LMU Munich Philosophy Faculty

Out now: *The Ethics of Behavior Change Technologies*, edited by Joel Anderson, Lily Frank & Andreas Spahn, featuring "Control, personal autonomy and behaviour change technologies", by me: www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph-de... #philosophy #technologyethics #aiethics

LMU Munich invites applications for a W2 Professorship in Philosophy Education, starting in October 2026. We are looking for candidates with an outstanding research record in philosophy and a strong profile in philosophy education.
Deadline: 15 November 2025:
job-portal.lmu.de/jobposting/b...

LMU Munich's Chair of Metaphysics, Prof Dr Alyssa Ney, joins Roger Penrose and Jacob Barandes in a debate about one of quantum theory's biggest mysteries: the collapse of the wave function, here: iai.tv/video/the-co... #philosophy

Newly published: "Learning How to Vote with Principles: Axiomatic Insights Into the Collective Decisions of Neural Networks", by Levin Hornischer and Zoi Terzopoulou, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 2025, doi.org/10.1613/jair...

Factual Difference-Making In this paper, we analyse causation in terms of factual difference-making. Factual difference-making is an alternative to counterfactual difference-making which does not face the problem of redunda...

Newly published: Lead article “Factual Difference-Making”, by Holger Andreas and Mario Günther, Australasian Philosophical Review, 2025, doi.org/10.1080/2474...

Can AI systems have free will? - Synthese While there has been much discussion of whether AI systems could function as moral agents or acquire sentience, there has been very little discussion of whether AI systems could have free will. I sket...

Newly published: "Can AI systems have free will?", by Christian List, Synthese, 2025, link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Technology Ethics Podcast A podcast-based introduction to the philosophy and ethics of technology

Are you teaching or taking an ethics of technology course this fall? Whether or not you're using my *This is Technology Ethics* book, you might find this 10-episode podcast (w/ the same title as the book) by ‪@johndanaher.bsky.social‬ & me useful: technologyethicspod.wordpress.com #aiethics

YouTube video by MCML_Munich Center for Machine Learning What is intelligence—and what kind of intelligence do we want in our future? With Prof. Sven Nyholm

🎥 Who gets the credit, or the blame, when AI makes decisions? Sven Nyholm ( #LMU/ #MCML) reflects on how AI challenges our ideas of agency, credit, and blame — and why we need new ways of thinking about authorship, justice, and decision-making.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUqi...

#AI #Ethics

Newly published: "The Worrisome Potential of Outsourcing Critical Thinking to Artificial Intelligence", by Ron Aboodi, Educational Theory, 2025, onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....

YouTube video by Center for Advanced Studies LMU George Ellis - CAS Lecture Series Cosmology - A Fine Tuned Universe: Issues, Evidence, Implications

Georg Ellis explains his ideas about a "Fine Tuned Universe". A wonderful highlight of this summer's lecture series at CAS!
(Re)Watch now on YouTube:

#cosmology
www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6Xw...

Quantenphysik: Gibt es eine objektive Realität? Die Quantenmechanik bleibt selbst Physikern ein Rätsel. Gibt es eine Realität auch ohne Beobachtung? Und wo bleibt da der freie Wille?

Dazu wie die Quantenmechanik funktioniert, gibt es in der Wissenschaft unterschiedliche Positionen.
Stephan Hartmann, #CASSchwerpunkt "Bayesian Methods" sagt @szde.bsky.social: "Die Wellenfunktion ist nichts, was da draußen existiert."
@lmu-mcmp.bsky.social
www.sueddeutsche.de/projekte/art...

ABSTRACT. A probability aggregation rule assigns to each profile of probability functions across a group of individuals (representing their individual probability assignments to some propositions) a collective probability function (representing the group’s probability assignment). The rule is ‘non-manipulable’ if no group member can manipulate the collective probability for any proposition in the direction of his or her own probability by misrepresenting his or her probability function (‘strategic voting’). We show that, except in trivial cases, no probability aggregation rule satisfying two very mild conditions (non-dictatorship and consensus preservation) is non-manipulable.

Just accepted:

‘The Impossibility of Non-manipulable Probability Aggregation’
– Franz Dietrich & Christian List

Abstract in alt text or read the full paper here:
www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

#philsci #philsky

Bender from Göttingen to LMU Munich - Daily Nous Sebastian Bender, currently "juniorprofessor" at the University of Göttingen, will be moving to Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU Munich), where he will be professor of early modern philosop...

Congratulations and all the best wishes to our author Sebastian Bender @lmuphilosophy.bsky.social
dailynous.com/2025/07/10/b...

Proofs and Research Programmes: Lakatos at 100 This open access book offers new insights into issues raised in philosophy of mathematics and in philosophy of science by Imre Lakatos.

Excited to share that the volume Lakatos @ 100 has just been published (open access)! It’s a great collection on Lakatos’s legacy.

📘 Book link: link.springer.com/book/10.1007...
Grateful to the editors for including me!

#Lakatos #PhilosophyOfScience #Bayes #OpenAccess

Culturally Sustainable Social Robotics (Social and Cultural Studies of Robots and AI) Culturally Sustainable Social Robotics (Social and Cultural Studies of Robots and AI) [Hakli, Raul, Nyholm, Sven, Nørskov, Marco, Nørskov, Sladjana] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Culturally Sustainable Social Robotics (Social and Cultural Studies of Robots and AI)

Coming soon: *Social Robots and Cultural Sustainability*, edited by Raul Hakli, me, Marco Nørskov & Sladjana Nørskov. Featuring chapters by @coeckelbergh.bsky.social, @davidgunkel.bsky.social @annapuzio.bsky.social etc. Planned publication date: Oct 27, 2025 www.amazon.com/Culturally-S... #aiethics

Poster for a 2-day workshop: IT FROM BIT A Workshop on the Metaphysics of John Archibald Wheeler All talks held in Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1, M210 Friday, 11 July 2025 900: Christopher Fuchs (U Mass Boston), "QBism and the Path to Wheelerizing Physics" 1100: Daniele Oriti (Complutense), "It-from-Bit and Gravity" 1400: George Webster (Oxford), ""It from Bit" as a Critical Idealist Proposal" 1500: Stefano Furlan (Utrecht), "Beyond the End of Time: Wheeler's Prolegomenon to "It from Bit"" 1615: Alyssa Ney (LMU), "Why Did Wheeler Reject the Everett Interpretation?" Saturday, 12 July 2025 900: Matthew Leifer (Chapman), "It from Bit from It" 1100: Graham Doke (Oxford), "From Bit to It to an Ontology for QBism" 1400: Victor Tremblay-Baillargeon (Montréal), "The Renderer's Dilemma: An Incompleteness Argument against It-from-Bit Ontology" 1500: John Dougherty (LMU), "It-from-Bit in QFT" 1615: Chris Timpson (Oxford), "It-from-Bit, Idealism, Fragmentalism, and Loneliness"

Just arrived in Munich for a workshop at @lmuphilosophy.bsky.social on “It from Bit” and the metaphysics of John Archibald Wheeler.

Very much looking forward to the talks and discussion!

@alyssaney.bsky.social

#philsky #philsci

Sebastian Bender I am an Assistant Professor (a tenure track "Juniorprofessor") at the Philosophy Department of University of Göttingen. Before coming to Göttingen, I held positions at Humboldt University in Berlin (w...

Thrilled to announce that Sebastian Bender is joining LMU Munich as Professor of Early Modern Philosophy. His expertise in 17th-18th c. metaphysics & epistemology (Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant) will boost our History of Philosophy section. Welcome, Sebastian! sebastianbender.net

The Future of Human Responsibility Artificially intelligent technologies – i.e., technologies that can take over tasks that human beings use their intelligence to perform – raise questions about moral responsibility. As we move into a...

Out now: A Companion to Applied Philosophy of A (edited by Regina Müller & Martin Hähnel), featuring my contribution "The Future of Human Responsibility: AI, Responsibility Gaps, and Asymmetries Between Praise and Blame": doi.org/10.1002/9781... #aiethics #philosophy

Do our observations make reality happen? Finally answering the most-vexed question in quantum theory might mean redefining what is real.

"Do our observations make reality happen?" - new article in *Nature* by LMU Munich's Chair of Metaphysics, Professor Alyssa Ney. Check it out here:
www.nature.com/articles/d41... #philosophy #lmumunich #metaphysics

Thanks for following me here on Bluesky!

Here a link to my podcast on the History of Philosophy "without any gaps":

www.historyofphilosophy.net

And to the corresponding book series from Oxford University Press:

global.oup.com/academic/con...

Just submitted the revised manuscript for HoPWaG volume 8, Philosophy in the Reformation! This is the version that will go to press, so I hope it will be out by the end of the year.

This is based on episodes 371-461 of the podcast, without the interviews of course; it will be 73 chapters long.

The Munich Lectures in Ethics 2025

***Coming up next week (June 3-5): the 2025 Munich Lectures in Ethics: Professor David Enoch (Oxford/Hebrew University of Jerusalem) on "Autonomy, Consent, Liberalism". With commentators Prof. Dorothea Gädeke, Prof. Rae Langton & Prof. Robert Simpson. More info here: eveeno.com/MLE25 #philosophy ***

Newly published: "Belief revision based on information states: hyperintensionality, fragmentation, and consistency", by Sena Bozdag, Doctoral Dissertation, LMU Munich, 2025, edoc.ub.uni-muenchen.de/35073/

Recently published: "Information-Theoretic Concepts in Physics", special issue of Entropy, edited by Michael E. Cuffaro and Stephan Hartmann, 2025 www.mdpi.com/journal/entr...

Thousands of small dots in 10 different colors on a white background. Dots with the same color form clusters. A dot represents an input-label pair ('possible world'). Close-by dots are possible worlds that are similar according to the neural network's reasons structure ('internally similar'). The fact that they form monochromatic clusters means that internally similar worlds typically are also externally similar, i.e., have the same label. In this case, there are 10 labels represented by the 10 colors. So the neural network's reasons structure matches that of the world.

New preprint, with Hannes Leitgeb @lmu-mcmp.bsky.social: "Explaining Neural Networks with Reasons".

➡️We propose a new faithful and scalable interpretability method for neural networks.
💡Based on a novel mathematico-philosophical theory of reasons.

arxiv.org/abs/2505.14424
philpapers.org/rec/HORENN

A theory of everything will never work at all scales | Stephan Hartmann

Just released by the Institute of Art and Ideas (@iai.tv): Stephan Hartmann (of @lmumuenchen.bsky.social) on why "A theory of everything will never work at all scales"

"Reality is fundamentally different at different sizes."

Coming up at @lmuphilosophy.bsky.social: the 2025 Munich Lectures in Ethics with Prof. David Enoch (of @ox.ac.uk, @oxfordlawfac.bsky.social & @hebrewuniversity.bsky.social), on “Autonomy, Consent, Liberalism”, with comments by Profs Dorothea Gädeke, Rae Langton and Robert Simpson. Spread the word!

Continuing the MCMP's thread of recent publications: "Axioms for type-free subjective probability", by Cezary Cieśliński, Leon Horsten, and Hannes Leitgeb, Review of Symbolic Logic, 2024, doi.org/10.1017/S175...

We continue the MCMP's series of recent publications: "Quantum Computing", by Michael Cuffaro and Amit Hagar, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2024, plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr...

Logical norms as defeasible obligations: disentangling sound and feasible inferences This paper develops a novel approach to the question of the normativity of logic, which we reinterpret as a clash between two intuitions: the direct normativity intuition and the unfeasibility intu...

We'll introduce ourselves to Bluesky with a series of posts about recent publications coming out of the MCMP. Here is the first post: "Logical norms as defeasible obligations: disentangling sound and feasible inferences", by Matteo De Benedetto and Alessandra Marra, Inquiry, 2024