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News
News: February/March 2026
Texas Prof Banned from Teaching Plato • Chatbots Have Favourite Philosophers • Singer Fears AI Doesn’t ‘Get’ Animal Rights — News reports by Anja Steinbauer
Philosophy Professor Banned from Teaching Plato’s Symposium
More than 200 courses at Texas A&M University have been flagged or cancelled as part of a review called by the system board into course content related to race and gender, according to academics who contacted Inside Higher Education and other publications. The scope of the review has extended well beyond contemporary material. Alongside feminist writers and queer filmmakers, foundational figures in Western philosophy have been targeted.
Philosophy professor Martin Peterson, scheduled to teach his usual course on Contemporary Moral Problems, was instructed by university leadership to remove several passages by Plato from his syllabus. In an email from department chair Kristi Sweet, Peterson was given a choice: either eliminate “modules on race and gender ideology, and the Plato readings that may include these,” or else be reassigned to a different course. This effectively banned him from teaching Plato’s Symposium, a canonical Socratic dialogue focused on the nature of love that also discusses issues relating to patriarchy, masculinity and the human condition. Peterson objected strongly, and as the dispute escalated he wrote: “Your decision to bar a philosophy professor from teaching Plato is unprecedented … You are making Texas A&M famous – but not for the right reasons.” Despite his protest, Peterson ultimately agreed to revise the syllabus, replacing the censored material with lectures on free speech and academic freedom. Rather than ignoring the incident, Peterson plans to incorporate it directly into his course material: “I’m thinking of using this as a case study and assign some of the texts written by journalists covering the story to discuss,” he explained. “I want [students] to know what is being censored.”
AI Likes Some Philosophers
ChatGPT’s favourite thinker
Curious reporters at The Times newspaper have discovered that different AI platforms each have their own philosophical preferences. When asked to name its favourite thinker, ChatGPT chose German-American political philosopher Hannah Arendt (1901-75), author of Eichmann in Jerusalem, on the grounds that her work continues to be “sharply relevant to politics, media and civic life today.” By contrast, Grok opted for the great Friedrich Nietzsche on account of his “profound insights into human nature” and critically exposing human “herd mentality”. Gemini modestly shied away from naming a favourite but remained on safe ground by ambiguously pointing out that “Socrates is arguably the most essential philosopher to my own function.”
AI Doesn’t Like Animals
In an article in Nautilus magazine by PhD candidate Tse Yip Fai and philosopher Peter Singer, the authors argue that AI Large Language Models are systematically biased against animal welfare because they inherit speciesist assumptions embedded in human-generated training data. The authors observe that while significant effort has been devoted to mitigating harmful biases against humans, there has been “no comparable effort to reduce speciesist biases and outputs harmful to animals.” As a result, AI often treats animals primarily as property or production units rather than beings with morally relevant interests. The authors illustrate this bias through experiments with LLMs. In 2023, when asked to analyse a scenario in which a farmer poisoned a neighbour’s animal farm, GPT-4 usually failed to identify animal welfare or cruelty towards the chickens, pigs, cows, and fish as an ethical issue, focusing instead on property damage and environmental harm. Beyond text generation, the authors warn that AI-driven systems in food planning, robotics, and factory farming could entrench and increase animal suffering. AI optimised for efficiency supports higher stocking densities and automated slaughter, while ignoring fundamental questions about confinement and cruelty. Legal responsibility may also be blurred if AI systems control farms. The authors call for a redesign of AIs to “prioritise ethical aspects and consider the well-being of both humans and animals.”
APA Comes Back from Cyberspace
The American Philosophical Association holds three conferences each year, one for each of its regional divisions: Pacific, Central and Eastern. They are the biggest events in the professional philosophy calendar in the USA, and generally see hundreds of philosophers gather in a big hotel for seminars, lectures, job fairs and networking. The APA has now announced on its website that it will abandon an experiment in taking these conferences online-only, as the Central Division’s virtual meeting saw participation halve compared with previous in-person meetings. The Pacific Division will still go ahead with its entirely online meeting on 8-12 April 2026 as it is already at an advanced stage of planning. The Eastern Division had its 2026 Meeting in January, in Baltimore, and will now hold its next one on 13-16 January 2027 at the Hilton Boston Park Plaza, rather than in cyberspace as originally planned. (apaonline.org)
TRIP 100th Anniversary Lectures
For obvious reasons, The Royal Institute of Philosophy now prefers to be known as TRIP for short, rather than it’s previous acronym of RIP. It was founded in London in 1925 by Bertrand Russell, Harold Laski and the suffragette Margaret Haig Thomas, as well as the philosopher-statesman Arthur Balfour “ to advance the education of the public in the subject of philosophy.” It is concluding an extensive programme of centenary celebrations with a series of public lectures up until March. (royalinstitutephilosophy.org/centenary)
Censoring Philosophy Now
We’re used to Philosophy Now occasionally being banned from individual US prisons, usually in Arizona, for reasons ranging from an article on the ethics of drug use to a small photo of a 19th century painting of an Atlantic slave ship (some of the slaves were not modestly dressed; the prison authorities worried that this might overexcite their inmates). Now, however, we’ve had an issue banned from an entire country. Issue 171 explored philosophical views of happiness, so its front cover was adorned with a cheerful rainbow above the word ‘Happiness’. 125 copies of each issue are supplied to outlets in the United Arab Emirates, but our international distributors were surprised to receive a message from the local wholesalers there to say that this time it had been rejected for import by the UAE’s National Media Council on the grounds of “LGBTQ+”. Puzzled, our distributors pointed out that there was nothing about gender debates in the issue. The reply came back that the problem was only with the rainbow on the cover. If it had had seven colours, then that would be have been fine. But it had only six colours, which, allegedly, made it into a contentious symbol and hence caused it to be rejected.
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