Kranti Saran

“What Can a Global Turn in
Philosophy of Science Look Like?”, forthcoming in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, by former Ashoka philosophy undergrad Kabir S. Bakshi.

Congratulations Kabir!

philsci-archive.pitt.edu/26382/

they even exclude one another. The whole plea - for this dream is nothing else - recalls vividly the defence offered by a man who was accused by his neighbour of having returned a kettle in a damaged condition. In the first place, he said, he had returned the kettle undamaged; in the second place it already had holes in it when he borrowed it; and in the third place, he had never borrowed it at all. A complicated defence, but so much the better; if only one of these three lines of defence is recognised as valid, the man must be acquitted.

From Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. Now known as The Trump Defence.

Cover of “every one still here” by Liadan Ni Chuinn

A unique, searing voice, and exceptionally good:

It seems so — he even has a reel explaining why he joined social media.

Werner Herzog is on Instagram:

www.instagram.com/reel/DNyVOOR...

#IndependenceDay

Cover of Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls Trilogy

Easily the best novel(s) I’ve read all year:

Evelyn Waugh

The key argument against delimitation shouldn’t be population policy but the ‘one person, one vote’ principle Supporters of delimitation say that “one person, one vote” justifies delimitation based on population size. But this conclusion is false

A novel and enlightening intervention on the delimitation debate by Bastian Steuwer:

indianexpress.com/article/opin...

Who actually runs Columbia University? | Arjun Appadurai and Sheldon Pollock Trustees aren’t academics – and they’re often political wolves in sheep’s clothing. We need reform to save the American university as we know it

“Boards are accountable to no one – only to themselves, and to some vague set of norms, often unwritten, about their obligations. Accountability is for faculty, administrators, and students.”
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

A welcome Luce cannonade:
archive.ph/EZ8Ys

Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science The Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science is a new, multidisciplinary guide to understanding the mind: a freely-available, growing collection of peer-reviewed articles introducing key topics to a bro...

The MIT Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science is a growing resource, expertly edited and designed, with high quality contributors (OK OK I am one of them) oecs.mit.edu

Pratap telling it like it is. This truly is the land of Maya.

Back in the classroom tomorrow. For the first time ever, my elective Intro. to Philosophy course has more students than the required foundation course I taught last semester (139 vs. 132). Go Ashoka philosophy!

Word.

YouTube video by J. Krishnamurti - Official Channel The computer is taking over | J. Krishnamurti

"If the machine can take over everything man can do and do it still better than us, then what is a human being?... What have we left?" Prescient thoughts circa 1981 by Krishnamurti that bear on the AI-revolution:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kut5...

YouTube video by Robinson Erhardt Ned Block: Consciousness, Artificial Intelligence, and the Philosophy of Mind

Excellent interview of @neddo.bsky.social (www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM1f...)

Fara Dabhoiwala · A Man of Parts and Learning: Francis Williams Gets His Due The only certainty about the picture is that it shows Francis Williams. No one has ever been able to discover who...

This is brilliant. Best thing I’ve read in 2025 (!) but more seriously, one of the best things the LRB has published in recent years. Fara Dabhoiwala on Francis Williams www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Plutocrats and Authoritarian Leaders: Like Flies to Flypaper Curtis Yarvin, darling authoritarian ideologue of many tech billionaires, is back in the news, along with his deep links to J.D. Vance, via Peter Thiel. It’s no secret that plutocrats tend to…

Elizabeth Anderson is on a roll at Crooked Timber these past few weeks:
crookedtimber.org/2024/12/24/p...

Last swim in the ocean for the year.

The highest quality backlit screen I’ve ever seen at any conference at the Saxena Auditorium at IIT-Bombay. @somakrc.bsky.social we should get one of these!

😂

Discussions of machine versus living intelligence need more clarity - Nature Machine Intelligence Sharp distinctions often drawn between machine and biological intelligences have not tracked advances in the fields of developmental biology and hybrid robotics. We call for conceptual clarity driven ...

Nic Rouleau & I: checklist to go through when settling on opinions about AI, diverse intelligence, unconventional cognition, consciousness, mind/machine issues, etc. When you read (or write) about these topics, run the perspective through this, to kick the tires. 🧪
www.nature.com/articles/s42...

IIT-Bombay has pretty sunsets and… unusual signage.

This is what's so baffling about so many suggestions for AI in the humanities classroom: they mistake the product for the point. Writing outlines and essays is important not because you need to make outlines and essays but because that's how you learn to think with/through complex ideas.

Going to use my new publication window as an excuse to repost this thing I made in 2019. My portrait of the great David Lewis in vegemite (and a fair bit of ink, as vegemite turns out to be a lousy medium) on toast. Context below of how this connects with my book... #philsky

“What if we were to build tools that served the needs of society’s most vulnerable members instead of letting entities interested in creating efficient killing machines dictate our scientific and technological futures? Or, to put it more clearly: Who is tech really for?”

It used to be printed on every single school textbook in India.
(I hope our current regime hasn’t changed that!)

You may want to add @cmkorsgaard.bsky.social