this fall i'm teaching intro to philosophy for the first time in over ten years. please, i am begging: share your syllabi! the weirder the better!

The next round of Zed and my work on aesthetic judgment and conversation: inspired by Susan Sontag we make the case for "seriousness" in aesthetic judgment and against vibing, communitarianism and the "omnivore monoculture". onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

New article! Many folks love their AI companions, and some philosophers argue current systems should count as "friends" functionally: they reciprocate "care" through positive intentions and rewarding experiences. 1/ philpapers.org/rec/BROAAT-37

it's bullshit when connections has ad-hoc barsalou-ass categories

We need to bring back the ideal of masculinity focused on quiet self-sacrifice for the sake of others. Alpha shit is for losers. Be a man and humbly forgo the shit you want for years so you can provide for your family, you indulgent little wuss

New commentary on Bai et al.'s BBS target article, co-authored with E. J. Green. Bai et al. argue that core cognition should be reconceptualized as perceptual. We argue that principles of object continuity in visual perception do not match traditional principles of core object cognition.

Perfect

glib, evidence-avoidant critiques of dissonance theory exemplify the central claims of the theory

Happy St. Patrick's Day, New York.

scenes from the MIT philosophy department

I think Fodor & Pylyshyn's 1988 paper is possibly the most mischaracterized paper in the history of cognitive science. It's often cited as arguing that neural networks cannot achieve systematicity, compositionality, and productivity. But that's not what they actually argue...

Object category warps the topography of object space for behavior https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.11.711098v1

A new Department of Cognitive Science is being created at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy. Here is the call for a cluster hire (for around 10 faculty) in all areas of cognitive science, at both junior and senior levels: www.unibocconi.it/en/faculty-a... Deadline: May 4th, 2026

What does it mean for culture to “shape” cognition? In our new TiCS paper, @benjaminpitt.bsky.social & I offer a typology of four possible effects: culture can Privilege one cognitive process over others, Prune out disfavored ones, Produce new ones, or have no effect. www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

🥁Now announcing the winner of the 2026 Stanton Prize: Congratulations, Melissa Kibbe @levelsof.bsky.social! ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ This honor will be celebrated at the upcoming meeting of the SPP

Claude is short for Jean Claude Van Damme. Are you saying Jean Claude Van Damme does not have consciousness? Because I agree with you.

Philosophers have never successfully defined wetness. How do you know a climate model isn’t wet?

very compelling argument for representationalism about psychology and antirepresentationalism about neuroscience

philosophymindscience.org/index.php/ph... Enjoyed writing this with the wonderful philosopher Bill Ramsey

She's like an old samurai whose great battles are behind her but every once in a while she kills a man with piece of paper just to prove a point

I think about this Tony Benn speech much more than I used to

After several years of work, my lab is starting to put out our first papers on learning in a unicellular organism (Stentor coeruleus). Here we show evidence for a form of associative learning in Stentor: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

really cool to see two of my favorite philosophers of perception collab, and the paper is a very convincing critique of the idea that mental imagery plays a widespread role in ordinary stimulus-driven perception

lots of good points have already been made on using AI Agents for cheating (e.g. the latest Canvas-bot), it degrades learning, etc. One additional thing I'd like to point out: if you use this stuff, you're not being clever, you're just an asshole. to explain:

I strongly disagree with this! Perhaps this was true in 2000. In 2026, there are ~200 DSA members in City council & mayor seats, ~65 in state leg seats. DSA holds ~1 in 120 state leg seats! Maybe most *online* leftists are too anti-reformist. But onliners of any ideology are stupid & impatient!

Was an intellectual pleasure working on this with @quiltydunn.bsky.social Someone who also feels that there is a glaring gap in current cognitive science/neuroscience/AI

A new preprint, co-authored with @johnwkrakauer.bsky.social: The Deliberation Taboo Cognitive science is, nominally, the science of thinking. We argue that the field has no theory of what thinking is and, even worse, that the topic has largely dropped out of focus. 1/ osf.io/preprints/ps...

it snowed

my paper has been rejected for not discussing quilty-dunn's work enough

I'm SO tired of people looking for "the neuroscience of X" (meaning uninformative neuroimaging pictures) when *the psychology of X* is right there, doing a perfectly good job...

Yesterday my friend told me about her PHILOSOPHY students all using ai for their assignments and like come the fuck on man you’re in Uni doing the subject thats Thinking about Thinking and u refuse to Think

LoTmaxxing and neuromaxxing simultaneously, levelsmogging the field in the process

NEW: Read this terrific piece @virginiaheffernan.bsky.social for @thenerve.news in which she unpicks Edge.org, the hugely influential 'salon' funded by Epstein & threaded through with race science & eugenics. 1/ www.thenerve.news/p/epstein-bi...

bars

The visual world is composed of objects, and those objects are composed of features. But do VLMs exploit this compositional structure when processing multi-object scenes? In our 🆒🆕 #ICLR2026 paper, we find they do – via emergent symbolic mechanisms for visual binding. 🧵👇

New PhD and post-doc job openings! Join me and Prof. Nina Kazanina @ Uni Geneva, Switzerland, to take part in an exciting project on relations and binding in language and vision, explored with cutting-edge neurophysiology (#iEEG and MEG). Full details in the job offer below.

This paper was an awesome collaborative effort of a @fitngin.bsky.social working group. It provides a detailed review of how DNNs can be used to support dev neuro research @lauriebayet.bsky.social and I wrote the network modeling section about how DNNs can be used to test developmental theories 🧵

A geometric shape regularity effect in the human brain. 🔗 buff.ly/4UsILev

how many google docs can one man have open at one time? my research explores this topic in ecologically valid settings

New paper coming out in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research: "Consciousness doesn't do that". I explain why I believe that animal sentience research is in large part built on sand. In my opinion, we should be skeptical of many of the claims made in this field. philpapers.org/rec/MICCDD

Martin Peterson's creative response to being banned from teaching Plato (shared with his permission).

the distinction between psychology and neuroscience

Terrifying headline if you don’t realize they are sports teams.

“You will be haunted by three spirits”

When we see something that's moving, our memories about it end up projected forward in time: We remember it further along than it was. In a new paper in 𝘗𝘴𝘺𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘰𝘨𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘚𝘤𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦, out today and led by @dillonplunkett.bsky.social, we demonstrate that this happens even when there is 𝙣𝙤 𝙢𝙤𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙬𝙝𝙖𝙩𝙨𝙤𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙧.🧵

fun pre-print for your start of week reading: "People Make Graded Judgments About The Inconceivable" (by Hu, Sosa, and me) doi.org/10.31234/osf...

and lexical semanticists will tell you there are categorial restrictions on composition