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PHILOSOPHERS NEWSContemporary philosophers · ideas · books
Herman Cappelen and Rachel Sterken's open-access collection asks whether what passes between a person and a language model is communication at all. Sixteen chapters, one of which argues the volume's own premise is false. A review of the arguments, and of what the book declines to notice.
Culture Desk · 15 September 2026 · Hans-Georg Gadamer, Saul Kripke, John Searle
Miranda Fricker opens Columbia's John Dewey Lectures on 30 September with three afternoons on blame, apology and the pressures people exert on one another. Three further meetings check out: a critical workshop on AI safety in Copenhagen, the ninth Formal Philosophy conference in Moscow, and the nineteenth Gelven graduate conference in DeKalb.
Miranda Fricker
Hans-Georg Gadamer spent four decades correcting readers of his own title. Truth and Method, published in 1960, argues that the humanities were reaching truth long before the natural sciences arrived to tell them they were not. What survives of the argument, including its quarrels with Habermas and Derrida, and what it can and cannot say about talking to a machine.
Jürgen Habermas, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer
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Her 2007 book gave the world 'epistemic injustice', a phrase now used by health regulators and courts. The deeper achievement was to show that knowing has a moral structure. As her Dewey Lectures open at Columbia on 30 September, Fricker is working on blame, apology and forgiveness instead.
Elizabeth Anderson, Miranda Fricker
A UCSF team has shown that one sheet of electrodes can decode attempted speech and attempted gesture at the same time in people with paralysis. The vocabularies are tiny and the claims modest. The philosophical problem is sharper than the headlines: who holds the record of an intention that was never carried out.
David Chalmers, Andy Clark, Miranda Fricker, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, John Searle
Saul Kripke died on 15 September 2022, aged 81. Rudolf Eucken, the 1908 Nobel literature laureate, died on this day in 1926 and was forgotten within a generation. Moritz Lazarus, who defined a people as those who count each other as one, was born on this day in 1824.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Saul Kripke
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Four university presses, one accidental theme. Across consciousness, communication, creativity and liability, the 2026 philosophy list keeps circling a question the discipline spent a generation dismantling — and it was engineers, not philosophers, who put it back into circulation.
Eric Schwitzgebel, David Chalmers, Daniel Dennett
Seven mid-sized meetings between 2 and 25 October, in Lithuania, Spain, Japan, Illinois, California, Utah and on Zoom. Three of them sit on the border between philosophy and something else. One has become a memorial. An eighth, in Brazil, could not be confirmed at all.
Timothy Williamson, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
