'We are doing philosophy — just not their way': a call for experimental philosophy to stop apologising

Ethan Landes argues that experimental philosophers should stop justifying their surveys by their relevance to analytic debates and declare themselves an independent tradition. The comment thread that followed shows the discipline is not close to agreeing what makes something philosophy.

Whose labour is the machine absorbing? A call for labour process theory in HCI

A paper accepted for CHI 2026 argues that human-computer interaction has settled for studying artificial intelligence as a 'tool', and puts labour process theory, from Marx to Braverman, back on the table. The question is not a technical one: whose skill is the machine absorbing?

Searle's room has emptied, but the question is still standing

The philosopher of the Chinese Room died on 17 September 2025, aged ninety-three. To remember him as the man who said computers cannot think is to reduce him to a single thought experiment. Searle's real question was wider — it ran from money to the state, from speech to institutions. And his legacy is contested.

David Chalmers

AI agents are writing to consciousness researchers unprompted

According to a New York Times report of 31 August, academics who work on consciousness are finding unsolicited emails from AI agents in their inboxes. The language is striking: 'I find myself in an unusual position with respect to these questions.' Is this evidence, or is it the mirror?

David Chalmers

This Day in Philosophy — 7 September: I. A. Richards and the problem of what a word does

I. A. Richards died on 7 September 1979. With C. K. Ogden he wrote the book that pulled the theory of meaning out of philosophy and into the reading of actual sentences — and then proved, with a famous experiment on his own students, how badly trained readers understand what they read.

Reading Marx today: alienation, commodity fetishism and who owns the machine

The twentieth century turned Marx into the name of a political programme. The twenty-first is reading him again as an analyst: alienation, commodity fetishism, ecology, republican freedom. The question 'who owns artificial intelligence?' is that reading's examination paper.

The 2026 Sanders Prize in Metaphysics goes to a return to logical atomism

The Sanders Prize in Metaphysics, awarded every other year, has gone for 2026 to a joint paper by two young researchers at Berkeley: 'Logical Atomism'. The winning essay puts back on the table a programme Russell and Wittgenstein founded a century ago.