I DM’d you a password for unlimited access

Hey Justin, awesome!

Thanks Sam!!!

Nerds: This is basically an amazing open ended RPG set in important scenes in philosophical history.

Pedagogy nerds: This is like Reacting (to the Past) simulations but single player. And philosophy.

It’s not generic LLM generated but based on lots of research into academic and popular sources.

It'll give you 10 interactions before asking you to connect with your Claude API key; if you don't have a Claude API key and want to explore any of these in more detail, DM me.

This may get cut off if my API tokens get maxxed out!

I made some playable philosophy simulations:

-Oxford 1952
-Republic Book I
-Jena 1799
-Paris 1945

www.ux-phi.com

Six-panel composite figure. Caption: Interactive artifacts always rely on people’s interpretive and interactional practices. Rowwise from top left to bottom right: A. Aegeus consults the oracle at Delphi (cup from Vulci, 440-430 BCE). B. Byzantine mosaic depicting the zodiac, from the floor of the 6th century CE Beth Alpha synagogue. C. One-sided sense-making in an experimental psychotherapy session, (McHugh 1968). D. Still from a BBC documentary showing a person interacting with ELIZA via a computer terminal, late 1960s. E. Researchers interacting with the PARC copier (Suchman 2007 [1987]). F. Screenshot of large language model chat interface, 2026.

New! Interactional foundations for critical AI literacies doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

Why do Anthropic engineers talk to Claude as a witch-doctor to his potions? How is prompt engineering like spider divination? Can one reason without reasons?

ft. Lovelace, Adorno, Suchman, Weizenbaum & many more ☺️

I'd ask him what would be involved in making a corpus of ordinary use, whether it's feasible. I expect he'll say it's possible, there's nothing even that computationally difficult about it, but to scale it up might take a lot of resources. What are the chances we could convince Oxford University to buy one of the machines that Turing is working on? Austin lets out a short, sharp laugh that echoes off the stone walls. "Oxford University? Buy a computing machine? For philosophy?" The entire room breaks into barely suppressed chuckles. Even Strawson, who had seemed sympathetic to your idea, is shaking his head with amusement. "My dear fellow," Hampshire says, still smiling, "do you have any idea what one of those machines costs? Or how much space it takes up? The university can barely afford to heat the libraries properly." "And imagine the conversation," Warnock adds gleefully. "Vice-Chancellor, we'd like several thousand pounds for an electronic brain to help us understand the word 'really.'"

I built a text based simulation of 1952 Oxford where you can argue with Austin, Hare, Strawson, etc. and I'm trying to convince them that they should think about making searchable bodies of ordinary language using the computers that Alan Turing is working on and they're laughing at me:

The Very Idea of Seriousness What norms govern aesthetic conversations? In Hansen and Adams (2024), we argue for a norm we call, following Stanley Cavell, “the hope of agreement”, along with a requirement of “seriousness”, the “...

The next round of Zed and my work on aesthetic judgment and conversation: inspired by Susan Sontag we make the case for "seriousness" in aesthetic judgment and against vibing, communitarianism and the "omnivore monoculture". onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

This is just another way of saying that I love mixed methods work, I guess. Archival research? Yes! Data collection? Yes! Quantitative analysis? Yes! Close reading? Yes! Case studies? Yes! Theoretical speculation? Yes! Let’s do it all why not

Twin peaks: The Return

So cool!—will there be a U.K. book tour?

This looks like a fascinating study both of what gentrification is and also of the stakes of expanding the meaning of political terms!

Looks super cool, thanks for turning on the conceptual inflation alarm!

This is a fantastic paper!

To celebrate the launch of the xphi-journal and kick-off our talk series, we are happy to invite everyone to this talk by Edouard Machery.

ruhr-uni-bochum.zoom-x.de/j/6780355881...

I really enjoyed this paper!

Reposting this convo with @xphilosopher.bsky.social about some evidence from conversations with participants that fits with the "truthfulness" finding in the recent Zyglewicz, Reuter, and Mandelbaum paper:

Yeah! It's cool to see more substantial evidence that fits with our impressionistic findings about people responding to other factors besides narrow truth/falsity.

And here are some other "truthfulness"-like responses that people gave:

Here's a snippet of that kind of response from a chat:

When we asked people to explain their TVJs about Travis color scenarios, a fair number of people said things that suggest they are thinking about truthfulness. E.g.: some people say that the subject of the scenario doesn't know that his walls are made of white plaster, when that is not specified.

This paper is super cool, very glad to see it forthcoming! I got to chat with @ericman.bsky.social a bit about it over chicken rolls last week—I think some of the qualitative evidence in our "Socratic Questionnaires" paper fits with the paper's idea that the TVJ task is a measure of "truthfulness".

Beautiful experimental philosophy paper on what people ordinarily mean when they say that a statement is “true”

Turns out it’s not always about corresponding correctly to the facts. Sometimes it’s more closely related to a moral ideal of “truthfulness”

philarchive.org/archive/ZYGTJN

Hey @liao.shen-yi.org here's another new journal for your diamond open access file

It's a pleasure to argue aesthetics with @nickriggle.bsky.social!

Congrats—really glad to see this is out!

Thank you Edouard! It was inspired by your guys' excellent paper.