.jpg?width=500 "Kant")
PHILOSOPHERS NEWSContemporary philosophers · ideas · books
Tag
84 stories
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
.jpg%3Fwidth%3D1600&w=3840&q=75)
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
.jpg%3Fwidth%3D1600&w=3840&q=75)
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
.jpg%3Fwidth%3D1600&w=3840&q=75)
Seventy-three years after Heidegger asked what technology is, the answer that matters is the one most often skipped: the essence of technology is nothing technological. A reading of Gestell, the Rhine passage, the sentence he cut, the Nazi record, and the objections of Feenberg and Ihde.
Yuk Hui, Martin Heidegger
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 canon of created minds is quoted far more often than it is read. Shelley's creature argues its case and wins it; Kubrick never explains HAL; Garland's film attacks the Turing test rather than staging it. What the canon taught us to expect is a villain with a face, and that is the one thing the harms have lacked.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Nick Bostrom
