(Successor site to CoPhilosophy, 2011-2020)
A collaborative search for wisdom, at Middle Tennessee State University and beyond... "The pluralistic form takes for me a stronger hold on reality than any other philosophy I know of, being essentially a social philosophy, a philosophy of 'co'"-William James
Reading, Thinking, and Dwelling in the Age of the Algorithm
An Applied Philosophy Talk by John Kaag
Abstract
We live in an era of industrial-scale shadow-play. The map of reality is no longer drawn from our own experience but projected by algorithms designed to keep us looking at a particular kind of wall. This talk argues that the oldest resources in the philosophical canon offer the most precise diagnosis of our newest predicament. Plato's cave anticipates the architecture of the feed—with one grim perversion: his prisoners at least shared a wall, while the algorithm builds a bespoke cavern for each of us. The Buddhist vocabulary of maya, tanha, and upadana describes with uncanny accuracy the mechanics of craving, clinging, and curated selfhood that the infinite scroll exploits. And Heidegger's account of Enframing—read alongside his catastrophic biography, which cannot be waved away—explains how attention itself became “standing reserve,” a resource to be extracted.
The talk concludes with the question increasingly posed to our machines: why is talking to a large language model so strange? The answer reveals a schism between information and meaning, between the calculative synthesis at which AI excels and the meditative, embodied, abductive thinking that a life—with something at stake—alone makes possible. Philosophy's task has not changed since the cave: to make us suspicious of the reality that appears most obvious, and to recover the gritty practices that might let us turn our heads, a few degrees, toward the light.
About the Speaker
John Kaag is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and Visiting Professor at Harvard Divinity School. He is the author of three widely acclaimed books published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux: American Philosophy: A Love Story, Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are, and Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life. These books were named NPR Best Books of the Year and New York Times Editors' Choice selections.
His work bridges American pragmatism, intellectual history, ethics, and the philosophy of technology, and he writes regularly for general audiences on why philosophy still matters for everyday life.
Let’s introduce ourselves, CoPhilosophers of Fall ‘26.
Go to the comments space below and tell us who you are, why you’re here, how you’d summarize your personal philosophy of "life, the universe, and everything" (but be less concise than "42"), & anything else you’d care to share. Include your section number, 1, 2 or 3 (940, 1 PM, 240 respectively).
Who am I, why am I here? Here’s an interview I gave recently:
This prestigious program offers U.S. undergraduate students the opportunity to undertake a 10 to 12-week research internship with Canadian university faculty across a variety of academic disciplines, from science and engineering to the humanities and social sciences. Previous research experience is required, but students from all majors are welcome to apply.
Key Details:
Application Deadline: September 16, 2026
Reference Submission Deadline: September 23, 2026
Program Overview:
Duration: 10 to 12 weeks, with internships beginning between May and July 2027
Location: Canadian universities
Experience: Engage in advanced research projects while exploring cultural, social, and recreational opportunities in Canada
Eligibility Requirements:
Must be currently enrolled as an undergraduate at a U.S. university
Must be a U.S. citizen with a valid U.S. passport
Must have one to three semesters remaining in their undergraduate program as of Fall 2027 (Meaning graduation in Fall 2027, Spring 2028 or Fall 2028)
...I know that you, ladies and gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most interesting and important thing about you is the way in which it determines the perspective in your several worlds. You know the same of me. And yet I confess to a certain tremor at the audacity of the enterprise which I am about to begin. For the philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos... Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use... Pragmatism (1907)
School starts in a week. Time to celebrate one of the more positive addictions.
“…As obvious as this may seem, it typically goes unsaid: to be a student is ... to study. Students are not clients; they are not consumers; they are not users who can be “captured” by outcomes, indicators, or throughputs. Experts recognize this fact, yet study is not a main theme or even a topic in the shelf of books I have on recent debates. Few philosophical arguments about the future of the university analyze what it means to study.
So before we go any further, let the first idea of this book be the idea of study. What, this humanities professor asks, does the word student mean? In the academic field of higher education, students are the subject matter for vast research. But philosophers often examine what seems obvious, and, to me, this idea of study especially has the power to help reorient the research university. Framing the idea of study means making explicit a goal that exceeds our current practices.
Framing the idea of study does not mean offering an empirical account of what students today “do.” Rather, it is an attempt to identify the ideas that may guide them. With some irony, I’ll try to outline the idea of study by exploring the words student and study as documented by the Oxford English Dictionary, which emerged from the philological research of great humanities scholars.
So let me link, or turn to, the 1989 version of the Oxford English Dictionary, conveniently available to students and faculty online. student, n. 1. A person who is engaged in or addicted to study. 2. a. A person who is undergoing a course of study and instruction at a university or other place of higher education or technical training. Also const. of, in (a subject); often with defining word prefixed, as art student, law student, medical student...”
— What Could a University Be?: Revolutionary Ideas for the Future (On Campus) by Robert B. Gibbs
This fall will include elections for important local, state, and federal offices, including Tennessee's Governor and U.S. Representatives in Congress. Please be engaged in this civic process...
Monday, October 5th is the last day to register in Tennessee for the fall election.
Wednesday, October 14th is the first day of early voting in Tennessee.
Thursday, October 29th is the last day of early voting in Tennessee.
Tuesday, November 3rd is election day.
MTSU's American Democracy Project stands by to assist you in all things voting. Students can find voter registration information for all 50 states on our website: https://amerdem.mtsu.edu/vote/
We also offer class presentations of 15-55 minutes about the voter registration and voting processes; simply email Amy.Sayward@mtsu.edu.
Additionally, we will be hosting voter registration drives across campus during September and October to register students and provide information about the upcoming election, including the three Tennessee Constitutional amendments that are on the ballot.
Even Elite Colleges Have Become Trade Schools Short-term return on investment is an impoverished view of a college education.
... it feels that, as a country, we’re “losing the point” of college, which in his mind, was supposed to be about figuring “out who you are and what you’re interested in.” His experience was that “people need to know what they want to do after college when they get to college,” which is a tall order for a teenager.
...a poignant anxiety I hear when I speak to college students: They have started worrying about employability the second they walk through the campus gates, if not before. While President Trump has pitted the idea of higher education against trade schools, as if the two types of institutions have different aims, that distinction is largely antiquated.
As the new school year begins, it’s worth pointing out how students and administrators treat colleges — even elite universities — as a catapult to a “good job” above all else.
Which is to say: Colleges are already trade schools.
The top two majors for students at four-year institutions as of 2022 are business and health professions. In June, the Department of Education issued its “earnings accountability” rule, which states that undergraduate programs have to show that their students earn more than a person with a high school diploma, and graduate programs have to show that their students earn more than a person with a college diploma, or they risk losing access to federal loans.
Nathan Heller, in a 2023 New Yorker article about the death of the liberal arts major, offered a history of the competing aims of the American university. In the 1960s, our institutions of higher ed were described by Clark Kerr, president of the University of California system, as a multiversity that “incorporates the tradition of land-grant universities, established with an eye to industrial-age skill sets. And it provides something for everyone.” The pursuit of knowledge and beauty, scientific research, and pre-professional studies were all bound together, even if it was never a harmonious union.
That fractious union was breaking apart long before the second Trump administration took a wrecking ball to the federal funding of research across disciplines. But the effort to put higher education in its place started much earlier. Over the past 30 years, there has been a concerted effort by mostly conservative politicians to diminish trust in the value of college, and to provide less federal funding for it. They paint America’s colleges and universities as foolish, progressive hotbeds of ethnic studies departments where impressionable young people get expensive Marxist indoctrination rather than marketable, useful skills.
It wasn’t always like this. There used to be bipartisan agreement that our universities were a source of civic strength, and local leaders wanted to keep educated young people from leaving their states. The political scientists Eric Schickler and Elina Maria Rodriguez analyzed a data set of over 1,000 state and national party platforms from 1980 to 2025 to show how Republicans have turned against higher education. In the ’80s and ’90s, some state-level Republicans supported public universities with high praise and high funding, Schickler and Rodriguez explain in an article published this year in the journal Studies in American Political Development.
...When we reduce college to metrics like short-term return on investment, we are ignoring so much human potential it is staggering: Young people who don’t have the resources to pay out of pocket for their college degrees are going to be pushed into jobs that they might be ill suited for, rather than getting to explore their intellectual potential in fields that are not immediately remunerative.
Who knows how many kids we have already trapped in a cutthroat competition to get a small number of finance or tech jobs, when their brains might have been put to better use creating the next great piece of literature, designing a new kind of green building, or working in a lab that could lead to the next medical breakthrough? When we impugn the more esoteric ambitions of higher education, we lose the ability to dream big about what our young people can accomplish...
"...Next time you find yourself mindlessly on a screen, create distance. Find pure air and solitude. Stare at a tree, watch a cat, touch a leaf, smell all the smells, even the bad ones. Talk to someone who might disagree with you, such as a teenager. Be someone’s best enemy, and let them be yours. These small distances are acts of defiance against an escalatingly automatic world. It’s not too late to cherish humanity in all its mysteriousness, beauty, and ugliness, and always worth the effort."
Converse with A.I., but write and think for yourself.
“…What, uniquely, does writing do? It compels thought. It compels thinking in ways that silent contemplation or spoken language rarely can. It compels us to subject our thinking to the effort of articulation, the rigor of grammar, the tests of intelligibility and coherence, the inspection of others. In doing so, it also enjoins us to be clear, logical, accurate — and accountable. People may easily forgive a word said in anger but not so easily one written in anger, precisely because the fact that it was written tells us that it was considered...”
Affective polarization, or feeling incapable of amicable disagreement with those whose views differ from your own, and feeling personally threatened by the difference,stifles the healthy, robust, good-natured debate that should be at the heart of higher education and functional democracy. Let’s model a better way here.
“… A large majority of students remain in-state for college, primarily for financial reasons, so one driver of this change is likely growing regional polarization. That would help explain why, for example, so many students at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, are liberal while the student body at Auburn University in Alabama is more conservative. But the researchers found that a significant additional factor was the students’ preference for attending college with politically similar peers — and their even stronger desire not to go to school with people on the other side of the political divide...”
As a Gen Z student preparing to enter the work force, I believe that personal ambition is far more compelling than blindly pursuing the corporate grind. Recently, while waiting in line for a concert, I struck up a conversation with a stranger who told me about a story he was writing — about a man building a piano in postapocalyptic America. I soon joined his Wednesday night “drunk writing group,” where I discovered that my greatest sense of fulfillment comes from following creative impulses.
It is passion, not rote progress, that guides our paths forward. One of my friends traveled to Ukraine to serve as a drone pilot. Another reports from the Middle East. A third spends weekends backstage interviewing underground rap artists. None of them followed a conventional script, yet each is building a career around a genuine curiosity.
To me, those acts of curiosity comprise ambition. Rather than defining ourselves by external markers of success, we increasingly define success by whether our work reflects our authentic selves…
And solicits your interlocutory collaborative engagement. Just remember that personifying AI does not make it an actual person… but (contrary to popular presumption) it might actually emphasize and reinforce your own singular humanity.
This is exactly what I’ve told my students, to engage critically (and transparently!) with AI as an interlocutor, not a search engine… with this caution: “Just remember that personifying AI does not make it an actual person… but (contrary to popular presumption) it might actually emphasize and reinforce your own singular humanity.” As Jaron Lanier keeps reminding us, we are not “gadgets”… but AI, in its non-humanity, can also be more than a mere gadget. It can be a constructive collaborator, supplementing but not displacing or replacing our distinctive form of intelligence. We should investigate, albeit with circumspect caution and reflective judgment at every step, the creative possibilities this technology may afford.
The philosophical text commentary for this year's French Baccalaureate exam features an excerpt from Friedrich Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human, exploring the preference for comforting beliefs over scientific skepticism. This text is one of the options presented to over half a million students during the annual four-hour philosophy examination. Read the full story at The New York Times. [1, 2]
Eight Predictions for the Future of Higher Education
“… If the university is no longer just the place you go to get a degree that gets you on a job, what is it? As far as I can tell after my inquiries during the past six weeks, almost no one has a particularly good answer to that question. In the coming years, as the pain starts at so many of these universities, their administrators, faculty, and those with a direct stake in the future of higher education need to figure out what a college education is for…”
The university should never have been conceived as “ just the place you go to get a degree that gets you a job,” so if in the future it is thankfully not that, let’s again make it the place you go to get a vision of life and how to live it. How about that?
“At the end of his 1895 address “Is Life Worth Living?,” the pragmatist philosopher William James tells his audience to take a leap of faith: we may never be certain that our lives have a meaning, but maybe they do. Why not take a chance on this “maybe”? Day in and day out, we take more mundane leaps of faith. For example, I promise to meet a friend at her apartment; while I may be killed on the highway on my way there, I may not, either. I hope to see her later, and that hope animates my choice to get on the road. Why not adopt a similar faith in life’s worthwhileness?
I used to balk at the idea of a leap of faith. I sided with Albert Camus over Søren Kierkegaard, whom he mercilessly critiques in the first part of the Myth of Sisyphus. For Camus, Kierkegaard recognizes the absurdity of the human condition— “the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart.” Yet, Kierkegaard, by calling on us to take a leap of faith, eliminates the absurd. In contrast, Camus says, “Being able to remain on the dizzying crest—that is integrity and the rest is subterfuge.”
Instead of the leap of faith, Camus proposes a different image: Sisyphus rolling the boulder endlessly up a hill, only to see it fall back down. Camus advocates grit over faith. Plant your feet firmly on the ground, disregard all hope of a future reward, and keep at it...”
https://open.substack.com/pub/celineleboeuf/p/leaps-of-faith?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios
…Perhaps this is why A.I.-enabled cheating does not seem to be a problem at Deep Springs. At other schools, students can tell themselves that they are, at worst, only cheating themselves. Students at Deep Springs learn to see themselves not as consumers of a degree (an individual good), but as creators of an education (a collective good). It’s important, too, that when second-year Deep Springers, as they’re known, make decisions about admissions and the curriculum, they know they are shaping a school that will exist when they are no longer there.
Deep Springs is unique, but it isn’t singular. Berea College is a selective four-year liberal arts school in Kentucky, one of 10 federally recognized work colleges in the United States. Founded in 1855 by abolitionists, it was the South’s first interracial, coed college. Today, its 1,500 undergraduates pay no tuition, and as at Deep Springs, they all work a campus job — at least 10 hours a week. At Berea, they receive pay to put toward housing and living expenses...
...I think the proof is always in the student. But you also have to recognize that there is an ineliminable element of human freedom in education.
When we talk about teaching and learning, the learning has to come from the student. And a good teacher who has a good pedagogy is always going to be especially attuned to the student and what the student needs and how to draw out of the student the best that that student can achieve.
But you cannot — trust me, any educator will tell you this — you cannot force the student. You can incentivize. We do that through grades and credentials. But ultimately, they have to want that sort of self-cultivation...
“…I think A.I. is a false mirror,” said Drew Lichtenberg, the dramaturg at the Shakespeare Theatre Company here and a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University. “It reflects back answers to black-or-white questions, but it does little to help explain the human experience the way art or philosophy can.”
He said he was shocked that students last semester were hungry for difficult plays and philosophical readings with no clear answers. “They were particularly into Kant and his ‘Analytic of the Sublime,’ Nietzsche and existential nausea, Camus and the myth of Sisyphus,” he said, adding that the cool reason of A.I. comprehends, but the seething imagination of art apprehends...”
Harry Frankfurt, a distinguished American philosopher, believed
that “it was impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth.
Producing bullshit requires no such conviction” (On Bullshit, Frankfurt). This
famous axiom was the product of Frankfurt’s prevalent and most well-known work,
On Bullshit. The book centers around the concept of "Truth", and
what is classified as lying and "bullshitting" (utter indifference to the
truth). However, Frankfurt sustains a slight sense of aversion to his
operational definition of "Truth" in the work, providing only tangential intersections
of his interpretation in On Bullshit.
Regardless, Frankfurt’s assertions in On Bullshit have
been widely proliferated, and can be applied to real-world, relevant scenarios
that we all relate to, especially when it comes to statistics and the sales profession.
Frankfurt himself discusses the implications of “bullshitting”
in the linked video, for those of you who would be interested in watching:
In 2006, Frankfurt published a follow-up to On Bullshit that
helped clarify what exactly Frankfurt defined as the "Truth", and where exactly
we derive the semantics of the word from. One of Frankfurt’s foremost assertions
is that there isn’t necessarily a subjective truth. Anyone attempting to present
a claim as truth with only personal belief or inflection as foundation for its
veracity is simply misleading their audience, whether that was their intention
or not.
Frankfurt characterizes truth as a force that relates
directly to reality. Truth, itself, isn’t subject to human manipulation, but
rather a synthesis of the facts about the world around us. In other words, we
cannot decide what is or isn’t true. Interestingly enough, Frankfurt views truth as normative binding, or a limiting factor that constrains human thought.
Truth governs belief. Frankfurt was a stringent proponent
of the belief that humans are obligated to care about and abide by the truth.
This, to me, extrapolates an incredibly intriguing line of thought. Following
the aforementioned logic, certain beliefs are either valid or invalid when
pitted against the “Metric of Truth”. As Frankfurt says, humans are rational
beings, and as such, we must strive to strictly adhere to the truth, as it
transcends the epistemological bounds of our perception.
To me, truth transcends the human mind. It cannot be created
or destroyed. For a moment I will speak apart from the work of Harry Frankfurt.
The disparate nature of man is something that starkly contrasts with truth. Here,
I’ve linked an interesting discussion forum, a great invention of the digital age, where individuals are
discussing the concept of truth. The “Original Poster” presents a multi-faceted
argument that demarcates illusions (human perception) from objective truth. He claims
that truth “cannot be a mental construct”, as an objective truth cannot alter
itself in the presence of different individuals. Under that logic, “the truth
of the Japanese would differ greatly from the truth of the Americans.” That is,
of course, a fallacious belief. However, as unsound as it is, it’s reflected
among the differing cultures/nations of the world. These differences are deeply
rooted in societies, and people demonstrate a nationalistic tendency to protect
them.
Let’s say, theoretically, we take two antagonizing groups of
people. Both groups assume a position that challenges the other and both groups
believe their position to be the truth. Of course, both sides cannot possibly
be telling the truth, but at the same time, neither side is telling a blatant
lie. At least, not under the parameters set forth by Frankfurt.
But what is most interesting about this experiment, is that
I cannot necessarily designate one of these groups as “bullshitters” either. A “bullshitter”
has no regard for what is true or false. They are entirely indifferent to the
truth. When superimposing that definition over the scenario I’ve presented, it doesn’t
correlate with the nature of either group. Both groups exhibit a vehement
confidence and genuine sincerity in their view.
What I can instead observe is what I can only describe as
delusion. Delusion, in the proper environment, can pose more of a danger than
both lying and “bullshitting.”
This thought ties into a discussion question that I posed to
the class during my presentation on Frankfurt’s work.
“Do you agree with Frankfurt in that ‘bullshitters’ who are
indifferent to truth could be just as dangerous as liars who actively conceal
it?”
While I received a mixed variety of responses to this
question, I can say one thing with absolute certainty. The bounds to which delusional
people go to promote their faulty claims far exceed those of a liar or a “bullshitter”.
When this phenomenon is applied to the American Political Sphere, that’s
one of the greatest examples of when delusion becomes dangerous. Politicians
are among the greatest liars of our population. They often employ misleading
rhetoric to elicit responses from their target audience, in our case, the
American populace.
When a group as malleable as the American population is
subjected to this, the concept of truth, as Frankfurt defines it, is rendered
irrelevant. Truth is not a social construct, and to treat it as such, as politicians
often do, opens doors to unsavory paths.
As I conclude, I’d like to draw attention to the image I’ve pasted
on the bottom of this post. It’s a quote from Frankfurt and a reminder of how important it is to prioritize
truth. It’s not uncommon for people to attempt to subvert reality, but reality
will never shift. To be selfless in your endeavors is a calling for the
recognition of truth. I encourage all who read this post to never stop caring
about the truth. It’s definitely something that the world could use more of.
This is exactly what I’ve told my students, to engage critically (and transparently!) with AI as an interlocutor, not a search engine… with this caution: “Just remember that personifying AI does not make it an actual person… but (contrary to popular presumption) it might actually emphasize and reinforce your own singular humanity.” As Jaron Lanier keeps reminding us, we are not “gadgets”… but AI, in its non-humanity, can also be more than a mere gadget. It can be a constructive collaborator, supplementing but not displacing or replacing our distinctive form of intelligence. We should investigate, albeit with circumspect caution and reflective judgment at every step, the creative possibilities this technology may afford.