Hired by the labs, closed by the universities: what philosophy is being paid for

Anthropic and DeepMind employ philosophers to draft the documents that govern their models. Hertfordshire is withdrawing philosophy from its curriculum altogether. The New York Fed's February 2026 table is quoted as vindication, but the columns nobody quotes tell a colder story about who now sets the discipline's agenda.

Luciano Floridi

From Ithaca to the Matrix: the journey home as a philosophical form

The nostos is older than philosophy and has outlasted most of it. Odysseus refuses immortality to go home; Neo swallows a pill to find out where home is. Between Homer and the Wachowskis lies a question neither can settle: what becomes of a return when there may be nothing to return to.

Plato

Vienna's October cluster, and a conference diary that admits its gaps

Four meetings in sixteen days at the University of Vienna, including a congress on how the story of the Vienna Circle has been told. Plus the UCLA date muddle settled from the department's own page, three further meetings that survived checking, and five that did not.

12 September: an invisible gardener, a thinking ocean and a cave of strangers

John Wisdom was born on this day in 1904, Stanislaw Lem in 1921, and four boys from Montignac walked into Lascaux in 1940. Between them they raise the same awkward question from three directions: how far can we trust the grip we think we have on what is out there?

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Georges Bataille, Stanisław Lem

Foucault at a hundred in Philadelphia, and Sartre among the machines

Two meetings the autumn diary has so far missed: a centenary symposium on Foucault at the University of Pennsylvania on 24 and 25 September, and the North American Sartre Society's 31st annual meeting, held on Zoom in October on artificial intelligence and digital existence. Plus a verified survey of what follows to the end of November.

Yuk Hui

Balzan Prize for Elena Esposito, who stopped asking whether machines think

The 2026 Balzan Prize for the social science of digital technology goes to a sociologist trained by Niklas Luhmann. Her claim is that the seventy-six-year argument about machine understanding has been aimed at the wrong target, and that the question worth asking about language models is a social one.

Eric Schwitzgebel, David Chalmers, Elena Esposito

Plato against the vote: the Republic's case for rule by those who know

The founding text of Western political philosophy argues that most people cannot be trusted to govern themselves. The ship of state, the guardians' curriculum, the quarrel with the sophists and the noble lie belong to one argument — and the modern replies to it, from Karl Popper to David Estlund, are less conclusive than they look.

Elizabeth Anderson, Plato