Concepts

A proposal from Boston: philosophers should collaborate with the people who disagree with them

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.

This Day in Philosophy — 5 September: Comte and Boltzmann, the founder and the casualty of the faith in science

Auguste Comte died on 5 September 1857; Ludwig Boltzmann took his own life on 5 September 1906. One announced that humanity had entered the age of positive science; the other was worn down defending the reality of atoms against physicists who called them a convenient fiction. The same date holds the promise of positivism and its price.

A philosophy department is saved — and philosophy argues about how to defend itself

The philosophy programme at the University of Dundee, marked for closure, has been partly reprieved. In the same weeks a survey measured how much the public actually wants universities to keep philosophy departments. And an old quarrel flared up inside the field: is experimental philosophy really philosophy?

Burge answers Descartes, and it takes him 688 pages

The philosopher who established that the content of our thoughts is not fixed inside our heads published a new book in August. Burge answers the two scepticisms that have run since Descartes, and both answers come from one place: understanding is a far greater achievement than we suppose.

Oxford's graduate philosophy conference turns thirty, with Chalmers on the bill

Oxford's philosophy conference for graduate students meets for the thirtieth time on 13 and 14 November. The keynote speakers are David Chalmers, Monima Chadha and Rob Simpson. One detail of the design separates it from the ordinary student gathering: every paper draws a reply from an Oxford faculty member.

David Chalmers

What is a concept? A twenty-two-chapter inquiry from Cambridge

'Concept' is among the words philosophy uses most and questions least. A new Cambridge collection follows its history from ancient Greece to Chinese and Indian thought, from Islamic philosophy to Kant and on to conceptual engineering. The result is less a history of philosophy than philosophy inspecting its own instrument.

Where is philosophy looking? A map of 2026

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.

Schopenhauer: not the creature who suffers but the creature who wants

The label 'gloomy pessimist' fixes on Schopenhauer's weakest side. His real thesis is more disquieting: the source of our unhappiness may not be what the world does to us but the fact that we must always be wanting something. And from there a road runs to compassion.

Thirty years on, Chalmers has not solved the hard problem — but he has kept it alive

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