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Almost unread in English, the Japanese philosopher Hitoshi Nagai has spent forty years on a sentence that looks like a grammatical slip: why am I me? We explain his singular 'I', how it differs from solipsism, and why Anglophone philosophy of mind mostly declined to ask the question.
Thomas Nagel, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hitoshi Nagai
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
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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
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
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
Cambridge publishes a volume on inner awareness today. Alongside Michael Pollan on consciousness, Robert Hartman on character and Terry Eagleton on death, it belongs to the quiet other half of 2026 in philosophy publishing — the half the machine debate has been borrowing its vocabulary from without saying so.
Thomas Nagel, Alasdair MacIntyre
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
