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Carrie Figdor is professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa.
It was an astounding discovery in the early 1980's that the same genetic sequence, the homeobox, controlled the development of basic body plans across…
There's a lot of talk these days about the existential risk that artificial intelligence poses to humanity -- that somehow the AIs will rise up and de…
Artificial intelligence started with programmed computers, where programmers would manually program human expert knowledge into the systems. In sharp …
Ecological psychology holds that perception and action are best explained in terms of dynamic interactions between brain, body, and environment, not i…
"What's life for if there's no time to play and explore?" In The Weirdness of the World (Princeton UP, 2024), Eric Schwitzgebel invites the reader to…
A lot of what we claim to know we learn from other people's testimony: they tell us, and in many ordinary contexts that is enough to gain knowledge. B…
What makes a species a species? Aristotle answered the species question by positing unchanging essences, properties that all and only members of a spe…
How could a good life include one with anger, or jealousy, or spite? In Dancing with the Devil: Why Bad Feelings Make Life Good (Oxford UP, 2023), Kri…
Does the universe have a purpose? If it does, how is this connected to the meaningfulness that we seek in our lives? In Why? The Purpose of the Univer…
What does “will” mean? A standard view is that it is a tensed mirror-image of “was”, and that the truth-conditions of past and future sentences – “He …
Folk psychology (on a standard reading) is the way we attribute contentful mental states to others in order to explain and predict their behavior – fo…
When someone close to us dies, intense grief is an expected and reasonable response. But while the reason for our grief – the loss of the person who i…
Frank Jackson’s "Knowledge Argument" introduced the philosophical world to Mary the brilliant neuroscientist, who knows everything there is to know ab…
The third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713) was a troubled soul – negative, misanthropic, and deeply troubled by his negativity and misanthropy. In A Ph…
For a certain kind of standard realist, science aims at getting the absolute truth about the universe. For Hasok Chang, this view is unrealistic becau…
Social scientists have long studied the ways in which smartphone use can distract us from the proper performance of means-ends tasks, such as driving …
The grief we feel when someone close to us dies is characterized by a complex and profound experience of loss. But what is this experience? In Grief W…
It seems undeniable that language has limits in what it can express – among other philosophers, Wittgenstein famously drew a line of this sort in his …
Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions revolutionized the way philosophers and historians of science thought about science, scientific …
Based on examining physics and the practices of physicists, philosophers of science often see models in science as representational intermediaries bet…
In 1980, the philosopher and logician Saul Kripke published a small but hugely influential book, Naming and Necessity, in which he argued that some cl…
Misinformation, disinformation, fake news, alternative facts: we are awash in a vast sea of epistemically questionable, not to mention false, testimon…
How should we form new beliefs? In particular, what inferential strategies are epistemically justified for forming new beliefs? Nowadays the dominant …
For many philosophers, the fact that scientists take different perspectives on the world is an obstacle to being a realist about the world. In Perspec…