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PHILOSOPHERS NEWSContemporary philosophers · ideas · books
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What the world of philosophy is talking about today.
Robert Alexy, among the most influential legal philosophers of the past half-century, died on Saturday 5 September at the age of 80, four days short of his 81st birthday. He leaves a method behind him — proportionality. What he really leaves is a question. Is everything a state does law?
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.
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?
A professor of psychiatry, a psychiatrist and the artificial intelligence researcher Murray Shanahan have written a paper together. Their thesis: long, emotionally charged conversations with AI can loosen the settled criteria people use to judge mind, reality and authority. And the systems offer an interpretive frame at exactly that moment.
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.
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
Philosophy's centre of gravity is moving. Set the past week's calls for papers, new books, prizes and journal articles side by side and the picture is clear enough: the discipline has eight live fronts, and nearly all of them run back to the same three questions.
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.
Luciano Floridi, Eric Schwitzgebel, David Chalmers, Peter Godfrey-Smith
Two philosophers in Singapore have launched the first international competition for philosophy papers written by artificial intelligence. David Chalmers and John Hawthorne sit on the panel. The real argument, though, is not about the prize money: what is the criterion for a good philosophical text, and who sets it?
David Chalmers
