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Academic Insights for the Thinking World
Suppose it were suggested that animals’ interests would be even better protected if we recognized a right of political participation to animals. One way to do that would be to have human representatives cast votes on behalf of animals with respect to different legislative proposals.
Together, expert communities and the public need to manage the interfaces between the production of specialized knowledge and its use in wider political discourse.
Humans are prone to bias, irrationality, and various forms of prejudice. From an evolutionary perspective, this is no accident.
Three months after the official US government “end” of three years of monitoring the COVID-19 pandemic that took over 1.1 million American lives, we are back to “new normal.”
While we occasionally have the sense that we are rolling dice with words and hoping for good luck, meaning and communication would be impossible if we only and always succeed no better than luck would allow.
A recent opinion piece claims that the overturning of Roe v. Wade has resulted in “a partial healing of the nation’s civic culture.”
There’s been a lot of hype recently about the emergence of technologies like ChatGPT and the effects they will have on science and society. Linguists have been especially curious about what highly successful large language models (LLMs) mean for their business.
A future human mission to Mars will be very dangerous, both as a result of factors already known but intensified, as well as new risk factors. It is worth raising the question of the ethicality of the decision to send humans into such a dangerous environment.
In episode 82 of The Oxford Comment, we discussed the ethics and cultural implications of artificial intelligence (AI) with scholars Kerry McInerney, Eleanor Drage, and Kanta Dihal
The addition to Electronic Enlightenment of nearly 500 letters from the Beaumarchais correspondence is a significant event in eighteenth-century studies.
In this interview, our Marketing Manager for philosophy, Hana Purslow, outlines OUP’s approach to subject marketing.
The idea that Xenophon’s Socratic dialogues entirely lacked the philosophical bite or intellectual depth of Plato’s had become a commonplace in a philosophical discourse which prioritised abstract knowledge over broader ethics. Dr Carol Atack makes the case for Xenophon’s kinder Socrates.
In a speech to the UN General Assembly in the fall of 2022, President Biden called on the UN to stand in solidarity with Ukraine. At least 1,000 companies have left Russia because of Putin’s brutal unprovoked war on Ukraine. Some companies left because of sanctions. Others left for moral reasons, often under pressure from investors, consumers, and out of […]
Over the past decade the philanthropic ideology of Effective Altruism has grown massively both in attracting funds and in influencing young people to try to make as much money as they can and give most of it away. But a series of catastrophic financial hustles in the world of cryptocurrency has brought EA heightened attention and started to expose its dangers.
When do we have a scientific fact? Scientists, policymakers, and laypersons could all use an answer to this question. But despite its obvious importance, humanity lacks a good answer.
Science skepticism is a central threat to deliberative democracy. Generally speaking, scientific investigations based on collaboration between scientific experts are far more reliable than individual efforts when it comes to finding the truth about complex matters. So, since public deliberation is better off when it rests on science, deliberative democracy requires a reasonably high degree of public uptake of science communication.