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News: December 2024 / January 2025
Lost Hegel lecture notes now being digitized • Professor Ted Honderich dead at 91 — News reports by Anja Steinbauer
Ted Honderich
We’re sad to report that Professor Ted Honderich died on 12th October 2024, at the age of 91. Born in Ontario, after studying at the University of Toronto he moved to Britain to take his PhD under the supervision of the famous A.J. Ayer at University College London. After teaching at the University of Sussex he returned to UCL, where for many years he was Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind & Logic. He also became a prominent public intellectual.
Ted Honderich at a dinner party
Photo © Philosophy For All pfalondon.org
Honderich edited a widely-used reference work: the Oxford Companion to Philosophy. He was Chair of the Royal Institute of Philosophy. His own philosophical work was mainly on consciousness, on free will and determinism, and on political philosophy. Apt words for his writings and lectures might be ‘witty’, ‘engaging’ and ‘trenchant’.
One widely respected example of his work on consciousness was his sustained criticism of Donald Davidson’s theory of anomalous monism. In carefully-argued papers such as ‘Donald Davidson’s Anomalous Monism and the Champion of Mauve’ (in Analysis 44, 1984) he argued that Davidson’s theory, contrary to the intentions of its author, actually boils down to a version of epiphenomenalism. In other words, rather than the mind and the body being two aspects of the same entity, the mind is a mere passive observer of actions taken solely by the physical body in a causal fashion.
Honderich’s own theory of mind kept evolving, ending up with his idea of ‘actual consciousness’, meaning consciousness of a subjectively experienced but physically real world with that consciousness having perceptual, affective and cognitive aspects.
Honderich later became notorious in many circles, and horrified many of his friends, with his analysis of contemporary terrorism. In his 2002 book After the Terror, he attempted to provide an explanation for Al-Quaeda’s terrorism in terms of anti-Western resentments in Third World countries. These, he said, were due to the poverty in turn attributable to Western capitalism, meaning that we all in the West bear some moral responsibility for the 9/11 attacks. Some fretted that he had crossed a line from explaining terrorism to justifying it.
Honderich was well known for his radical leftwing political views. When Daniel C. Dennett published his humorous dictionary The Philosophical Lexicon, it defined the word ‘honderich’ as follows:
honderich interj. (contraction of “Hound the Rich!”). The battle cry of those who subscribe to the violent overthrow of inequality. “The toast of the dinner party in Hampstead was ‘honderich!’”
Hegel Lecture Notes Restored
Even if you have made only the most fleeting acquaintance with the works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), you will know that he wrote some very hefty, dense classics of philosophy. Yet, there are aspects of his philosophy to which we have access only through the lecture notes of his students. One of the most diligent note-takers among them was Friedrich Wilhelm Carové. His more than 4,000 pages of notes on Hegel’s lectures include the much-coveted lectures on Aesthetics, which Hegel delivered in Heidelberg and of which no record had previously been known. The documents, discovered in a library in 2022, have now been stabilised and restored. Next they will be digitalised and made available for research.
Gender Self-Determination Act Becomes Law in Germany
Germany’s new Self-ID law came into effect on 1 November 2024, and is of philosophical interest in the contexts of identity, sex and gender. It has been pointed out that a single German word, Geschlecht, refers to both sex and gender, bringing an added complexity to the debate. The new law allows citizens aged 14 and above to change their gender simply by making a declaration to a registry office, which they can do once a year. Parents can do this for their children. While minors need parental consent to change their legal gender, they can appeal to the family courts should their parents or legal guardians refuse. The legislation also means that talking about or revealing a person’s birth sex, if distinct from their legal gender, could land the offender with a €10,000 fine.
Is AI Ethics Excluding Children?
In a paper published in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence, researchers from Oxford University stress that, although there is widespread consensus on what form AI ethical principles should take, no research has been dedicated to how to apply them to children. Dr Jun Zhao and his team from the Oxford Martin Programme on Ethical Web and Data Architectures (EWADA) point out the particular challenges involved in AI for children on account of their particular needs as vulnerable and developing young humans. Like all humans, children’s lives are necessarily going to include more AI. The EWADA researchers argue that although AI can and is being used to keep children safe, for example by identifying inappropriate online content, no effort has been made to incorporate safeguarding principles into AI innovations, including those supported by Large Language Models. They therefore call for a more child-centred approach to designing AI ethics principles, so that the emotional, cognitive and social needs of children can be properly met.
AI Accurately Models Behaviour of Individual Human Beings
Are children ready to deal with cutting-edge AI?
Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash
A team of researchers from Stanford and Google DeepMind have explored the possibilities of AI social simulacra. Joon Sung Park, a Stanford PhD candidate in computer science, led the experiment. The team recruited 1,000 people diverse in terms of age, gender, race, region, education, and political ideology. On the basis of information acquired by interviews with them, the team created an AI generative agent twin of each human. Testing how closely the agents simulated their human counterparts, participants and agents completed personality tests, social surveys, and logic games. The results were 85% similar. “If you can have a bunch of small ‘yous’ running around and actually making the decisions that you would have made – that, I think, is ultimately the future,” said Park. The agents interacted with one another, learning and remembering information about one another and adjusting their behaviour accordingly. If AI agents can really act like real people, we can learn about human behaviour and choices, as well as the effects of environment, change and information upon them, by observing social simulacra. This kind of model is intended to find application in the social sciences and related fields of enquiry. It could facilitate studies that would be expensive, hard to carry out or unethical to conduct with real human participants.
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