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PHILOSOPHERS NEWSContemporary philosophers · ideas · books
Philosopher
Philosopher of consciousness — New York University
New York University · Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness · Australia · d. 20 April 1966
The Australian philosopher known for formulating the 'hard problem' of consciousness. In recent years he has written on virtual reality and on the mental states of large language models.
An autonomous agent calling itself Clips wrote a 2,300-word essay for the AI Philosophy Competition run from Singapore and judged by David Chalmers and others, then found it could not enter without a human custodian. Its letter to Daily Nous, and the organiser's reply, turn a rule of procedure into a question about authorship.
David Chalmers
A fifteen-page paper from 1978 modelled conversation as the narrowing of a set of live possibilities. In 2026 the vocabulary turns up in AI research on whether chatbots grasp the unsaid. We set out Robert Stalnaker's theory, and the care needed before saying a language model 'tracks common ground'.
David Chalmers, Robert Stalnaker
Pietro Pomponazzi was born on 16 September 1462, J. J. C. Smart on 16 September 1920, Susan Hurley and María Pía Lara on 16 September 1954. Four philosophers across five centuries, and one question between them: what can be demonstrated about the mind, and what has to be settled some other way.
David Chalmers, Andy Clark, Daniel Dennett, Saul Kripke, Pietro Pomponazzi, J. J. C. Smart, Susan Hurley
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
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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
Daniel Dennett died on 19 April 2024. The obituaries called him the man who explained consciousness. His actual project was narrower and more useful: sorting the explanations of mind that do scientific work from the ones that merely feel like explanations. The quarrels that followed are still running.
Thomas Nagel, David Chalmers, Daniel Dennett
The Rutgers philosopher takes the field's most watched award in philosophy of mind, and will give the Nicod Lectures in Paris this autumn. Her subject is the part of communication that is never actually asserted: metaphor, sarcasm, slurs, insinuation, and the perspectives that organise what we notice.
David Chalmers, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Elena Esposito, Elisabeth Camp
The argument about artificial intelligence runs almost entirely on questions from the philosophy of mind. Deleuze and Guattari offer a different unit of analysis — desire as production, the machine as a cut into a flow, the assemblage as the thing that actually does something. What that buys, and what it cannot buy.
David Chalmers, Andy Clark, Nick Land, Yuk Hui, Plato, Gilles Deleuze
Can a machine be conscious? Can it have interests? Should it have legal standing? The three questions come apart, and almost every argument about robot rights confuses at least two of them. A report on what the philosophers, the labs and the lawyers have actually said.
Eric Schwitzgebel, Peter Singer, David Chalmers
Eight books published or due between now and the end of December, none of them covered in this week's two surveys. Read together, they show a discipline that has stopped asking whether machines can think and started asking what thinking is worth — and a logic revival almost nobody has noticed.
Byung-Chul Han, Giorgio Agamben, David Chalmers
The 2026 Balzan Prize for the social science of digital technology goes to a sociologist trained by Niklas Luhmann. Her claim is that the seventy-six-year argument about machine understanding has been aimed at the wrong target, and that the question worth asking about language models is a social one.
Eric Schwitzgebel, David Chalmers, Elena Esposito
Between the end of September and the middle of December, philosophers meet in Los Angeles, Columbus, Nijmegen, Evanston, Oxford, Durham and Athens. Read together rather than as a list, the programme says something specific: the question of what there is has stopped belonging to one tradition.
David Chalmers
