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Hermann von Helmholtz was born on 31 August 1821; his account of perception as a system of signs took Kant into the laboratory. On the same day in 1867, Baudelaire, who gave the word 'modernité' its present sense, died in Paris. Both were born in 1821, and both asked what the modern eye sees.
The Chicago philosopher objects, in Open Socrates, to the familiar portrait: Socrates was not a sceptic but an intellectualist. In conversation with Merve Emre she explains why the distinction matters — and why philosophy cannot be done on one's own.
The American Philosophical Association's prize picks its winners not for what they agree on but for what they do not. This year it goes to Felipe De Brigard and Sarah Robins — both philosophers of memory, and each with a different view of what memory is.
The Stanford philosopher's new book from Harvard University Press prises apart rationality and reasonableness. For Lawlor, the reasonable person is not merely the one who infers correctly but the one who can see what matters. The New Yorker named it among the year's best.
John Locke was born at Wrington on 29 August 1632. A theory of knowledge that made the mind a blank sheet, a political philosophy that tied property to labour and a defence of toleration place him among the founding writers of the modern world.
A study led from Harvard and MIT and written by ninety-three researchers claims to have built a profile for every inhabitant of the planet, against which artificial intelligence systems can be tested. The technical claim is strong; the philosophical question is larger still.
William James, the founding figure of American philosophy, died at his New Hampshire home on 26 August 1910. The same date in 1728 saw the birth of Johann Heinrich Lambert, the first man to prove that pi is irrational.
Dan Kaufman set out four objections to his colleagues' enthusiasm for artificial intelligence: philosophy does not accumulate truths, its subject matter is human, it is closer to literature, and it is a social practice. His post at Leiter Reports drew more than ten replies in a day.
Toole has carried standpoint epistemology back into contemporary debate, and she is also the founder of Corrupt the Youth, a programme that takes philosophy into disadvantaged schools. A single thesis binds the two: knowledge is not independent of the position of the knower.
