School of History and Philosophy of Science
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Recent:
• Whitehead Lectures, Harvard University, 2023: 1. Limits of Sentience; 2. Boundaries of Consideration
• Tolerance and Freedom of Expression (Sir Karl Popper Memorial Lecture, 2025). Text. Video. Podcast. A second paper.
• Online notes for Living on Earth.
• Inferring Consciousness in Phylogenetically Distant Organisms
• Two corrections to Theory and Reality, 2nd ed.
(Photo by Daniel Boud)
Other recent papers and talks:
• Biology, Brain Rhythms, and Consciousness (preprint). Published version here.
• Climatic and Other Catastrophes – a talk given at Columbia in 2022. Science, incentives, lab-leaks, and trust. This is the March 2023 update.
• Gradualism and the Evolution of Experience – on the biology of subjective experience.
• Simulation Scenarios and Philosophy. Pacific APA 2023, now published in PPR, open access. Reply to Chalmers.
• Models, Fictions, & Conditionals – about how we can get empirical information from models that are full of fictional elements.
• Nervous Systems, Functionalism, and Animal Minds (text of a talk, 2023)
• Covid Heterodoxy in Three Layers (4K). Now published. With a Reply to Akçay.
• If Not Vegan, then What? (Aeon)
• Octopus Debris Throwing (PLoS One)
• Moderating Twitter’s Moderators (a short article on free speech)
• Tolerance: A Hierarchical Analysis (with Ben Kerr). Preprint
• Philosophers and Other Animals (in Aeon, with extra notes here).
• Food and Farming (draft)
• Materialism, Then and Now (where ‘then’ is 1968)
• Individuality, Subjectivity, and Minimal Cognition
• Commentary on Anil Seth’s BBS paper about biological naturalism (in press).
• Philosophy and Science (New School talk, 2014, NYC)