Alex Gregory

This navigable and enormous (I'm guessing: comprehensive) tree of life is pretty amazing: www.onezoom.org

It occurs to me that some people might not know of this fantastic guide to punctuation. It manages to be succinct, clear, and sensible. www.sussex.ac.uk/informatics/....

Postdoctoral Researcher in Philosophy Grade 7 Philosophy 095373 £39,355 - £45,413 pa 10-Jul-2025 23:30 The successful candidate will work as a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the AHRC & FNR funded project `The Role of Cognitive Experience in Decision and Action¿ under the supervision of Dr Laura Gow (PI) and Dr Robin McKenna (Co-I). The project aims to deliver a new explanation of belief-discordant behaviour - situations where we fail to act in accordance with what we believe. Our hypothesis is that cognitive experience plays a vital role in our everyday actions and decisions. We propose that our beliefs need to `seem true¿ to us if they are to play a role in our everyday behaviour. Having a belief seem true involves cognitive phenomenology; experientially taking a belief to be true when we first acquire it and if we later entertain it in thought. (For example, whereas the belief that grass is green seems true, the belief that solid objects are mostly empty space does not.). The post is available from 1 September 2025 until 31 August 2028. If you are still awaiting your PhD to be awarded you will be appointed at Grade 6, spine point 30. Upon written confirmation that you have been awarded your PhD, your salary will be increased to Grade 7, spine point 31. If you require a visa to work in the UK, the University of Liverpool may be able to support your application for sponsorship under the Skilled Worker Route. Or there maybe the option to support your application under the Global Talent Visa, Depending on your circumstances you may find you can apply for one independently without University support.

Here is the advert for a postdoc at Liverpool for a project I'm involved in. Please share it with anyone who you think might be interested in applying. A brief project description is below.

tinyurl.com/4f7vw7ra

"Economics textbooks" is the obvious joke answer. A more serious answer is that some right-wing thought emphasizes a certain kind of freedom (e.g. Nozick) so that there may be *very* many different equally utopian outcomes, and so no single vision to write about.

An interesting thing about sports (and other contests-for-entertainment) is that they have to balance meritocracy against excitement. Designing a contest that actually selects the best team is often boring, because we know who is the best team. So most sports build in randomness

Something about pulling apart lego toys, or unbuilding ikea furniture?

Spam emails from predatory academic journals: Dearest Dr Professor Landes, may you grace us with your world-leading expertise?

Emails from actual academic journals: We've created an account in our system for you. Review this paper, kthx.

RIP Alasdair MacIntyre, a towering figure the likes of which this world rarely produces. Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised that his influence extended far beyond his scholarship:

Alex Gregory, Take In Your Hen: Fittingness and Hedonic Adaptation - PhilPapers Humans have a strong tendency to hedonically adapt to their circumstances, so that something that once brought joy eventually brings only indifference. Does this tendency guarantee a kind of failure o...

New paper coming out in Philosopher's Imprint: "Take In Your Hen: Fittingness and Hedonic Adaptation".

philpapers.org/rec/GRETIY

This sounds right to me too. The definition is strictly false, but for the uninitiated it's better at conveying the spirit of the enterprise than many more careful definitions might be. (cf. "philosophers ask questions that come naturally to children using methods that come naturally to lawyers")

Putnam 1975:

Come and work with us! We are advertising for a Lecturer in Philosophy (roughly=Assistant Prof) with research interests in philosophy of mind, metaphysics, or language. Details:
jobs.soton.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx...

(Obvious rival hypothesis: Someone - though so far as I can see, not Epicurus, or Hume - introduced the problem with reference to omniscience, and everyone since has blindly copied that person in deference to tradition.)

This is partly a genuine question: Was there some historic reason why denying omniscience once seemed a natural solution to the POE, or reason why the POE wasn't noticed until someone took note of omniscience in particular?

Why does everyone *always* set up the problem of evil by appeal to God's omnipotence, omnibenevolence, *and omniscience*? It's relevant to the problem, but not central. Theodicies effectively aim to state caveats on omnipotence and omnibenevolence, so they are where the action is.

This is the first of two adverts for postdocs on a project I'm involved in with Laura Gow and Thomas Raleigh. This one will be based in Luxembourg; the other will be based in Liverpool and will be advertised soon. Please share with anyone who might be interested.

recruitment.uni.lu/en/details.h...

Congrats!

That's a nice way to put it, and definitely rings true!

Many years ago when I was a teenager starting to study philosophy, my Nan reported that she's once heard philosophy described as the effort to check things that were normally treated as common sense. I've since found few better short descriptions, I think.

(Possibly a list more suited to summarising philosophy would group some things together, such as all the pronouns, the quantity words, and also some sets of prepositions.)

It's always hard to give a short answer to "what is philosophy?". But I wonder if the beginnings of one comes out when we notice that many of the core areas of philosophy surround words in this list: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_co... (the, be, if, good, know, want, because, etc.).

Because the implicit comparison is different each time. That's another possibility in this case (see also @wiglet1981.bsky.social's comments). I'm mildly sceptical that "wants" is *always* implicitly comparitive (our finite minds sometimes need simpler attitudes), but perhaps it sometimes is.

This is all sticking with wanting understood as monadic. On another view "want" is like "tall" and context always supplies some comparison so that "wants X" always means "prefers X to implicit Y". Then you could truly say in one context "I want P" and in another "It's false that I want P"...

i.e. you want to avoid food colouring, but also want to eat, and on balance might want to eat even food with colouring rather than none at all.

One source of confusion here is that "I don't want food that has food colouring" can mean you fail to want it (~Wp), or that you want to avoid it (W~p). You can't do the former if you truly want it, but you can do the latter and have conflicting desires, as Chris says. I'd guess this is such a case.

Southampton, England. r/brutalism

I get the impression that my Happiness&Wellbeing students this year are less sympathetic than normal to hedonism, and more swayed by the experience machine objection. Is that some kind of post-pandemic effect?

I wonder! Much higher than 20%, and it might explain why people think of it as "normal". On the other hand, perhaps it is now much lower than it used to be (single parents, single children, blended families, etc.) so it nonetheless is overestimated.

I wonder what percentage of people, at some point in their lives, have lived in a four-person household.

It is stunning to see how Meta illegally downloaded billions of pages of copyrighted books and articles from Russian pirate sites when training Llama 3. And not only that, but Meta also directly redistributed that copyrighted data to others: