_This is a qualitative review of a 5 week period from 22 November until 26 December, plus brief comment on the period 1 - 22nd November._ _Caveat lector: I wrote this one quickly, and the main intended audience is my future self._ ## Pre-amble Amble 3 ended on 31 October (see [[02021 Amble 3 – Written review]]). On the 1st November, I travelled from London to Penne with my parents. They stayed at Carlane for 5 nights and I took a couple days off to hang with them. I then welcomed a dear childhood friend, followed by the Reykjavík Bridge Unit and a gaggle of spectators. It was a great opening week for the [[_Penne d'Agenais Coworking Retreat]]. I continued posting to my [daily study journal](https://sun.pjh.is), read a fair bit, and wrote my plan for Amble 4. ## Outline of Amble 4 **Week 1: Finished off Joeseph Walker's new website.** The [new site](https://josephnoelwalker.com/) is much better than his previous one, and I am glad to support his podcast. He paid me partly in private tutoring calls—I found these valuable. I spent more time working on this than I intended (debug below). **Week 2: Pragmatism; evergreen notes & gym upgrades** I thought about the PH production function and my intellectual training regime. I wrote a longlist and shortlist of things to try. I spent a couple days practicing "evergreen note" writing along the lines suggested by Andy Matuschak. **Week 3: Reading: non-naturalist realists & Nietzsche; CK visit** I did quick reads of several non-naturalist realists: Sharon Hewit-Rawlette, Sidgwick and Parfit. Then several books on Nietzsche, in particular: Nietzsche's Values, Beyond Selflessness. CK came to visit and cowork, so I took about 1/3 of the week off to hang with her. **Week 4: Reading and writing** Thomas Nagel, Richard Rorty, Joe Carlsmith, Ruth Chang. **Week 5: Reading and writing** Blogs: Joe Carlsmith, Holden Karnofsky, Robin Hanson. More Nietzsche scholarship, more on radical uncertainty. For an "ideas focussed" outline, see my [study journal](https://sun.pjh.is/archives). ## Pragmatism and naturalism [[Pragmatism]] and [[Naturalism]] were a major theme of this period. I've long felt unsure how to square (a) the understanding of world I get from Darwin and the cosmologists with (b) the things that some of our best moral philosophers sometimes say about what they are doing. In particular, I wanted to get clearer on why some philosophers—such as [[=Derek Parfit]], [[=Tim Scanlon]], [[=Thomas Nagel]], [[=Jonathan Dancy]]—defend non-naturalist moral realism. I started with the pragmatists, though. Reading more [[=Cheryl Misak]], [[=William James]] and [[=Richard Rorty]] helped me realise that a bunch of views I absorbed from [[=Nietzsche]]—and still hold as "best guess" views—add up to a picture of [[Pragmatism]], [[Subjectivism]] and [[Naturalism]]. For example: - [[Pragmatists think of beliefs as dispositions to act and anticipate]] - [[Pragmatists think of knowing the world as always linked to agency within it]] - [[Pragmatists evaluate beliefs in terms of successful action, not correspondence to facts]] - [[Pragmatism implies that values and norms are contingent, contextual, ephemeral]] - Pragmatists think our ability to reason together is grounded in a shared receptiveness to reasons, and that this is grounded in contingent, variable factors. There is not a universal capacity of reason that all rational beings share. ### Adaptive values, adaptive norms Here's a pragmatist-naturalist-flavour sketch of how to think about values, moral norms and consequences. The pragmatist thinks of cognition as always concerned with getting by in the world, as the kind of beings we are. Insofar as we try to build a better world, we pursue values we happen to have, given what we are—not values that stand independent of humanity. These values are our own in the sense that they are proximately grounded in what we are, though ultimately what we are is a product of the material process of natural selection. We evaluate states of affairs in light of our values. We usually evaluate actions according to moral norms. We evaluate moral norms by their propensity to lead to valuable states of affairs. The connection between a moral norm and valuable states of affairs sometimes breaks. In those cases, we may try to evaluate potential actions directly in light of expected consequences. The connection can also break persistently if the environment changes significantly. In those cases, we revise our moral norms. The evolution of our values is similar, but slower, and even less conscious. Insofar as we develop moral norms and hold each other to these, we do so to solve practical problems of cooperation, e.g. to realise gains from trade, to avoid violent conflict. Our norms are subject to complex selection pressures—those which become dominant do so because they are adaptive, not because of non-natural truths about their validity. On the naturalist-pragmatist picture, adapativeness looms in the background when we reflect on moral norms and values. You think of norms and values as temporary and contingent. When the fitness landscape changes, norms and values change too.  ### The future: governance vs competition A key question, on this picture, is to what extent we can coordinate to control the fitness landscape. If we do this, we could tilt the deck to preserve the best of the values we currently hold. We already do this to a significant degree. Could we do it at a global scale over the very long-run? Even if we can't, might we want to do it for as long as possible, even if that's only decades or centuries? We can think of governance as "deliberate attempts to change the fitness landscape". Hanson thinks [the choice between competition and governance is central for the future of humanity](https://sun.pjh.is/robin-hanson-one-of-our-main-choices-is-between-competition-and-governance). It seems like we could significantly limit and reshape the field of competition if we chose to [^1]. [^1]: In the very long run, this might increase the risk we are dominated by some alien species who took a more fitness maximising strategy. Hanson worries it would also reduce the probability of our descendents spreading to the stars. ## The present: dream time? [Robin Hanson](https://sun.pjh.is/robin-hanson-this-is-the-dream-time) and others have suggested that we currently live in an unusual "dream time" era, a period where an accumulated surplus of resources has temporarily reduced competition pressure. This opens up space for "luxury beliefs"—beliefs which inhibit, or at least fall far short of, maximium reproductive potential. Eventually, some humans will develop norms that better approximate maximum reproductive potential in this environment and—absent coordinated effort to prevent this—they will become dominant. Population will increase and per capita wealth will return to near-subsistence levels. ([You may or may not](https://sun.pjh.is/comments-on-this-is-the-dream-time) find this a bleak prognosis.) ### So anyway, what about those great non-naturalist philosophers? As I see it, they are united by, as John Dewey puts it: "the idea that absence of immutably fixed and universally applicable ready-made principles is equivalent to moral chaos." They think, as [Joe Carlsmith puts it](https://handsandcities.com/2021/01/03/the-despair-of-normative-realism-bot/), that "non-naturalism is the only way to validate what needs validating about normative judgement and discourse". Or, as Simon Blackburn puts it: > That things do not matter unless they matter to God, or throughout infinity, or to a world conceived apart from any particular set of concerns or desires, or whatever. I have felt the pull of this intuition in the past. Like Carlsmith, I now rarely feel it. I think I have unlearnt it. And I seem quite able to go on with my caring and wanting and valuing much as before. I have long felt hesitant to dismiss the non-naturalists. This is largely driven by outside-view deference—the sense that if this position taken seriously by some of the best philosophers, I should not set much store on my own amateur objections. But having read some of the non-naturalists a little more carefully, I now see this crux more clearly, and I'm willing to bet more (indeed, most) of my chips against them. ### Why does meta-ethics matter, again? If we think of ourselves as trying to make the best of things by (the best of) our own lights, that's quite different from trying to realise some external standard. It narrows the potential gap between what we care about and what we ought to care about, while leaving room for a story of correction and improvement _by our own lights_. Meta-ethics informs our views on convergence and diversity, and the things that underwrite them. Insofar as [[Value convergence]] is practically important but not inevitable, the naturalist may think we should invest more in affordances that sustain it. An objectivist might think that convergence is underwritten by something out there, whereas a subjectivist thinks it is underwritten by shared identity, and at the second-order, by game theory. The naturalist may be more concerned to develop and sustain some forms of homogenity—on pain of intractable conflict. They may also, like [[=Joshua Greene]], recognise diversity as inevitable, but look for a second order "meta-morality" which will help different groups co-exist. Greene casts hedonistic utilitarianism as our best candidate meta-morality, though he rebrands the doctrine, tellingly, as "deep pragmatism". Meta-ethics also informs my relationship to the ideal of impartial concern. Crudely: the realist says that there is an external standard out there and idiosyncracies that distract from that are fundamentally regrettable. The non-realist is not suspicious of their particular identity in that way. Here we find ourselves, this is what we are and what we value, let's go for it. The pragmatist picture thinks of impartiality as a norm that may help cooperation, useful for that reason. But the pragmatist will not see impartiality as the right perspective for humanity to adopt when we ask: what is ultimately valuable? This cluster of questions in metaethics and philosophical method has gnawed at me over the past decade. I am looking forward to "putting them down", to free up energy and motivation for deployment elsewhere. Am I ready to do that? Maybe. Nearly? Probably. ### Some things that still bother me I wrote some rough notes, leaving them unpublished for now. %% In the subjectivist picture, I want to keep an ability to say "let's become better versions of ourselves." I'm not sure how to do this. One option is to generate and reflect on normative theories, another is to look closely at people you admire. This is an extremely material question given the growing capabilities we have to change the human condition via biotech. What about creating digital minds? Introspective hedonism as described by [[=Sharon Hewitt Rawlette]] strikes me as the best version of non-naturalist realism. It hangs together nicely and maybe one day per week I am tempted to make it my favourite theory. It seems to have pretty different implications for what we should aim for in the future. ... Alongside all this, I've realised I'm more and more satisified with "two thirds utilitarianism" as working theory. I want to I don't see this picture as form of nihilism, so I'm not tempted by the "you should just bet on realism being true, even if your credence is low" move. %% ### Metaphysics, for the pragmatist I stumbled accross Elijah Millgram's characterisation of [metaphysics as intellectual ergonomics](https://sun.pjh.is/elijah-millgram-on-metaphysics-as-intellectual-ergonomics), and I really like it. On that picture, philosophers should focus squarely on: is this is a useful way to think, given where we're at? ## Predicting the future in the face of radical uncertainty Following my [reflection on the book by Mervyn King and John Kay](https://sun.pjh.is/tetlock-vs-king-and-kay-on-probabilistic-reasoning), I thought a bit more about this topic, partly in dialog with Joseph Walker, and partly by reading more of [[=David Deutsch]]. I wrote up [some thoughts](https://sun.pjh.is/thoughts-on-robin-hanson-and-david-deutsch-on-predicting-the-future) on this. In short—nothing Deutsch is saying threatens the legitimacy of speculation in the mode of Bostrom or Hanson (in the case of Hanson, Deutsch explicitly concedes this). Deutsch (channelling Popper) _might_ have a coherent alternative to Bayesian epistemology, but if he does, he's not been able to explain why the practice of assigning subjective probabilities is generally unhelpful or illegitimate. He thinks it causes trouble when we think about quantum physics—I'm happy to defer to him on that one. In general though, I remain a fan of the Bayesian mindset. ## Reflection on Georges Bataille I did some semi-random reading around the edges. Most memorable was a brief encounter with Georges Bataille. Many focus on problems of material scarcity, but Bataille writes on abundance. In the bits I read, the focal question was: what to do with all the surplus? And a key thought is: if we just keep trying to reinvest our surplus for further gains, we will eventually run up against others who are trying to do the same thing, and end up in a highly destructive war. If the question we face is less "how to avoid wasteful use?" and more "how to avoid highly destructive use?", a whole bunch of apparently wasteful use of resources might not look so bad. In this light, things like luxury expenditure and sporting competition present as relatively harmless ways of burning off the material surplus—and "relatively harmless" is a major achievement. As an undergraduate, I often came back to the question: how can we play status games with better externalities? I still think this is important. I also enjoyed Bataille on =[[Nietzsche]] and his struggle to unlearn the Judeo-Christian-style valuing: > The difficulties Nietzsche encountered—casting off God and the good while fired, nonetheless, with the ardor of those who have died for God and the good—those difficulities I have, in turn, encountered. > > [...] > > Extreme states of being, whether individual or collective, were once purposefully motivated. > > [...] > > Morality always says: "let every instant of your life be _motivated_." The [Eternal] Return _de-motivates_ the instant, frees life from purpose and is thereby, first of all, its downfall. The Return is the whole man's dramatic mode and his mask; it is the desert of a man whose every instant is henceforward unmotivated. > > [...] > > How can we not draw the consequences of the purposelessness inherent in Nietzsche's desire. Chance—and the quest of chance—represents inexorably the sole remaining recourse. It struck me that the Death of God shares something with the experience of meditation: it's a "stepping back" from the usual structures of motivation that dominate our experience. We recognise a level of choice we were not previously aware of. We can select these structures, to some degree. And the grounds for selection are contingent and mysterious—personal tastes given to us by the world, by the particular identity we are thrown into. I drew a connection from here to [[=Ruth Chang]], but I'm out of time for writing about that today. %% I'm not sure I understand the response that N and B are aiming for. For my part, I see value in developing an awareness of the reality of things, and dwelling upon these matters for a while seems fine. I keep having this image of a clothes rail, trying on different shirts. Try several different shirts for a while. Sit naked for a while, sure. But do it all over and over again, it's fun. There is some edge of my worldview where it seems important to recognise the purposelessness insight. Man, I kinda don't trust all of this GPT-3 style narrative construction. What would it be like to really inhabit the "unmotivated" state of mind? Perhaps CK can answer that. The attractive side is: you're all in on what is happening, what you are doing—now. It's not about some future promise. It's life as game, not as journey. All this vague spiritual stuff. For some reason, after all this time, I still find myself trying to orientate. I have felt very good about things a lot of the time, these past years. What is the thing that feels slightly off? It relates to EA and moral philosophy, I think. Something about the claims it's made on my agency. But let's not go too hard on romantic individualism here. Ruth Chang and Joe Carlsmith resonate, it's like—yes, you are resisting this too. %% ## Training patterns I spent two days focussed on improving my intellectual training regime, trying to run with the "gym/workout" analogy. The main thing I did was learn about and practice Evergreen note writing. I gave it a try for a current topic of interest, namely [[Pragmatism]]. I encounted and solved a couple of basic problems. I have not mastered this practice yet, and I'm not sure how much of it will stick and be useful. But I did get a tantalising glimpse of how a habit like this could compound. I tidied up my notes repository and made some improvements. I installed a "random notes" plugin and found that browsing through notes at random is very stimulating. I hired a developer to make a simple Obsidian plugin to generate lists of notes based on tags and filenames. It went ok, but I didn't want to keep working with them. So I spent a couple hours writing my own bash scripts to fix some issues and auto-generate a notes [[Changelog]] and a record of [[What I'm reading]]. ## Progress against stated goals I made just 4 / 8 of my lead metric goals. That's a big shortfall. I started to think I would miss them towards the end of week 2 of the bout, and thought about it several times each week thereafter. For some reason, I didn't care enough to do anything about it. Was this my patterns of care correctly telling me that the goals were bad? Or were the goals good, and I was wrong not to care about them? I am honestly not sure. ### Debug of week 1 Week 1 didn't go to plan at all: I ended up spending most of the week on Joe's website. Two main reasons: (1) I chose to build the site on Ghost, a platform I've never used but wanted to learn, rather than WordPress, a platform I've worked with for more than a decade. (2) I greatly extended the original brief, because I wanted to help him more. I realised what was happening fairly early, paused to reflect, and decided to push through. I did a good job of accepting the situation, updating the plan, and just enjoying the work rather than clinging onto my original plan and feeling "behind". ## Closing thoughts, and what's next? This period of study was somewhat distracted. I showed up every day, but I didn't reliably feel like I was running at full speed. I read more than I expected but wrote a good deal less. I had a couple of 10 / 10 days, but many 5 / 10 days. Overall I judge my rate of learning during this period 6.5 / 10—ok / good, but notably less good than previous ambles in 2021. My mood and energy fluctuates on a roughly annual pattern, and I was clearly in the lower range for much of the period [^2]. This headwind could easily explain most of the difference between this and the previous periods. In that context, I can imagine a manger telling me to dial down my expectations and call this a surprisingly good period overall. I am reluctant to cut myself slack in this spirit, though—it's on me to consistently aim for and achieve great results, no matter what headwinds I face. [^2]: If things had got much worse, I would have switched tack to spend a couple weeks on the kinds of tasks I reliably find easier during periods of lower mood (e.g. software design and development). I think it was correct not to do this. Amble 1 2022 will begin on 24th January. I will write the plan and do other preparatory work between 20-23 January. In the meantime, I will be mostly "on holiday", mostly in Venice. That means a shift in emphasis away from "being productive" and towards "enjoying my days, loving my friends, following my heart". I will maintain some minimal structural commitments, and may, in fact, do a bunch of productive things, when the mood seizes me. Often when I take holiday I end up making web applications... ## Appendix 1. What I was reading An automatically generated list of the PDF files I annotated during this period. **John Maynard Keynes** - (Very short Introductions 230) Keynes, John Maynard Skidelsky, Roebert - Keynes A Very Short Introduction (2010, Oxford University Press) **Nietzsche** - John Richardson - Nietzsche's Values (2020, Oxford University Press) - The Gay Science - Beyond Good and Evil - Brian Leiter - Moral Psychology with Nietzsche (2019, Oxford University Press) - Bernard Reginster - The Will to Nothingness An Essay on Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality (2021, Oxford University Press) - Christopher Janaway - Beyond Selflessness (2007, Oxford University Press, USA) - On the Genealogy of Morals (Oxford, 1998) - SEP - (Oxford World's Classics) Friedrich Nietzsche, Graham Parkes - Thus Spoke Zarathustra A Book for Everyone and Nobody (2005, Oxford University Press) **Articles** - Agent-Relativity and the Doing-Happening Distinction 10.2307@4320228 - Industrial Revolution - Wikipedia - Taming-Philosophy-Della-Rocca - Clarifying Frank Knight's discussion of the meaning of risk and uncertainty 10.2307@23600452 - What we’re doing when we’re doing epistemology | Aeon Essays - The Use and Misuse of Models for Climate Policy Robert Pindyck **Joe Carlsmith** - The despair of normative realism bot – Hands and Cities - On the limits of idealized values – Hands and Cities - Alienation and meta-ethics (or is it possible you should maximize helium) – Hands and Cities - the-importance-of-how-you-weigh-it **Derek Parfit** - Parfit, Derek - Reasons and persons (20071987, Clarendon Press) - Reasons and Persons Watch theories eat themselves - EA Forum - Jeff McMahan Tim Campbell James Goodrich Ketan Ramakrishnan - Principles and Persons The Legacy of Derek Parfit (2021, Oxford University Press, USA) - Singer, Peter - Does anything really matter essays on Parfit on objectivity-Oxford University Press (2017) - On What Matters Volume Three (2016, Oxford Univ Pr, Parfit, DerekOxford University Press) **Fiction** - (Oxford Worlds Classics) Prickett, Stephen Carroll, Robert - The Bible Authorized King James Version (2014, Oxford University Press, USAOxford Paperbacks) - Vinge, Vernor - A Fire Upon The Deep (2011) - Martin, Amis - Money - A Suicide Note - Coetzee, J M - Elizabeth Costello (2004, Vintage Books) **Poetry** - Frank O'Hara - Lunch Poems - Cohen, Leonard - Book of Longing (2008, McClelland & Stewart) **Uncategorised** - UK Ministry of Defence — Human Augmentation A New Paradigm (May 2021) - Ross Douthat - The Decadent Society How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success (2020, Avid Reader Press Simon & Schuster) - Jordan Peterson - Beyond Order 12 More Rules For Life - J Storrs Hall - Where Is My Flying Car A Memoir of Future Past (2018) - Andy Norman - Mental Immunity Infectious Ideas, Mind-Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think (2021, Harper Wave) - Virtues for Real-World Utilitarians Preprint **Henry Sidgwick** - The Methods of Ethics - Crisp Sidgwick book review **Nick Bostrom** - vulnerable - digital-minds - Bostrom Nick - Superintelligence Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Oxford University Press) **Textbooks** - (Oxford Handbooks) David Copp - The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory (Oxford Handbooks) (2005, Oxford University Press, USA) - (Oxford Handbooks) Iwao Hirose, Jonas Olson - The Oxford Handbook of Value Theory (2015, Oxford University Press) - Ruth Chang Kurt Sylvan - The Routledge Handbook of Practical Reason (2020, Routledge) - Russ Shafer-Landau - Oxford Studies in Metaethics Volume 7 (2012, Oxford University Press, USA) **Robin Hanson** - Overcoming Bias This is the Dream Time - Hanson, Robin - The age of em work, love, and life when robots rule the Earth (2016, Oxford University Press) **David Deutsch** - The Beginning of Infinity Explanations that Transform the World-Viking (2011) **Julia Galef** - The Scout Mindset Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't (2021, Portfolio) **Philip Tetlock** - Superforecasting The Art and Science of Prediction (2015) - (Risk Analysis vol. 37 iss. 2) Cox, Tony - Review of Superforecasting The Art and Science of Prediction. Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner. (2015). New York Broadway B (2017) (10.1111risa.12776) - On the Difference between Binary Prediction and True Exposure With Implications For Forecasting Tournaments and Decision Making Research - (foresight vol. 19 iss. 2) Rötheli, Tobias - Superforecasting the art and science of predictionSuperforecasting The Art and Science of Prediction By Philip Tetlock and Dan (2017) (10.1108FS-12-2016-0061) **Dan Sperber** - Hugo Mercier, Dan Sperber - The Enigma of Reason A New Theory of Human Understanding-Allen Lane (2017) - 2019MercierSperberprecis-of-the-enigma-of-reason - (Mind & Language vol. 33 iss. 5) Chater, Nick Oaksford, Mike - The enigma is not entirely dispelled A review of Mercier and Sperber's The Enigma of Reason (2018) (10.1111mila.12181) **Holden Karnofsky** - Bayesian Mindset - on the most important century - 80,000 Hours - In a nutshell - www-cold-takes-com-all-possible-views-about-humanitys-future-are-wild- - www-cold-takes-com-making-the-best-of-the-most-important-century- - www-cold-takes-com-summary-of-history-empowerment-and-well-being-lens- - www-nytimes-com-2021-10-05-podcasts-transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-holden-karn - cold-takes-are-we-trending-toward-transformative-ai-how-would-we-know-2021-09-10-181400 - cold-takes-where-ai-forecasting-stands-today-2021-09-10-182001 - are-we-trending-toward-transformative-ai-how-would-we-know - forecasting-transformative-ai-whats-the-burden-of-proof - this-cant-go-on - transformative-ai-timelines-part-1-of-4-what-kind-of-ai - does-x-cause-y-an-in-depth-evidence-review copy **Julian Baggini** - The Great Guide What David Hume Can Teach Us about Being Human and Living Well (2021, Princeton University Press) **James Boswell** - Boswell, James - The Life of Samuel Johnson (2008, Penguin Group USA, Inc.) **Leo Strauss** - lawler what is straussianism **Radical Uncertainty** - Are economists really this stupid - UnHerd - Mervyn King John Kay - Radical Uncertainty Decision-making for an Unknowable Future (2020, Hachette UK) **Ruth Chang** - ChangDAPreminiscencesubmit - the existentialist of hard choices » 3AM Magazine - What is it to be a Rational Agent? **Plato** - The Name of Plato 10.2307@264825 **Heidegger** - Pragmatism Heidegger and the Context of Naturalism 10.2307@25669937 - (Very short introductions 25) Heidegger, MartinInwood, M. J - Heidegger a very short introduction (2019, Oxford University Press) - Martin Heidegger (author), John Macquarrie (translator), Edward Robinson (translator) - Being and time (1962, Blackwell Publishers) - (Routledge guides to the great books) Heidegger, MartinMulhall, Stephen - The Routledge guidebook to Heidegger's Being and time (2013, Routledge) - Martin Heidegger - The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (1977, Garland Publishing) **Hilary Putnam** - Why Reason Can't Be Naturalised 10.2307@20115757 **Richard Rorty** - SEP Richard Rorty - Trotsky and the Wild Orchids (1992) - Bernard Williams · Getting it right · review of Rorty LRB 23 November 1989 - We Can Do Better On Richard Rorty’s “Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism” - Bernard Williams reviews Richart Rorty Consequences of Pragmatism **Hegel** - Social and Political Thought | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy **Thomas Nagel** - The End of Explanation by Bernard Williams The New York Review of Books - Nagel, Thomas - The Last Word (2009, Oxford University Press) - (Philosophical Review vol. 107 iss. 4) Review by Simon Blackburn - The Last Word.by Thomas Nagel (1998) (10.23072998393) - (Ethics vol. 109 iss. 1) Larmore, Charles - Thomas Nagel,The Last Word (1998) (10.1086233878) - (The European Legacy vol. 11 iss. 4) Findler, Richard - The Impossibility of the Last Word Thomas Nagel's Concealed Perspective (2006) (10.108010848770600766169) - Mortal Questions (1979, Cambridge University Press) - The View From Nowhere (1989, Oxford University Press, USA) - · The View from Here and Now A Tribute to Bernard Williams · LRB 11 May 2006 **Timothy Scanlon** - Review of Being Realistic About Reasons Reviews Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews University of Notre Dame **Cheryl Misak** - Misak, Cheryl J. - Cambridge pragmatism from Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein (2016, Oxford University Press) - Frank Ramsey A Sheer Excess of Powers (2020, OUP Oxford) - Review of ethics book - Review of Misak's book on ethics copy **Sharon Hewitt Rawlette** - Hewitt - Normative qualia and a robust moral realism **Michael Rosen** - Review of On What Matters 7 November 2013 - againstrationalism **Joshua Greene** - Moral Tribes Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them (2013, Penguin Press) **Elijah Millgram** - (Topoi vol. 21 iss. 12) Elijah Millgram - Commensurability in Perspective (2002) (10.1023a1014825624960) - The Great Endarkenment Philosophy for an Age of Hyperspecialization (2015, Oxford University Press) - (Ethical Theory and Moral Practice vol. 19 iss. 4) Grote, Thomas - Review of Elijah Milgram The Great Endarkenment – Philosophy for an Age of Hyperspecialization (2016) (10.1007s10677-015-9679-0) - Review John Stuart Mill and the Meaning of Life Reviews Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews University of Notre Dame - (Mind vol. 123 iss. 492) Wright, C. D. - Hard Truths, by Elijah Millgram (2014) (10.1093mindfzu141) - (Noûs vol. 30 iss. 2) Elijah Millgram - Williams' Argument Against External Reasons (1996) (10.23072216293) - (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research vol. 75 iss. 1) ELIJAH MILLGRAM - Who Was Nietzsche's Genealogist (2007) (10.1111j.1933-1592.2007.00061.x) - (Utilitas ) Loizides, Antis - Elijah Millgram, John Stuart Mill and the Meaning of Life (New York Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. viii + 249. (2020, Cambridge University Press (CUP)) (10.1017s0953820820000345) - (Philosophical Books vol. 48 iss. 1) joyce, richard - Ethics Done Right Practical Reasoning as a Foundation for Moral Theory - By Elijah Millgram (2007) (10.1111j.1468-0149.2007.4352.x) - (Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (Hardback) vol. 104 iss. 1) Elijah Millgram - IX—On Being Bored Out of Your Mind (2004) (10.1111j.0066-7373.2004.00087.x) - (Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 29 iss. 2) ELIJAH MILLGRAM - What's the Use of Utility (2000) (10.1111j.1088-4963.2000.00113.x) **Matt Ridley** - The Evolution of Everything How New Ideas Emerge (2015, Harper) **SEP** - pragmatismsc - impartialitysc **Meta** - Sönke Ahrens - How to Take Smart Notes One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking - For Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers (2017, Createspace Independent Publishing Platform) - edwards-how-to-read **Biography** - Keith Richards, James Fox - Life (2010, Little, Brown and Company) **Georges Bataille** - Douglas Crimp, Rosalind Krauss, Annette Michelson - George Bataille Writings on Laughter, Sacrifice, Nietzsche, Un-Knowing (October 36) (1986, MIT Press Journals) **Simon Blackburn** - On Truth (2018, Oxford University Press, USA) **C Thi Nguyen** - seductions of clarity **William James** - (Penguin American Library) William James, Martin E. Marty, Martin E. Marty - The Varieties of Religious Experience (1982, Penguin Classics) **Roger Crisp** - The Cosmos of Duty Henry Sidgwick's Methods of Ethics (2015, Oxford University Press) **Tyler Cowen** - Cowen, Tyler - Stubborn attachments a vision for a society of free, prosperous, and responsible individuals (2018, Stripe Press)