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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 8h

** I don't actually think this will happen

Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 8h

I absolutely believe in the revolutionary* potential of AI.

*Marxist revolution when the bubble bursting causes a widespread crisis in capitalism.

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 18h

A truly shocking headline in the Belfast Telegraph

Photo of Ian Murray, the Minister for Digital Government and Data in front of the union flag with the headline "‘Brit Card’ label hasn’t helped us sell digital ID plan in NI, admits minister"

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 1d

It's that time of the year again!

Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · Nov 5

Running a seminar on panpsychism today (i.e. what is it like to be a bat?)

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Reposted by Fintan Mallory

Pekka Väyrynen @vayrynen.bsky.social · 2d

📣JOB ALERT📣
Lecturer or Associate Professor in Philosophy at University of Leeds. AOS: Social Philosophy + at least one of: Metaphysics, Epistemology, or Philosophy of Language, Logic, Mind, or Action. Details at jobs.leeds.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx.... Closing date 5 Nov 2025. #philosophy 1/2

Job Opportunity at University of Leeds: Lecturer/Associate Professor in Philosophy

Are you an experienced academic in Philosophy with the ambition to carry out world-leading research and deliver an exceptional student experience in a research-intensive Russell Group University? Woul...

jobs.leeds.ac.uk

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 1d

That’s really sweet! I’m glad someone can read Quine and feel seen.

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 1d

That's a really good point!

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 1d

When I was a child, I thought language was a set of functions that could be composed to generate more complex functions from entities to truth-values.

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 1d

Did anyone else have this image? I think this might just be a Quine thing. Maybe Quine was an unusual kid.

When I was a child I pictured our language as settled and passed
down by a board of syndics, seated in grave convention along a
table in the style of Rembrandt. The picture remained for a while
undisturbed by the question what language the syndics might have used in their deliberations, or by dread of vicious regress. I suppose this picture has been entertained by many, in uncritical childhood.

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 1d

When teaching Confucius today we discussed whether a noble ruler can guide a people through example to be more humane. Anyway, I’m really going to miss Michael D.

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 1d

Confucius comes out against ChatGPT in educational contexts.

7.8 The Master said, “I will not give a person a boost or a start if he does not know the frustration [of trying to solve a difficult problem] or the frenzy one would get into when trying [to put an idea] into words. After I have shown a student one corner of a square, if he does not come back with the other three, I will not repeat what I have done.”

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 2d

I've been thinking about it a lot and have come to the conclusion that leaders should practice virtue.

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 3d

Can’t believe I actually managed to misrepresent my own position in this post.

Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 3d

Found a really old paper that argues that chatbots are props that people use to engage in games of make-believe. This seems like a plausible analysis: journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article...

Fictionalism about Chatbots

According to widely accepted views in metasemantics, the outputs of chatbots and other artificial text generators should be meaningless. They aren’t produced with communicative intentions and the syst...

journals.publishing.umich.edu

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 4d

I've only really read The Development of Arabic Logic (1964) and Epistemology: On the Scope and Limits of Knowledge (2003) but I got the impression that both were decent overviews of the fields when published.

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 4d

Just calculated that if I keep up my rate of publication for the next 50 years, then I will have published as many articles as Nicholas Rescher did books.

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Reposted by Fintan Mallory

Kate Kirkpatrick @philosofemme.bsky.social · 5d

JOB: Associate Professor or Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy, in association with a Tutorial Fellowship at Merton College. AoS Ethics and/or Political Philosophy, with at least an AoC in Feminist Philosophy.
#PhilJobs
www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DOW474/a...

Associate Professorship or Professorship of Philosophy - Philosophy APTFC at University of Oxford

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 5d

Snow
By Louis MacNeice

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes—
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands—
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 5d

#nationalpoetryday

Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · Nov 17

Derek Mahon, Tractatus

Tractatus

‘The world is everything that is the case.’
From the fly giving up in the coal-shed
To the Winged Victory at Samothrace.
Give blame, praise, to the fumbling God
Who hides, shame-facedly, His aged face;
Whose light retires behind its veil of cloud.

The world, though, is also so much more –
Everything that is the case imaginatively.
Tacitus believed mariners could hear
The sun sinking into the western sea;
And who would question that titanic roar,
The steam rising wherever the edge may be?

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 5d

There’s a particular kind of argument that you get in Berkeley, and more recently in things like Firestone & Scholl on the El Greco fallacy, that is just extremely satisfying.

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 5d

This paper is a lot of fun. It has associationist vs computational models of perception, the Apollo program, and a kind of elegant reasoning applied to perception that's just exciting to follow through.

Frances Egan @francesegan.bsky.social · 5d

Shamelessly promoting my favorite paper. Everybody who was anybody in the history of science/philosophy/mathematics had a view on the moon illusion. frances-egan.org/uploads/3/5/...

frances-egan.org

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 5d

Philosophy of chemistry seems really cool and the people seem nice.

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 5d

Attended a workshop on the philosophy of chemistry today and am thinking of transitioning to working in the philosophy of chemistry. Anyone know the main chemicals I should know about? Just the big ones. I don’t have a lot of time.

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 6d

Paul Thomas Anderson casting DiCaprio, Penn, and del Toro to recreate Philip Seymour Hoffman in the aggregate.

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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 6d

Watching One Battle After Another thinking ‘I wish Philip Seymour Hoffman were alive to play all of these roles’.

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