Section
PhilosophyPath
Philosophy as the upstream of how we should reason, build, and govern AI. Essays, philosopher landings, and comparisons that connect classical philosophy to current AI debates.
Most readers should start with the essays. The philosopher and work pages are reference material — read after an essay references them, not as an entry point.
Essays on philosophy and AI
Long-form arguments connecting classical philosophy to current AI debates. Each essay is 25–60 minutes of reading.
Correction, Recourse, and Surplus
22 minWhat AI productivity studies do not measure. Starts from the cleanest published case (Brynjolfsson, Li, and Raymond's randomized rollout to 5,172 customer-support agents) and reconstructs the institutional questions the headline 14 percent…
Empiricism, Induction, and the Limits of LLM Generalization
philosophy-of-ai · #1 · 30 minLocke, Hume, and Kant clarify the modern AI scaling debate: where model content comes from, what licenses generalization beyond training data, and why architecture still matters. The essay connects the bitter lesson, the era of experience,…
What Is Philosophy?
foundations · #1 · 12 minPhilosophy is the disciplined practice of asking why a claim should be believed, what a concept actually means, and what a good answer would look like. The page distinguishes philosophy from science, from religion, and from personal opinion…
From Plato's Cave to the Era of Experience
philosophy-of-ai · #2 · 36 minA Philosophy x AI essay on Plato's Cave, imitation, world models, and the claim that future AI systems must learn from interaction rather than from human text alone. The argument is not that Plato predicted AI. He did not. The argument is t…
What Is Logic?
foundations · #2 · 14 minLogic is the study of which inferences preserve truth. The page distinguishes formal logic from informal critical thinking, names the main systems (classical, intuitionistic, modal, paraconsistent), shows the validity check on a real argume…
Four Lenses on the AI Economy
philosophy-of-ai · #4 · 22 minRawls, Foucault, Marx, and Beauvoir as four analytical lenses on workplace AI. A fairness dashboard for a hiring model is a local property of a decision system; justice in the AI economy is a structural property of the institutions around t…
AI Productivity and the Distribution Question
philosophy-of-ai · #5 · 28 minAI is not just a productivity tool; it is a surplus-routing mechanism. For every productivity gain, the question is who captures it through wages, margins, vendor licensing, lower prices, reduced headcount, or cloud rents, and who loses bar…
Call-Center AI: A Case Study in Productivity, Surveillance, and Surplus
philosophy-of-ai · #6 · 24 minA grounded case study in the Philosophy × AI series. Brynjolfsson, Li, and Raymond's randomized rollout of a generative-AI assistant to 5,172 customer-support agents at a large software firm gave a 14 percent productivity gain that fell alm…
What Is a Symbolic System?
foundations · #6 · 16 minA symbolic system is a triple of an alphabet, a set of formation rules, and an interpretation. Propositional logic, the lambda calculus, formal arithmetic, and a programming language are all symbolic systems by this definition. The page bui…
Propositional Logic
foundations · #7 · 18 minPropositional logic is the formal study of inference among atomic propositions joined by truth-functional connectives. It is the simplest non-trivial logical system, sound and complete, decidable in time exponential in the number of atoms.…
Predicate Logic
foundations · #8 · 22 minPredicate logic, also called first-order logic, extends propositional logic with terms, predicates, and quantifiers. It is the standard formal language of mathematical practice. The page gives the syntax (terms, atomic formulas, quantified…
Modal Logic
foundations · #9 · 22 minModal logic extends propositional logic with operators for necessity and possibility, interpreted on Kripke frames of possible worlds with an accessibility relation. The page covers the four readings (alethic, epistemic, deontic, temporal),…
What Is Epistemology?
foundations · #12 · 18 minEpistemology is the philosophical study of knowledge, belief, and justification. The page distinguishes the central questions (what knowledge is, what justifies belief, how knowledge is possible at all), names the major positions (foundatio…
Induction and Hume's Problem
foundations · #14 · 22 minHume argued that induction (the inference from past observations to future cases) cannot be rationally justified: any justification is either circular or assumes a uniformity-of-nature principle that is itself an inductive claim. The page r…
Bayesian Epistemology
foundations · #15 · 22 minBayesian epistemology models belief as graded credence (probability) and rational update as conditionalization on evidence. The page gives the formal apparatus (probability axioms, Bayes's rule, conditionalization), the Dutch-book argument…
Knowledge as Justified True Belief, and the Post-Gettier Replies
foundations · #20 · 18 minThe standard pre-Gettier analysis defined knowledge as justified true belief (JTB). Gettier's 1963 counterexamples showed JTB is insufficient. This page walks the post-Gettier reply space: the no-false-lemmas patch, defeasibility, reliabili…
Free Will and Determinism
foundations · #21 · 20 minThe debate is structured by two claims: causal determinism (every event is necessitated by prior events plus laws) and the freedom-requirement for moral responsibility. Hard determinism accepts determinism and denies freedom; libertarianism…
Personal Identity Over Time
foundations · #22 · 19 minWhat makes a person at one time numerically identical to a person at another? Locke proposed memory; Reid showed the proposal generates paradox; Parfit refined it into psychological continuity. Animalism replies the bearer of identity is th…
The Mind-Body Problem
foundations · #23 · 21 minHow do conscious mental states relate to physical brain states? The page walks the major positions: substance dualism (mind and body are distinct kinds of substance), reductive physicalism (mental states are identical to brain states), func…
Ethics: Consequentialism, Deontology, and Virtue
foundations · #24 · 19 minThree families of normative ethical theory dominate contemporary philosophy: consequentialism (rightness is fixed by outcomes), deontology (rightness is fixed by duty-conforming features of the action), and virtue ethics (rightness is what…
Philosophy of Science: Foundations
foundations · #25 · 20 minFour central questions in the philosophy of science: what demarcates science from non-science (Popper's falsifiability); how scientific change happens (Kuhn's paradigms); whether our best theories should be read as approximately true descri…
Formal Arguments and Common Fallacies
foundations · #26 · 17 minHow to read an argument structure: identify premises, conclusion, and inferential moves. Validity vs soundness review. The major formal fallacies (affirming the consequent, denying the antecedent) and informal fallacies (ad hominem, equivoc…
Philosophers
Landing pages for individual philosophers — biography, key positions, what they got right and wrong, what AI inherits.
Comparisons
Side-by-side treatments of two philosophers or two positions. Where they agree, where they part, why it matters now.
Plato vs Socrates: Historical Person, Literary Character, and Philosophical Method
18 minSocrates left no writings; Plato wrote dialogues in which Socrates speaks. The historical Socrates and Plato's literary Socrates are not the same figure, and Plato's own philosophical positions are not always identical to those his characte…
Validity vs Soundness
foundations · #3 · 9 minValidity is a property of an argument's form: if the premises are true, the conclusion must be true. Soundness adds the requirement that the premises actually be true. The page gives the side-by-side, walks through the four cases, and ends…
Syntax vs Semantics in Formal Systems
foundations · #4 · 14 minIn a formal system, syntax is the set of rules for which strings count as legitimate expressions; semantics is the assignment of meaning to those expressions. The page works through propositional logic and a small fragment of arithmetic to…
Arguments and positions
Named arguments and positions in philosophy and AI — what each one says, what supports it, and where it has been pressed against.
The Chinese Room Argument
foundations · #5 · 18 minJohn Searle's 1980 thought experiment argues that formal symbol manipulation, no matter how sophisticated, cannot by itself constitute genuine understanding. The page reconstructs Searle's setup as a numbered argument, walks through the fou…
The Gettier Problem
foundations · #13 · 16 minEdmund Gettier's three-page 1963 paper presented two cases satisfying the classical justified-true-belief analysis of knowledge yet intuitively failing to count as knowledge. The page reproduces both original Gettier cases, reconstructs the…
Knowledge, Justification, and LLMs
foundations · #16 · 22 minLarge language models produce assertions that are sometimes true, often confident, and not always traceable to their evidential basis. The page applies four epistemic frameworks (classical justified-true-belief, reliabilism, Bayesian calibr…
Paradoxes
Classical paradoxes treated technically — the formal statement, the standard responses, and what the paradox still pressures in current thinking.
The Liar Paradox
foundations · #10 · 18 minThe sentence 'this sentence is false' is true if and only if it is false. The page reconstructs the contradiction formally using Tarski's T-schema and self-reference, then compares the four major solution families: Tarski's stratified-langu…
Russell's Paradox
foundations · #11 · 18 minConsider the set R of all sets that do not contain themselves as members. R is a member of R if and only if R is not a member of R. The page reconstructs the contradiction formally from Frege's Basic Law V (unrestricted comprehension), trac…