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27The achievement gap thesis reconsidered: artificial intelligence, automation, and meaningful workAI and Society 1-14. forthcoming.John Danaher and Sven Nyholm have argued that automation, especially of the sort powered by artificial intelligence, poses a threat to meaningful work by diminishing the chances for meaning-conferring workplace achievement, what they call “achievement gaps”. In this paper, I argue that Danaher and Nyholm’s achievement gap thesis suffers from an ambiguity. The weak version of the thesis holds that automation may result in the appearance of achievement gaps, whereas the strong version holds that a…Read more
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75Meaning in Life and the Vocation of TeachingStudies in Philosophy and Education 42 (5): 541-558. 2023.What can one person teach another about living meaningfully? Recent discussions about the relationship between education and finding meaning in life have tended to focus on institutional and curricular matters and, as a consequence, have sidelined the importance of the vocation of teaching. Drawing on Raimond Gaita’s philosophy of education, I suggest that his view of the love of a subject embodied in and demonstrated by teachers illuminates both the nature of leading a meaningful life as well a…Read more
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34Meaning and beautyRatio 36 (1): 51-63. 2022.What place do experiences of beauty have in a meaningful life? A marginal one, at best, it would seem, if one looks at the current literature in analytic philosophy. Treatments of beauty within so-called “analytic existentialism” tend to suffer from four limitations: beauty is neglected, reduced to artistic production, saddled to theology, or taken as a mere application of a broader theoretical framework. These discussions fail to engage with the rich tradition of philosophical aesthetics. In th…Read more
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762Kitsch and the Social Pretense Theory of Bullshit ArtPolish Journal of Aesthetics 4 (63): 47-67. 2021.This essay argues that bullshit art is a meaningful concept that differs from bullshitting about art, although the two may occur in tandem. I defend what I call the social pretense theory of bullshit art. On this view, calling a work of art ‘bullshit’ highlights a discrepancy between the prestige accorded a work of art and its nonsense character. This category of aesthetic criticism plays a unique role that cannot be identified with kitsch but bears only a contingent connection to it.
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23Remorse and the Ledger Theory of MeaningPhilosophy 1-22. forthcoming.A common idea about assessing meaning in life is that one draws up a list of those various positive values that one has achieved and subtracts from it one's negative deeds in life. The resulting balance is the meaningfulness of one's existence. I call this the ledger theory. Drawing on the work of Raimond Gaita and Julian Barnes's novel The Sense of an Ending, I argue for a phenomenology of remorse that gives us reason to reject the ledger theory. Even those agents whose lives have been exceptio…Read more
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27What is the good life? Luc Ferry chicago: The university of chicago press, 2013; VII + 320 pp.; $32.50 (review)Dialogue 55 (3): 570-574. 2016.
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15What Can Philosophy Contribute to Ethics?Philosophical Quarterly 68 (271): 429-432. 2018.What Can Philosophy Contribute to Ethics? By Griffin James.
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40Ordinary Meaningful LivesInternational Philosophical Quarterly. 2018.Neil Levy has argued that “superlative meaning” can be attained only through “inherently open-ended” projects. This implies a two-tier system of meaning: one for elites, the other for ordinary people. It sets lives characterized by “open-ended” work over and against those that find meaning in commonplace sources, e.g., personal relationships. I argue that Levy’s argument rests on two mistakes. First, it confuses two senses of “superlative meaning”—superlative abundance and superlative safety. Ev…Read more
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20The Variety of Values: Essays on Morality, Meaning, and LovePhilosophical Quarterly 68 (270): 209-212. 2018.© The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Scots Philosophical Association and the University of St Andrews. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] Wolf's recent collection of essays, The Variety of Values, makes clear that she is a hedgehog in Isaiah Berlin's well-known sense of the term. That is, she is engaged with an overarching problematic rather than a series of disconnected inquiries. The reader is presented …Read more
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23Meaningful Lives in an Age of Artificial Intelligence: A Reply to DanaherScience and Engineering Ethics 28 (1): 1-9. 2022.Does the rise of artificial intelligence pose a threat to human sources of meaning? While much ink has been spilled on how AI could undercut meaningful human work, John Danaher has raised the stakes by claiming that AI could “sever” human beings from non-work-related sources of meaning—specifically, those related to intellectual and moral goods. Against this view, I argue that his suggestion that AI poses a threat to these areas of meaningful activity is overstated. Self-transformative activitie…Read more
Lucas Scripter
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen
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The Chinese University of Hong Kong, ShenzhenLecturer
Areas of Specialization
Value Theory |