Ryan Lake (1976-2025) Ryan Lake, assistant professor of philosophy at Perimeter College at Georgia State University, has died. Ryan’s philosophical interests were mainly on questions related to freedom and determinism. In addition to his academic work and teaching, Ryan dedicated a significant amount of time and effort popularizing philosophy. His main channel for this was his philosophical comic strip, Chaospet, which I was fortunate to be able to publish for several years at Daily Nous. You can view those comics here. He also had a series of philosophy videos on TikTok. Ryan defended a version of compatibilism, yet a recurring theme of his comics was the absurdity of human agency, responsibility, and valuing in a mechanical and indifferent universe. (Chaospet by Ryan Lake, January 15, 2019)  For Ryan, the absurdity of our condition also included the human capacity, or perhaps need, to grasp for the silver lining in what seem like metaphysically or epistemically undesirable conditions.  (Chaospet by Ryan Lake, September 12, 2017)  And of course he did not exempt his own way of grappling with the human condition from his ironic lens. (Chaospet by Ryan Lake, September 20, 2022)  Ryan died of cancer. He was 48 years old. The post https://dailynous.com/2025/08/21/ryan-lake-1976-2025/ . https://dailynous.com/2025/08/21/ryan-lake-1976-2025/

“Pity the Poor Reader” “Pity the poor reader” is one of philosopher Penelope Maddy‘s writing maxims. Maddy is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Irvine, and is interviewed about her writing by Nathan Ballantyne (Arizona State) at his site, The Workbench. What does she mean by it? She says: In philosophy especially, I figure the reader is nearly always gasping for breath, in danger of being swept out to sea, so the writer should do everything in their power to help. Keep things as simple and explicit, as direct and straightforward as you can. Don’t hedge or obfuscate. Don’t use jargon unless you define it. (Philosophical words—realism, analyticity, empiricism, etc.—are used in so many different ways that it’s not safe to call on one without saying explicitly what you mean by it.) Give concrete examples. Down to earth examples are always best, I think… I sometimes said to my students, I don’t care what happens on Mars (Twin Earth, etc.), tell me what happens here! Later in the interview she shares a variant of this advice, picked up during her time in grad school at Princeton, which she has passed on to others: At the time, [Thomas Nagel] lived in New York City and commuted down to Princeton by train. Rumor had it that he read his students’ short papers during the train ride, with all the noise and distractions that would involve. So the grad student scuttlebutt was that we needed to write our papers clearly and directly enough to come through to someone in that challenging environment. I used to share that advice with my students: Write for Nagel on the Train.  The interview contains further interesting details about Maddy’s writing, along with more bits of writing advice. You can read the whole interview here. Discussion welcome, as are writing suggestions. The post https://dailynous.com/2025/08/25/pity-the-poor-reader/ . https://dailynous.com/2025/08/25/pity-the-poor-reader/

Mini-Heap Recent links… While much has been written about how current generations should wield the power they have to affect future generations, almost nothing has been written on whether that power is legitimate — but there’s a question there. Is it a good one? Emil Andersson thinks so To what extent is visual perception influenced by one’s culture? — a look at some recent findings “Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world” — the 21 rules of 17th Century Samurai Miyamoto Musashi (interesting on their own but also for lessons on Stoic and Buddhist philosophy) “Philosophy majors scored higher than students in all other majors on standardized tests of verbal and logical reasoning, as well as on self-reports of good habits of mind, even after accounting for freshman-year differences” — Vazquez & Prinzing’s op-ed on their research (covered previously at DN) is being republished in several popular news venues “It was new math… A machine just contributed original research-level mathematics” — ChatGPT-5-Pro “reasoned for 17 minutes, and produced a correct proof,” making novel progress on an open problem in math (via MR) “In living things, unlike in machines, unreliable parts make a reliable whole” and “the unreliability of biological building blocks is not a bug, it’s a feature” — a way of thinking about the difference between organisms and machines “Expertise induces epistemic opacity to outsiders.” Was Aristotle aware of this problem? And what did he think the solution is? — Eric Schliesser on epistemic trespassing, synthetic philosophy, and On the Parts of Animals Mini-Heap posts usually appear when several new items accumulate in the Heap of Links, a collection of items from around the web that may be of interest to philosophers. The Heap of Links consists partly of suggestions from readers; if you find something online that you think would be of interest to the philosophical community, please send it in for consideration for the Heap. Thank you.Previous edition.   The post https://dailynous.com/2025/08/25/mini-heap-673/ . https://dailynous.com/2025/08/25/mini-heap-673/

Philosopher’s Annual for 2024 The articles that made it into the latest edition of Philosophers Annual have been announced. The list aims to “select the ten best articles published in philosophy each year—an attempt as simple to state as it is admittedly impossible to fulfill.” This volume—the 44th—covers the literature from 2024. The selections are: Rosalind Chaplin (UNC Chapel Hill), “Kant on the Conceptual Possibility of Actually Infinite Tota Synthetica,” from Kantian Review Most interpreters hold that Kant rejects actually infinite tota synthetica as conceptually impossible. This view is attributed to Kant to relieve him of the charge that the first antinomy’s thesis argument presupposes transcendental idealism. I argue that important textual evidence speaks against this view, and Kant in fact affirms the conceptual possibility of actually infinite tota synthetica. While this means the first antinomy may not be decisive as an indirect argument for idealism, it gives us a better account of how our ideas of the unconditioned generate the antinomies, and it allows us to see important and often overlooked elements in Kant’s account of the infinite. Nicholas DiBella (Carnegie Mellon), “Cantor, Choice, and Paradox,” from The Philosophical Review This article proposes a revision of Cantor’s account of set size that understands comparisons of set size fundamentally in terms of surjections rather than injections. This revised account is equivalent to Cantor’s account if the axiom of choice is true, but its consequences differ from those of Cantor’s if the axiom of choice is false. This article argues that the revised account is an intuitive generalization of Cantor’s account, blocks paradoxes—most notably, that a set can be partitioned into a set that is bigger than it—that can arise from Cantor’s account if the axiom of choice is false, illuminates the debate over whether the axiom of choice is true, is a mathematically fruitful alternative to Cantor’s account, and sheds philosophical light on one of the oldest unsolved problems in set theory. Caspar Jacobs (Leiden), “Comparativist Theories or Conspiracy Theories?” from The Journal of Philosophy Although physical theories routinely posit absolute quantities, such as absolute position or intrinsic mass, it seems that only comparative quantities such as distance and mass ratio are observable. But even if there are in fact only distances and mass ratios, the success of absolutist.. The post https://dailynous.com/2025/08/17/philosophers-annual-for-2024/ . https://dailynous.com/2025/08/17/philosophers-annual-for-2024/

Texas Hires Gustafsson and Ward Philosophers Johan Gustafsson and Thomas Ward have been hired by the University of Texas at Austin. Johan Gustafsson was most recently senior research fellow at the University of York. He joins the UT Austin Department of Philosophy this fall as full professor. His research covers a range of topics in moral and political philosophy, and he is the author of Money-Pump Arguments (2022), among many other works. You can learn more about his writings at here and here. Thomas Ward was previously associate professor of philosophy at Baylor University. This fall, he will be associate professor in the School of Civic Leadership at UT Austin with a courtesy appointment as associate professor in the Department of Philosophy. Ward works on the history of philosophy, especially medieval philosophy, and has authored several books in the area. You can learn more about his work here and here. Additionally, UT Austin’s Department of Philosophy hired Jens Jäger, who will start as assistant professor this fall. The post https://dailynous.com/2025/08/11/texas-hires-gustafsson-and-ward/ . https://dailynous.com/2025/08/11/texas-hires-gustafsson-and-ward/

Opportunity to Volunteer to Teach Online Courses for Ukrainian Universities A pair of philosophers have created a program that facilitates volunteers for team-teaching online courses at Ukrainian universities. The European Initiative for Online Tandem Courses for Ukrainian Universities launched in September of last year. It arranges for teams of two European university lecturers from two different countries to offer philosophy seminars via a virtual platform (such as Zoom) at Ukrainian universities. It is done on a voluntary basis and at no cost to the universities. The aims of the program include communicating to Ukrainian students and scholars: that Ukraine is not alone in this terrible war of aggression and that we as European partners stand in solidarity with Ukraine, that Ukraine is already part of a peaceful and cooperative Europe today, that Russian aggression cannot prevent Ukraine and its European partners from living the “European way of life”, with the tandem teaching method of two lecturers from different European countries, that we work together within the European Union across national and language borders, and opportunities for gaining academic contacts throughout Europe. The initiative was created by Ulrich Arnswald (University of Innsbruck, Austria) and Joaquín Jareño Alarcon (University of Murcia, Spain), who have been teaching a two-hour seminar once a week for the Oles Honchar Dnipro National University in Dnipro, close to the front line. Professor Arnswald says, “Every seminar is extremely intensive, the students are highly motivated (and there are good reasons for this) and, despite the strong focus on the philosophical content, you gradually learn more about the war, personal feelings and concerns.” About the program as a whole, the organizers write: When we developed this initiative, we remembered the Samizdat underground seminars of the Cold War. At that time, various philosophers such as Charles Taylor, Roger Scruton, Jacques Derrida, and R.M. Hare participated in a kind of “underground university” in Czechoslovakia, one of the most repressive states behind the Iron Curtain. This group came together on short notice, the seminars took place in private flats in the Czechoslovakia over a few days, and then the colleagues left the country again to avoid being picked up by the secret service. It was an adventurous undertaking, described in a book by Barbara Day entitled The Velvet Philosophers (1999). What this generation did for.. The post https://dailynous.com/2025/07/30/opportunity-to-volunteer-to-teach-online-courses-for-ukrainian-universities/ . https://dailynous.com/2025/07/30/opportunity-to-volunteer-to-teach-online-courses-for-ukrainian-universities/