends an account of mental causation in terms of difference-making: if our minds had been different, the physical world would have been different; therefore, the mind causes events in the physical world. His account not only explains how the mind has physical …