Well, at least one can hardly accuse this ethicist of mere armchair philosophising:

The cultists, the mind demons and the coup plan are the sort of thing we’ve learnt to expect from 2021, but some details take a turn for the absurd:

I am now wondering whether Peisithanatos counted as a Motivational Philosopher:

Too little influence of environmental philosophy, or too much...?

Wanting the truth doesn’t mean you aren’t training people to lie to you. I learnt this way back when I tried answering Panelbase surveys: completing a survey earnt a small amount of money, but it had to be a completed survey, and many surveys included screening questions. Give a disliked answer to one of those and …

Thanks, Doctor Irvine. Now I get to spend the rest of the day speculating about who this was.

Not mocking armchair philosophy now, are they?

Reports are circulating (seemingly sourced from a paywalled Telegraph article) about the Oxford Philosophy Dept.’s attempts to bolster female confidence by manipulating reading lists, e.g. converting ‘G.E.M. Anscombe’ into ‘Elizabeth Anscombe’. Having once had a (female) tutee who thought Martha Nussbaum was a ‘he’, I’m not sure whether it’s optimism or pessimism Oxford has in excess.

I interviewed Tony Milligan (K.C.L.) about the ethics of space exploration for Pod Academy. It was his work on cultural value in space I built on/responded to in my piece for Commercial Space Exploration: Ethics, Policy and Governance, and as things turned out we were co-contributors to that volume, so it was particularly interesting to have …

strangely shaped pieces of meta

Yes. Well. I’m glad the most I generally have to deal with is whether one may write ‘indigenous’ without capitalisation.

Despite our both having links to Durham’s Philosophy Dept. I’ve never met Thom Brooks, who I think came to Durham shortly before I stopped being physically there. Occasionally he makes waves I notice: once some students contacted me hoping I could advise on getting a critical response published to something he’d written (they were into polyamory …

Until recently I thought the trickiest thing about long-term intergenerational ethics was the need to peer into distant, largely unpredictable futures. I have changed my mind. After pondering sentences like ‘Unborn generations depend on us’ (will depend? are going to depend? will be already depending? are yet going to have used to depend? will have been …

As I understand it (from some distance), the story so far goes something like this: (1) The students’ union at the School of Oriental and African Studies urges that its philosophy-related courses should teach mostly African and Asian thinkers (not in itself startling given the name of the institution), and insofar as white philosophers must be …

It’s a good thing polling day is nearly upon us; things are getting too meta even for me. I think we’re now onto critcisms of the tone of accusations of lowering the tone of the debate.