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PHILOSOPHERS NEWSContemporary philosophers · ideas · books
Philosopher
Philosopher of mind — University of California, Riverside
University of California, Riverside · United States
Works on consciousness, moral psychology and the reliability of philosophical intuition. He argues that the ground of consciousness may be far more flexible than usually assumed.
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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
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
Eric Schwitzgebel's book in the Cambridge Elements series argues that AI consciousness in the near future is neither obviously impossible nor obviously inevitable. Its central thesis: the moment we are forced to decide will arrive long before the moment we could know.
Cambridge University Press · 2026 · English
Publisher page →Eric Schwitzgebel, Peter Singer, David Chalmers
Simon Conway Morris, whose Burgess Shale work supplied the evidence for Stephen Jay Gould's 'Wonderful Life', has taken the 2026 Templeton Prize for arguing that Gould read those fossils backwards. His thesis — that evolution converges on eyes, flight and intelligence — carries a philosophical bill that his critics say he has not paid.
Eric Schwitzgebel, Jeremy Pober, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Simon Conway Morris
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
Six of the year's most consequential philosophy books are about artificial intelligence. The two that are not — a history of the concept and a history of prediction — are the reason the other six are worth reading. A survey of the year to September.
Eric Schwitzgebel, Yuk Hui, Carissa Véliz
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
When he set out the hard problem of consciousness in 1996, artificial intelligence was still a laboratory matter. In June the book's thirtieth anniversary was debated in Bochum. Chalmers now argues that virtual reality is real, that machine consciousness is possible in principle, and that the real danger lies in erring in the wrong direction.
Eric Schwitzgebel, David Chalmers, Peter Godfrey-Smith
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
A study in Philosophers' Imprint argues that consciousness is 'substrate flexible': it could arise in silicon- or sulphur-based structures that carry enough complexity.
Eric Schwitzgebel, Jeremy Pober
