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PHILOSOPHERS NEWSContemporary philosophers · ideas · books
The argument of Eric Schwitzgebel's book, out from Cambridge in August, cuts against both camps: consciousness in artificial systems is neither obviously impossible in the near future nor obviously inevitable. The real difficulty is that the moment we have to decide will arrive long before the moment we could know.
Newsroom · 3 September 2026 · Luciano Floridi, Eric Schwitzgebel, David Chalmers, Peter Godfrey-Smith
The world's best-known applied ethicist has moved back to Melbourne, given up rejecting capitalism outright and launched a chatbot trained on his own writings. The question he has been putting for fifty years is unchanged: how should we live? What has changed is the world in which it is asked.
Peter Singer
On the opening panel of the PEN World Voices Festival, Judith Butler declined to speak about the loss of democracy: what we are mourning, she said, is a possibility that was never realised. The sentence condenses thirty years of philosophy in which identity, recognition and living together are three names for one problem.
Judith Butler
A study in Philosophy & Technology argues that contemporary visions of the digital future push democratic politics systematically aside — and sometimes propose an openly post-democratic future. The source is not a conspiracy but a contradiction inside modernity itself: autonomy set against automation.
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The whole of Taylor's work turns on a single question: how did modern human beings come to experience themselves as an 'I'? His answer marks the limits of individualism without denying freedom, and treats secularity not as the death of belief but as its becoming one option among others.
Charles Taylor
The New School for Social Research is giving Stanley Cavell two days on 30 and 31 October. The focus falls on his writings about art — and on the constitutive part that scepticism about other minds plays in his reading of it. Alice Crary and Jay Bernstein are among the speakers.
Geoff Keeling and Winnie Street's book in the Cambridge Elements series sets out, in orderly fashion, a question with no answer yet: can an artificial intelligence system have welfare, and if it can, what follows for us? One author works at Google — a detail that explains where the book stands.
The rule behind the APA and Phi Beta Kappa's Lebowitz Prize is unusual: the winners must be two philosophers defending opposing views on the same question. In 2026 it went to Felipe De Brigard and Sarah Robins. The question they disagree about looks simple: is remembering a kind of imagining?
