Nietzsche's The Genealogy of Morals

 

Friedrich Nietzsche's The Genealogy of Morals is one of the Project Gutenberg ebooks that is available to read online.

Excerpt from Part 9:

"But why do you talk of nobler ideals? Let us submit to the facts; that the people have triumphed—or the slaves, or the populace, or the herd, or whatever name you care to give them—if this has happened through the Jews, so be it! In that case no nation ever had a greater mission in the world's history. The 'masters' have been done away with; the morality of the vulgar man has triumphed. This triumph may also be called a blood-poisoning (it has mutually fused the races)—I do not dispute it; but there is no doubt but that this intoxication has succeeded. The 'redemption' of the human race (that is, from the masters) is progressing swimmingly; everything is obviously becoming Judaised, or Christianised, or vulgarised (what is there in the words?). It seems impossible to stop the course of this poisoning through the whole body politic of mankind—but its tempo and pace may from the present time be slower, more delicate, quieter, more discreet—there is time enough."

Heady stuff, if not necessarily true or evident.

Lloyd Gerson on Plato's Moral Realism

 

Dr. Lloyd Gerson is a Canadian. He teaches at the University of Toronto. In this YouTube video he defends Plato's moral realism and ground of truth against revisionist readings of Plato.

Gerson speaks about his book Plato's Moral Realism in which he argues that Plato's ethical philosophy is inseparable from his systematic metaphysics.

Plato's moral realism rests on the Idea of the Good, the unhypothetical first principle of all. It is this, as Plato says, that makes just things useful and beneficial. That Plato makes the first principle of all the Idea of the Good sets his approach apart from that of virtually every other philosopher. This fact has been occluded by later Christian Platonists who tried to identify the Good with the God of scripture. But for Plato, theology, though important, is subordinate to metaphysics. For this reason, ethics is independent of theology and attached to metaphysics. 

This book challenges contemporary accounts of Plato's ethics that start with the so-called Socratic paradoxes and attempt to construct a psychology of action or moral psychology that makes these paradoxes defensible. Rather, Lloyd Gerson argues that Plato at least never thought that moral realism was defensible outside of a metaphysical framework.


Related reading: Dr. Gerson's lecture on Platonism vs Naturalism; Philosophers' Corner: Thumbnail Sketch of Phillipa Foot; Moral realism - Wikipedia

Aldarir Sentenced for Multiple Counts of Smuggling

 

Ancient Egyptian artifact stolen and sold by Eldarir in 2019.

BROOKLYN, NY: A federal judge sentenced Egyptian doctor Ashraf Omar Eldarir to six months in prison for smuggling nearly 600 Egyptian antiquities through JFK. He used fake provenance to funnel gold funerary amulets, wooden tomb models, an ancient Egyptian polychrome relief, an ancient Roman limestone stele, and an ancient Roman limestone head.

The false provenances included “multiple documents, including what appeared to be decades-old Egyptian blank pages with watermarks, decades-old Egyptian loose stamps, and multiple black-and-white old-looking photographs purporting to depict an ancestor of the defendant displaying several of the artifacts in his office from long ago,” stated court documents, which noted forensic examiners determined the documents were forgeries and the photographs had been photoshopped and aged.

Robbers sent Eldarir videos of the objects from the grave sites "as if it were K-Mart and here’s your pick to choose from," William Campos, the assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in court.

Read more here: Man packed luggage with hundreds of looted ancient artifacts, feds say

Artists Against AI Generated Art

 

AI images are programmed. We should consider the value of original and truly unique work.

Why are some artists refusing to use AI for creative work?

Many express concerns about copyright infringement. They believe that their work is being used without their consent to train AI models, which then generate derivative works that compete with their own.

Artists argue that the AI technology does not represent true artistic work, and that it devalues their efforts. AI generated images do not entail the natural and lengthy process of art creation. True art is an expression of human experience, emotion, and creativity, something which AI lacks. That is why many view the AI generated images as the opposite of art.

Artists are also concerned that human artists are increasingly being replaced by AI technology.

Molly Crabapple posted an open letter and petition, calling for book and magazine publishers to refuse to use AI art. Crabapple’s letter include signatures from high profile people such as author Naomi Klein and actor Jon Cusack.

Related reding: The Harm and Hypocrisy of AI Art; Independent Artists Are Fighting Back Against AI Image Generators With Innovative Online Protests by Richard Whiddington for Artnet; Colonizing Art | OpenMind Magazine; Philosophers Needed to Navigate the AI Revolution

Philosophers Needed to Navigate the AI Revolution

 

Demis Hassabis, CEO and co-founder of Google DeepMind, has pondered the need for profound philosophical thought to guide humanity through the uncharted waters of advanced AI. His observation highlights a fascinating and potentially critical aspect of the ongoing AI revolution. He believes that the AI revolution requires not just technical prowess but also deep ethical and philosophical reflection.

“I think there is a need for some great philosophers,” Hassabis said. “Where are the great next philosophers? The equivalent of Kant or Wittgenstein, or even Aristotle.”

He went on to explain why he believed such philosophical minds were crucial: “I think we’re going to need that to help navigate society to that next step because I think AGI and artificial superintelligence is going to change humanity and the human condition.”

Read it all here: Will Need Great Philosophers To Navigate The AI Revolution: Google's Demis Hassabis

Failure to Preserve Science Journals

 

Today online research can supplement field and lab research in multiple sciences, but a study suggests that some potentially important findings are no longer available because they have not been preserved.

The work of archiving and preserving science journals is time consuming and there is no uniformly applied process to preserve free downloadable journal articles. If the publisher ceases to exist, the journals may vanish. 

Eighty-four online-only, open-access (OA) journals in the sciences, and nearly 100 more in the social sciences and humanities, have disappeared from the internet over the past 20 years as publishers stopped maintaining them. The average duration of online access appears to have been about 10 years.

“The analysis demonstrates that research integrity and the scholarly record preservation … are at risk across all academic disciplines and geographical regions," says Andrea Marchitelli, managing editor of JLIS.it, the Italian Journal of Library, Archives, and Information Science.

The authors of the study are Mikael Laakso (Hanken School of Economics), Lisa Matthias (Free University of Berlin), and Najko Jahn (University of Göttingen). To determine the list of the 176 vanished journals, they did some digital detective work because clues about them are fragmentary. After the journals go dark their names no longer appear in bibliometric databases.

The authors defined a vanished journal as one that published at least one complete volume as immediate OA, and less than 50% of its content is now available for free online. Some of the content may be accessible as printed copies or in paywalled commercial services.

They used a historical archive of internet content, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, to determine when production ceased and when content disappeared from the internet (within 5 years for three-quarters of the journals). The journals had been based in 50 different countries. Most of the now dark journals published articles only in English.

The study found that only about one-third of the 14,068 journals indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals in 2019 ensure the long-term preservation of their content. Some commercial services offer it, and the Public Knowledge Project Preservation Network, does so for free.

Source: Dozens of Internet Journals Have Vanished; How Open Access Journals are Transforming Science

Two Kinds of Human Dignity

 

I recommend reading this paper by Dr. David Bradshaw, Philosophy professor at the University of Kentucky. "Making Human Rights Orthodox," International Conference on Post-Humanism and Artificial Intelligence, Athens, Greece, November 2024.

Dr. Bradshaw often speaks at Eastern Orthodox conferences and is an expert in early Greek theology. His book Aristotle East and West: Metaphysics and the Division of Christendom is fascinating and challenging (Cambridge U Press, 2004).

Bradshaw writes, "From an Orthodox standpoint, contemporary human rights discourse is problematic in two ways: many rights that are widely advocated are contrary to Orthodox moral teaching, and even those that are acceptable (such as, for example, the right to life) are often justified through faulty reasoning. Hence it is important to articulate a legitimately Orthodox framework for human rights.

 
The approach suggested here is based on a distinction between two kinds of human dignity: ‘mere’ human dignity, consisting in being accorded respect and appropriate treatment by others, and ‘true’ human dignity, consisting of possessing a pure conscience before God. These give rise to two distinct categories of human rights, which I refer to, respectively, as rights of non-abuse and rights of agency."