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PHILOSOPHERS NEWSContemporary philosophers · ideas · books
Foucault's will was unambiguous: no posthumous publication. But the manuscript had been delivered to his publisher in 1982. Confessions of the Flesh, which appeared in 2018, deals not with the modern period readers expected but with the early Church Fathers — and looks there for the origin of the modern subject's obligation to speak about itself.
World Desk · 6 September 2026
Seven researchers from Boston University's Mind and Morality Lab argue that philosophy should import a method from the sciences: adversarial collaboration, in which opponents design the work together. Their diagnosis is blunt — philosophers argue in soldier mindset, and rarely change their minds.
To read Cicero merely as a 'great orator' is to miss the intellectual fight he was actually in. Long treated as the man who carried Greek philosophy into Latin, he is now read as a thinker of independent weight. His question is still open: does a republic survive on good institutions, or on good citizens?
Auguste Comte died on 5 September 1857; Ludwig Boltzmann took his own life on 5 September 1906. One announced that humanity had entered the age of positive science; the other was worn down defending the reality of atoms against physicists who called them a convenient fiction. The same date holds the promise of positivism and its price.
An opinion piece in Neuroscience of Consciousness argues that the debate over consciousness in artificial intelligence is being conducted on the wrong ground. The question, its authors say, is not whether a system performs the right computations but whether attributing consciousness helps explain its behaviour — the first serious change of criterion since Turing.
Eric Schwitzgebel, David Chalmers
The philosophy programme at the University of Dundee, marked for closure, has been partly reprieved. In the same weeks a survey measured how much the public actually wants universities to keep philosophy departments. And an old quarrel flared up inside the field: is experimental philosophy really philosophy?
The philosopher who established that the content of our thoughts is not fixed inside our heads published a new book in August. Burge answers the two scepticisms that have run since Descartes, and both answers come from one place: understanding is a far greater achievement than we suppose.
Oxford's philosophy conference for graduate students meets for the thirtieth time on 13 and 14 November. The keynote speakers are David Chalmers, Monima Chadha and Rob Simpson. One detail of the design separates it from the ordinary student gathering: every paper draws a reply from an Oxford faculty member.
David Chalmers
