John Grey

Ellen Clarke, "The Units of Life: Kinds of Individual in Biology" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Hear Carrie Figdor interviewing me about my book here open.spotify.com/episode/7drX...

Hey, my name is in the Epstein files! I've told the story before, but should probably re-up.

TLDR: never met the guy, never took (or asked for) any money from him, never visited the island. I was invited to the island, and said no.

It's not that hard to just say no.

Being a professor is like Picture of Dorian Gray except it’s the students who stay young and full of life while you decay year after year in front of them

There is a case to be made that any board of a university that signed an agreement that required paying a fee has breached their fiduciary duty and I think somebody should explore it

Important update about the JHP Summer Seminar: advanced graduate students are also eligible to apply, as are recent PhDs working in early modern philosophy! Please spread the word. Application deadline: February 1st; more information: jhp.wisc.edu/summersemina... #philsky #earlymodern #academicsky

APSU to pay $500,000 to professor fired, then reinstated over Charlie Kirk post - ClarksvilleNow.com Austin Peay State University will pay one of its professors $500,000 after initially firing him for a social media post in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s death.

A valuable cautionary note to university administrators, and a good outcome in the particular case.

clarksvillenow.com/local/apsu-t...

How Can We Live Together? - Boston Review Ezra Klein is wrong: shame is essential.

Including @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social on Ezra Klein, living together, and the problem with “reading lines from the script of a fascist movement eroding basic democratic freedoms and aiming to subordinate whichever large swaths of the country are not simply removed outright”:

YouTube video by Rob Sheridan 10 Hours Hypnotic Fireplace Ambiance – 4K Macro Slow-Motion Color Flames, Crackling Fire (No Music)

For your holiday ambiance, I've made a hypnotic yule log fireplace with ultra slow motion macro footage of flames stretching & warping like liquid as fire reacts with calcium chloride & barium. This is real fire I filmed, not CGI or AI.

10hrs, 4K, crackling sounds, no music, no ads. Happy holidays!

Would honestly love it if that's where the overton shifts

The earliest reference to the 1000 to 1 word picture exchange rate I could find is from Locke’s essay:

Discourse surrounding “AI” these days often feels like a guy showing you his shovel and you say, “that’s a nice shovel” and he says “I am going to perform surgery on my mother with this shovel” and you say “Oh God please don’t that is not what a shovel is for.”

This is an insane set of edits

Emergence explains nothing and is bad science | John Heil

John Heil on why talk of "emergence" by scientists and philosophers is unhelpful – iai.tv/articles/eme... #philsky #philsci #physics #biology #philmind

It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.

Misinformation on Marginal Revolution A case study in o3 hallucination

A case study in how Cowen's uncritical use of GPT/o3 is causing him to spread misinformation on Marginal Revolution, from @pappubahry.com

pappubahry.substack.com/p/misinforma...

I love looking at this graph, showing it to my students, and sharing it on social media, even though it unerringly brings out the trolls.

This is the efficacy curve of Pfizer's mRNA COVID vaccine.

This, people, is what ended the emergency phase of the COVID pandemic. Despite what RFK Jr says.

Evergreen

We are always just one generation away from losing everything we know, if we don't work to retain that knowledge.

You have more in common with every unhoused person, every undocumented immigrant, every trans or otherwise LGBTQ person, every disabled person, every person in any marginalized minoritized ethnicity, than you do with even one single billionaire.

🚨 New journal alert! 🚨
We hear it's a great one 😉

And there's an open CFP for the next volume: journal.lib.uoguelph.ca/index.php/nn...

But does it have a negation operator, though

How Trans People Can Update Their Passports — And Why to Do It Now With a federal ban on passport gender marker changes currently blocked, THE CITY spoke with legal experts in NYC about how trans, nonbinary and intersex people can file these updates.

If you’re looking to update your U.S. passport to accurately reflect your gender, the window may soon be closing. For many, an accurate passport is more than just a confirmation of identity, it’s necessary to travel safely.

PARIS (AP) — French President Macron announces that France will recognize Palestine as a state.

Describe something you learned from lecture this week that you didn’t know just from doing the readings. Connect something you learned in 209 this week to something you are learning in another of your classes this semester. If Monday and Wednesday assigned readings were from two different texts, make connections between the two. Do they share themes? Forms? Tone? Historical context? Do you find them equally interesting? Look at the very first paragraph of one of our texts and discuss how the opening lays the groundwork for the rest of the work. Quote specific lines, phrases, or images. Using quotes from a text, persuade someone (friend or foe, your grandma or your senator) to change their mind about something important. Compose a 5 song playlist to accompany an assigned reading from this week, and write a few sentences for each song, explaining your choices. Describe an idea you had in response to the readings/lecture/discussions for our class this week- any idea, about literature, or the world, or yourself. How might you pursue this idea, in your studies or elsewhere? Choose a passage (no more than 10 lines) from the readings this week and rewrite it, changing at least one of the literary aspects such as: person (change from first to third-person or vice versa), tense (change from past to present etc), focalizing character (i.e. write it from a different character's perspective), style (adjectives, diction, description, tone). Then write 2-3 sentences about the effect of your changes. Compose a yelp review to strangers, or a letter to a specific person, or a booktok style video, recommending a novel/poem/play from this week’s reading. Write a letter to someone who has questioned your choice of majoring or minoring in English, explaining why you value what you’re learning. Include quotes / ideas from this week’s readings.

syllabus time, teaming up for the herculean efforts of reinventing writing assignments. here, some prompts for required weekly low stakes 250-500 word reflections/ process pieces that have proven relatively conducive to real writing in lit class. please share any similar suggestions in thread.

Not the point of this fascinating article, but it remains darkly ironic to me that the Humanities have fallen backwards into being the safe financial bet of degrees

Call for Directors Academic Philosophy Data and Analysis, a long running project that collects and analyzes data on graduate experience and employment outcomes for philosophy PhDs, is seeking to expand its leadership. W...

“Academic Philosophy Data and Analysis (philosophydata.org), a long running project that collects and analyzes data on graduate experience and employment outcomes for philosophy PhDs, is seeking to expand its leadership…from 1 to 3 directors”

Please share!

#philsky

apda.ghost.io/call-for-dir...

This is often the source of confusion in metaphysics classes, where 'object' is intended to be an umbrella term for any persistent entity (or sometimes even just something that can be picked out in thought!). But 'objectification' as a concept is pretty ingrained at this point.

When this ends there will be calls not to prosecute people who broke the law while following orders and there will be calls not to impose social or professional, much less legal, sanctions on officeholders who stood by, for unity’s sake. It will be important to ignore them; heeding them got us here.

This seems like an important data point, since all of the recent philosophical approaches to the hard problem I've read have been based on the predictive processing account of the contents of experience.

Apply for a Radcliffe Fellowship!
Applications in humanities, social sciences, & creative arts are due Sept 11, 2025
Applications in science, engineering, & math due Sept 30, 2025
www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/radcliffe-fe...
(I hear they'd especially welcome projects related to climate change)
#HPS ⚒️