Victor Kumar @victorckumar Twitter profile

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Victor Kumar

18 days

Right-wingers like JD Vance have coded population decline as a conservative issue. But just because their proposed solutions are alarmingly regressive doesn’t mean the problem isn’t real. My argument for progressive pronatalism today in the @nytimes

Opinion | Population Growth Isn’t a Progressive Issue. It Should Be.

There’s more to the issue than what JD Vance says.

www.nytimes.com

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

2 months

Analytic philosopher here, I keep destroying my wife's views with devastating counterexamples but she rarely changes her mind, what am I doing wrong?

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

3 months

A few of my progressive students are annoying. Is this a social crisis?

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

22 days

cognitive science / philosophy of mind

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

3 months

Having children is the most meaningful thing you can do with your life. Intellectuals and creatives can't accept this because it means their vocations aren't supremely meaningful and any fool can have a more worthwhile life. But it's true and all the counterarguments are cope.

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

5 months

No one on philosophy twitter will ever top this 1-2

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

2 months

@ANNVYSHINSKY No I can make sense of what she says

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

11 months

"Thomas Nagel’s 1974 paper What Is It Like to Be a Bat? mused on whether we could still be human if we had bat-like features such as the ability to echolocate." Is this sufficient to destroy the reviewer's credibility?

I’ve Been Thinking by Daniel C Dennett review – an engaging, vexing memoir with a humility bypass

The veteran US philosopher renowned for his theories of consciousness is an intriguing figure but too prone to ‘professorial preening’

www.theguardian.com

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

2 years

@haymarketbooks “Monarchy is a survival of the tyranny imposed by the hand of greed and treachery upon the human race in the darkest and most ignorant days of our history. It derives its only sanction from the sword of the marauder, and the helplessness of the producer…”

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

9 months

Philosophy makes you smart or smart people are drawn to philosophy. Big W for philosophy either way.

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

4 months

Male philosophy majors may have the lowest fertility rates, but consider their intellectual fecundity (also low)

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

30 days

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

16 days

How do non-philosophers function without knowing how to distinguish good and bad arguments?

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

3 months

@lastpositivist No, unless I write a book

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

2 years

@haymarketbooks “…and its gifts to humanity are unknown, save as they can be measured in the pernicious examples of triumphant and shameless iniquities.”

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

7 months

(At a philosophy talk) I’m a little confused about why this idea of yours is so stupid

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

4 months

RIP to a legend. Dennett wrote one of the most beautiful books about evolution. His ideas will live on.

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

3 months

I am a really good researcher. Countless times junior scholars have asked me for advice, but my skills can't be taught because I realize my one and only recipe is this: directly intuiting the truth. That's literally it.

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

4 months

Philosophers will really be like "you believe in science? that pales in effectiveness to my strategy, analyzing concepts" and then never successfully analyze a concept

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

2 months

@morallawwithin Hmm I was counterexampling her reasons for divorce though

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

8 months

I started to tell someone this stat and thought wait no I must be misremembering, it must be yearly. But no, we kill 200 million chickens every day, 140 thousand every minute.

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

2 months

That Aeon essay got me wondering who the best philosophy haters are within philosophy. Wittgenstein and who else?

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

4 months

Dennett's 1982 review of Nozick's Philosophical Explorations in @BostonReview begins with this tale:

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

4 months

Why is concern with population decline right-coded? I don't get it.

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

4 months

William James' Principles of Psychology is one of the best books of all time. James has so much psychological insight, it's uncanny, and he has hardly any experimental research to draw on. If he could know all that from the armchair what work is empirical evidence even doing?

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

2 months

@TobyMeadows I think I already said they are devastating?

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

4 months

Happy birthday to the guy who invented rule utilitarianism

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

18 days

Just happy to be called brilliant

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

4 months

"According to psychology--" NO. According to Greg who ran four bizarre studies on MTurkers pressing keys blindly and then luckily drew friends as reviewers at Psych Science

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

4 months

Thrilled to have been tenured and promoted to Associate Professor at Boston University today!! I'm so lucky to be able to continue at BU with brilliant colleagues and incredible students. What a dream.

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

5 months

Co-sign

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

3 months

Analytic philosopher here. Anybody got some rich life experiences I can squeeze into bloodless abstractions?

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

4 months

Philosophy is cool because it trains you not to make up a guy to get mad at.

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

3 months

Clarifications and caveats: There are lots of ways to have a meaningful life (obvs), just not as meaningful as having children. There are exceptions, people whose life would not be very meaningful by having children. Not saying the children have to be your biological offspring.

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

3 months

@cc_leboeuf The point is to consider whether some human activities are more meaningful than others. Any ranking will inevitably mean some people are engaging in less than supremely-meaningful lives. I think curious open-minded people can handle this thought even if it's uncomfortable

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

4 months

Public philosophy was a mistake

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

1 month

You know how people saw doctored clips and inferred Biden was senile? Gettier case! Analytic epistemology is finally relevant. Still boring though.

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

2 months

Leftists will really be like "you believe in effective altruism? that pales in effectiveness to my strategy, starting a communist revolution" and then not start a communist revolution

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

2 years

New, terrible criticism of EA just dropped

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

9 months

"Ornithology would be quite useful to birds, if only they could understand it" is one of the best clap backs of all time

Jonathan Birch

@birchlse

9 months

There's a line attributed to Feynman (probably apocryphally) that "philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds". I've always taken it as a compliment. Imagine putting birds in charge of their own conservation programs.

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

3 months

Jerry Fodor, The Mind Doesn't Work That Way

florence ☧

@morallawwithin

3 months

People put acknowledgements at the beginning of their book, which is cute, but it would be good for the field if we also did the opposite—list the people who were an active hindrance to your work, and what they did to impede your progress

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

8 months

Back in the day fellow grad student Octavian Ion had this taped on his office door

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

2 months

@bengrossbg Hmm will try, I've told her I think she has difficulty understanding, hasn't made a difference

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

3 months

“concept creep” that’s a slur please just call me an analytic philosopher

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

5 months

At recent conferences/talks I was talking with people about great public philosophers, and here's a list I came up with. Who's missing? (Loads but who?)

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

2 months

So embarrassing that humans choose mates partly because of how their butt looks. Deeply unserious life form.

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

6 months

The number of philosophy majors at BU has DOUBLED over the past ten years, according to a new report. The number of majors in all other humanities fields has declined or remained static.

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

1 year

People say vegans are obnoxious, but the ones I know IRL seem too tolerant: Given what vegans believe (correctly) about the awfulness of eating meat, why don't they shun omnivores? Just because it would be socially isolating for them, or is there another reason, good or bad?

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

4 months

You gotta hand it to the critics of the student protests -- ethically, it's pretty cut and dry when one group establishes dwellings on land that isn't their's, occupies another's group's premises, and blocks members of another group from traveling from one place to another.

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

2 years

Congratulations to Tim and Christine!!

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

4 months

Land acknowledgements seem pointless and performative to me. Can anyone steelman them?

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

2 years

As pure philosophy, EA is unassailable. Of course we should do more good, better But as a flesh-and-blood social movement, EA is rightly controversial b/c its members tend to be individualist, hyper-intellectualized, paternalist, market-oriented, and techno-utopian

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

8 months

Funny that epistemology is so unconcerned with journalism, given that journalism produces more publicly serviceable knowledge than science.

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

9 months

Very important to write a tailored cover letter, otherwise we might assume you're applying to jobs en masse and not interested exclusively in our job

Martin Halla

@HallaMartin

9 months

#Econjobmarket — I am really surprised by the significant percentage of cover letters that are completely canned (& even misname the job posting institution etc.) It takes very little effort to tailor a CL to a specific job posting/institution. Given the sheer volume of

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

1 year

Is free will the philosophical issue that most reliably causes scientists to spout nonsense?

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

9 months

Is it unprofessional to live tweet the laughably awful paper I'm reviewing?

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

3 months

Many otherwise smart people lose their minds when they hear arguments against eating meat. They say things like: -eating meat is natural to our species -it's tradition -other animals eat meat too -it’s the purpose of animals to be eaten -animals don't feel pain

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

4 months

Disappointing that so many talented philosophers waste their time on AI alignment. They need to get back to work on more important topics, like grounding.

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

3 months

A historian recently complained that being a white man disadvantaged him on the academic job market. In philosophy data suggest that "women have 58–114 percent greater odds than men" of landing a permanent position.

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

9 months

The most important thing to know about the academic job market is that hiring decisions are based 10% on merit and 90% on a swirl of arbitrary, idiosyncratic, and unknowable preferences

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

2 months

@petemandik Will be very unnatural for me but ok

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

2 months

In philosophy we do things a little differently (all questions are attempts to look clever)

Jay Van Bavel, PhD

@jayvanbavel

2 months

Questions at academic conferences:

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

1 year

Eventually, lab-grown meat might free our conscience. We'll be able to fully confront the horrors of factory farming, and regulate it, without sacrificing enjoyment of the meat we crave Josh May and I in @BostonGlobe

The thing that could finally get us to eat less meat is — meat - The Boston Globe

We’ll never give up factory farming unless we have better options. Thanks to technology, we might soon have them.

www.bostonglobe.com

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

9 months

Is anyone else fascinated by the scientists who are philosophical dunderheads?

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

2 years

I'm going to assign to my students this controversial NYT essay and some of the best Twitter replies. Whatever you think about the essay itself, I think it's great fodder for discussion. Please reply with links to good/bad takes if you have them.

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

4 months

Dennett was also one of philosophy's greatest haters. You're not playing chess, you're playing "chmess."

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

3 months

Before evaluating this graph we need to figure out whether holes exist

Pessimistic Idealism

@Neo_1dealism

3 months

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

6 months

Journal reviewers

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

8 months

My brilliant student Sebastian Wu made Magic: The Gathering cards ( @wizards_magic ) from philosophers and concepts in my intro ethics course @BU_Tweets All his cards, with explanations, can be found here:

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

2 years

My toddler’s pronouns are me/mine

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

4 months

What a shame. Here are some great recent public philosophy books evidently not on the list -- accessible and of interest to a wide audience. What else?

Alex Guerrero

@Alex_A_Guerrero

4 months

Out of 3228 “best” and “notable” books from the @nytimes Book Review since 2000, exactly 12 are labeled as “philosophy.” And of those, many are about philosophers rather than being instances of philosophy. I feel like this is a problem… Here are the 12 books. @nytimesbooks

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

3 months

Finished Haidt's book and the main problem is that none of the surprising ideas are well-supported and none of the well-supported ideas are surprising

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

2 months

Puzzle: why is it possible for good philosophers to be philosophy haters but not for good scientists to be science haters? Because criticizing philosophy can be a form of philosophy; criticizing science (as a whole) can’t be a form of science.

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

8 months

Can't plagiarize if I don't read

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

6 months

Why? Because you cannot escape philosophy. Scientists can do philosophy of science unthinkingly but they cannot avoid doing it.

Joyce Carol Oates

@JoyceCarolOates

6 months

why study philosophy at all? once the "queen of the sciences" it has been, not surpassed, but rendered irrelevant by more specialized fields of inquiry (linguistics, neuroscience, etc.). however, to not have read Plato, Aristotle, the pre-Socratics, Lucretius, is a disadvantage

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

3 months

What's a CV section more navel-gazing than "Invited Talks Declined"?

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

2 years

People complain that philosophers working on trendy political topics are getting all the jobs, but recent threads by @lastpositivist show no or only mild such trend Reminiscent of white people complaining about reverse racism when it’s just mild loss of privilege

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

25 days

Is there any philosophy paper more overrated than Judith Thomson's "A Defense of Abortion"?

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

1 month

Some vegans think vegetarianism, pescatarianism, etc. are immoral compromises. Doesn’t matter that it’s hard to give up dairy or fish. But veganism is a compromise too. Industrial plant farming kills animals too, indirectly. It’s hard to eat only humane plant-based food.

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

3 months

Deleted. Thanks for the insane replies though!

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

4 months

Excited to spend 2024-25 with other fellows at the Safra Center at Harvard! @HarvardEthics

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

8 months

Lots of young philosophers on the job market have never worked on AI before but plan to do so in the future. Inspiring!

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

4 months

It’s incredibly hard to get a TT position, most are not well paid, but it’s also one of the cushiest jobs in the world

Sheera Talpaz

@snarkademic

4 months

Don't go into academia. Just don't.

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

3 months

Since gender doesn’t arise from a hidden essence, social learning (“social contagion”) probably influences the formation of transgender identities. Good thing that’s ethically irrelevant. You don’t have to be “born that way” for your identity to be authentic and stable.

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

7 months

This is not a core assumption in academia. "Morality" is regarded as a force for good only under normative conceptions of morality. It's widely understood that people moralize -- treat as moral -- what serves their own interests or those of their clan or tribe.

David Pinsof

@DavidPinsof

7 months

Lots of people saying this tweet is obvious. It’s not. It challenges a core assumption, common in academia, that moral convictions are a force for good. And it should trouble us. How are we supposed to know when our own moral convictions are leading us astray?

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

4 months

Some people are indifferent to most religions but detest the sect they escaped from. This is how I feel about metaethics.

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

4 months

The students protesting about the kid just want to feel like they're part of something important, they don't even understand his role in the Omelas economy

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

5 months

Every philosopher is dismayed at what their colleagues find interesting

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

4 months

Eventually, even the noblest of lineages degenerates into mediocrity

Céline Henne

@celinehenne

4 months

A noble lineage!

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

4 months

Jonathan is exactly right about Dennett's legacy. I am less sympathetic to his views on consciousness and intentionality and more sympathetic to his views on evolution and free will. But right or wrong, Dennett's contributions to philosophical naturalism were pathbreaking.

Jonathan Birch

@birchlse

4 months

Dan Dennett was a lifelong champion of (1) the explanatory power of cognitive science and evolutionary biology in relation to the big questions of philosophy, and (2) the integration of philosophy with scientific disciplines. An inspiration to me and many others in these ways.

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

15 days

Have started appending “late” to philosophical positions I disagree with. Late internalism, late nonnaturalism, etc.

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

3 months

The hardest part of being a philosopher is hiding your sense of superiority

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

10 months

According to David Enoch it is "an incredibly complicated empirical question" whether Israel should kill thousands of children in Gaza

Daily Nous / Justin Weinberg

@DailyNousEditor

10 months

“I think that philosophers (and other intellectuals and academics) can sometimes offer valuable contributions to public discourse. Still, I think this letter is a paradigmatic example of how not to do so.”

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

1 month

Gonna start a new philosophy journal but submissions are always closed

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

3 months

Friend just posted about a vicious attack on their family by a pit bull. In the comments should I express sympathy or argue pit bulls are not actually dangerous? I'm a philosopher, by the way.

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

3 months

Some people are interpreting my earlier tweet to mean devoting your life to academic philosophy isn't meaningful. That's just not true. It isn't meaningful, but I didn't say that.

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

3 months

As a parent, I don't play favorites. I love my older child and my backup child equally.

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

2 years

It’s my birthday today and all I want is for you to like or retweet this post so knowledgeable people see it and point me to medical advice about my father (78) who is three months post-covid and has been experiencing intense fatigue and breathlessness

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

1 year

Check out the schedule for my intro ethics class on moral problems @BU_Tweets All public philosophy with readings from @willmacaskill @amiasrinivasan @KieranSetiya @rinireg @sentientist @add_hawk @last1000chimps @d_benatar @slatestarcodex @jiatolentino @Yascha_Mounk and others

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Victor Kumar

@victorckumar

4 months

Used to care deeply about my children until I found out natural selection was punking me

manvir singh

@mnvrsngh

4 months

Anyone experienced an existential or ethical destabilization after studying/learning about the psychological or evolutionary foundations of moral intuitions? I'm interested in that feeling and how people reconcile evolutionary debunking with the desire to be moral.

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