Concepts

Searle's room has emptied, but the question is still standing

The philosopher of the Chinese Room died on 17 September 2025, aged ninety-three. To remember him as the man who said computers cannot think is to reduce him to a single thought experiment. Searle's real question was wider — it ran from money to the state, from speech to institutions. And his legacy is contested.

David Chalmers

This Day in Philosophy — 7 September: I. A. Richards and the problem of what a word does

I. A. Richards died on 7 September 1979. With C. K. Ogden he wrote the book that pulled the theory of meaning out of philosophy and into the reading of actual sentences — and then proved, with a famous experiment on his own students, how badly trained readers understand what they read.

Reading Marx today: alienation, commodity fetishism and who owns the machine

The twentieth century turned Marx into the name of a political programme. The twenty-first is reading him again as an analyst: alienation, commodity fetishism, ecology, republican freedom. The question 'who owns artificial intelligence?' is that reading's examination paper.

The 2026 Sanders Prize in Metaphysics goes to a return to logical atomism

The Sanders Prize in Metaphysics, awarded every other year, has gone for 2026 to a joint paper by two young researchers at Berkeley: 'Logical Atomism'. The winning essay puts back on the table a programme Russell and Wittgenstein founded a century ago.

Forty years on reference: Devitt draws up the account in Reference and Beyond

Michael Devitt's collection from Oxford University Press takes stock of one of the longest-running arguments in the philosophy of language: what does a name refer to? The review in NDPR calls it the most consistent defence yet written from within the causal tradition.

Mouffe: democracy is not the art of agreement but of taming conflict

For forty years she has pressed one thesis: people cannot agree on fundamental values, and this is no defect. Democracy's job, for Mouffe, is not to bring everyone round to a single view but to turn the enemy into an adversary. Empty the political stage and the passions remain — someone else fills it.

Foucault at a hundred: an oeuvre that has kept growing since his death

Born in 1926, Foucault reaches his centenary in the same year that the first volume of The History of Sexuality turns fifty. The symposium meeting in Pennsylvania at the end of September is no mere commemoration: thirteen Collège de France lecture courses and a fourth volume, published after his death, have made rereading him unavoidable.

Augustine of Hippo: the philosopher who turned inwards

He thought about time not through clocks but through memory, expectation and attention. He showed that the will can be divided against itself. And he turned the road to truth inward. To count Augustine a theologian and nothing more is to conceal his extraordinary modernity.

The competition that made Rousseau famous is now worth fifty thousand dollars

The Berggruen Institute's essay competition takes its inspiration from the Dijon Academy contest that Rousseau won in 1750. It does not want a peer-reviewed paper; it wants an essay in the tradition of Montaigne and Emerson. One of the 2025 winners was Anil Seth, a name this column has been citing all week.