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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
Rudolf Carnap died on 14 September 1970; Humberto Maturana was born on this day in 1928, Allan Bloom in 1930 and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa in 1486. Three of them spent their lives fixing a boundary — of the meaningful, the cognising, the educated. The fourth refused to stand on either side of his.
Martha Nussbaum, Martin Heidegger, Rudolf Carnap, Humberto Maturana, Allan Bloom
Since 2024 the philosophy of artificial intelligence has become a body of work rather than a news cycle. Nine books from Anthem, Oxford, Minnesota, Urbanomic, California, MIT and Yale, sorted by what they are doing — and a judgement on which lines of enquiry are producing results and which are circling.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
The Rutgers philosopher takes the field's most watched award in philosophy of mind, and will give the Nicod Lectures in Paris this autumn. Her subject is the part of communication that is never actually asserted: metaphor, sarcasm, slurs, insinuation, and the perspectives that organise what we notice.
David Chalmers, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Elena Esposito, Elisabeth Camp
The argument about artificial intelligence runs almost entirely on questions from the philosophy of mind. Deleuze and Guattari offer a different unit of analysis — desire as production, the machine as a cut into a flow, the assemblage as the thing that actually does something. What that buys, and what it cannot buy.
David Chalmers, Andy Clark, Nick Land, Yuk Hui, Plato, Gilles Deleuze
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
John Wisdom was born on this day in 1904, Stanislaw Lem in 1921, and four boys from Montignac walked into Lascaux in 1940. Between them they raise the same awkward question from three directions: how far can we trust the grip we think we have on what is out there?
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Georges Bataille, Stanisław Lem
The 2026 Balzan Prize for the social science of digital technology goes to a sociologist trained by Niklas Luhmann. Her claim is that the seventy-six-year argument about machine understanding has been aimed at the wrong target, and that the question worth asking about language models is a social one.
Eric Schwitzgebel, David Chalmers, Elena Esposito
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
