A draft syllabus for philosophy of cognitive science. Thoughts, comments, and suggestions appreciated! (The redacted one is a banger paper that I refereed that's not out yet but is accepted and should be out by next spring)

PhD scholarship in Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh registryservices.ed.ac.uk/scholarships...

New paper by @hadeelnaeem.bsky.social on the complexity of pain experiences, and how this makes the use of AI pain-detection technologies liable to generate epistemic injustice. Pain experiences/reports is definitely one of the things I'd like to look at more closely, post-book.

I've now posted an episode on the causal faithfulness condition. Faithfulness says much more than just that causal paths don't cancel, and raises foundational questions about causation, probability, and underdetermination. youtu.be/k8p0OS-8u2Q

Henry’s thesis is on: “Developing a Naturalistic Metaphysics for Biological Agency”. His goal (our goal in working together) was to show that there’s nothing unscientific or supernatural about ideas of agency, mental causation, and free will. ⬇️ (1/n)

Again, it is worth keeping in mind when comparing the rate of discoveries that public funding for medicine and the sciences is orders of magnitude larger than for the humanities. We work slow in part because we work on a shoestring.

The best exhaustive study on helmets in the Roman Republic - an iconic marker of Roman identity and the Roman army - is a 30-year-old unpublished dissertation that I think likely gets their primary manufacture method wrong! Much work to be done.

Charting the rise and fall of ancient trade through shipwrecks was a major 1990s thing (substantially altering our understanding of the ancient economy) but an approach massively refined to tune for discontinuities in the evidence, e.g. Leidwanger (2020).

Maybe this is simply a difference in the expected 'rate' of knew knowledge, but this take puzzles me, because there's quite a bit of new data and studies needing to be done that I can see pretty easily in Roman history. Knowledge creation steady and clearly visible.

I'm very excited to announce that UNC Biology has 6 faculty positions open this year! The first is for an Asst Professor who studies organismal resilience using an integrative approach 1/n unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/307...

Excited to be in the Himalayan foothills for the 39th @mindandlife.bsky.social / @mindandlifeeu.bsky.social dialogue on Minds, AI and Ethics. The livestream will be available from 9:30am Monday (India Time) - but in the meantime, here's some beautiful mountains 😍 www.mindandlife.org/events/minds...

Save the date:The next biennial Society for the Study of Measurement (SSM) conference will be held at the University of Edinburgh June 22-25, 2026. Calls for conference papers, posters, & workshops will be posted soon ⤵️ measurementsociety.org #HPS #STS #metrology #statistics #data #science #philsci

Please spread the word! I am recruiting a PhD student this cycle (Fall 2026 start) to join my team in a new venture: the neuroscience of mood. If you are curious to learn more, this short talk provides a good overview of why, what and how. www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjIK...

Still puzzled by the debate on organismal agency? Our edited collection brings historians, philosophers, and scientists into dialogue—offering a wide array of perspectives. An affordable paperback edition will be out at the end of the month! www.routledge.com/The-Riddle-o... #HPS #evobio #philsky

If you're interested in the cognitive neuroscience of memory feel free to email me! I do experimental psychology, brain imaging (fMRI and MEG) and a bit of modelling. Lab is doing stuff on forgetting, aging, schemas, and event boundaries, but we're not limited to that. #psychscisky #neuroskyence

MindGrad Deadline Extension: The deadline for submissions to MindGrad 2026 has been extended by a week until Monday 13th October! Submit here: forms.gle/GQ9hi68A4BKp... #philsky #philconf #philosophy @philoswarwick.bsky.social

𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗰𝗶𝗼𝘂𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗶𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗯𝗶𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗻𝗮𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘀𝗺 Is consciousness tied to biological brains? Neuro&Philo Salon present+discussion with @anilseth.bsky.social of his BBS target paper! October 23, noon USA eastern #neuroskyence Register: umd.zoom.us/meeting/regi... doi.org/10.1017/S014...

Two-year postdoc w/ Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science! Scholars in all areas of #philsci, inclusive of philosophical approaches to logic&math, are eligible. This is understood broadly to include issues in the history&practice of particular sciences.Deadline 5 Dec 2025. buff.ly/MhR4PcK

If you thought people having their senses of self challenged by AI was a new thing, think again. I got this from an outstanding meeting on philosophy & AI in Prague the last few days, www.reddit.com/r/philosophy... specifically, from Dániel Golden fi.abtk.hu/hu/munkatars...

potato.

We now have this nifty flier for our upcoming conference on Marxist biology - please help spread the word! (registration including for zoom link here: ihpst.utoronto.ca/events/diale...)

Why do we smile? What makes pulling back the lip corners a fundamentally positive act? Why don’t we beam out good vibes by blinking our eyes or wrinkling our noses? From our archive, @kensycoop.bsky.social's essay about the (murky) origins of the smile: disi.org/dawn-of-the-...

Thanks to @pessoabrain.bsky.social and @thetransmitter.bsky.social for featuring our paper and to @aliyarumana.bsky.social and Peter Tse for engaging so generously with the ideas! 😊 www.thetransmitter.org/the-big-pict...

I lived the times too, all too familiar. I'd like to encourage younger people to read this, especially men who feel somehow oppressed by the "woke" culture. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Gotta strive for a non-violent philosophy of biology ✌️

this is, hands down, the best video I've seen on men's influencer content and it's not close either

JOB AD: If you research philosophy, history or social studies of biology, with interest in agroecology, crop science or environmental intelligence, consider applying for 3-year postdoctoral fellowship in Munich! Deadline for applications: 31/10, details www.sts.sot.tum.de/en/sts/arbei... #philsci

We are organising the 1st Basic Principles of Cognition conference at RUB, Germany, 9-10 October 2025. Save the date! #MinimalCognition #BasalCognition #CognitiveScience #CogSci #Philosophy #Mind #Life #Organism #Evolution basicprinciplesofcognition.wordpress.com #EPSA25 #ESPP #GAP12 #KogWiss

Important for discussions about agency and free will: Hermida M, Ladyman J (2025): Physical Explanation and the Autonomy of Biology. Philosophy of Science :1–18. #neuroscience #consciousness #freewill #reductionism

New publication by our postdoc Margarida Hermida (@unisalzburg.bsky.social) and James Ladyman (University of Bristol) on physical explanation and the autonomy of biology: www.cambridge.org/core/journal... #philsky #philsci

Our International Postdoc Forum is a virtual seminar series for early career researchers to share their work w/commentary by MCPS community members. Excited to welcome @rosetrappes.bsky.social (University of Bergen, Norway) at 1215 CT Wed 24 Sept. Sign up for Zoom link. buff.ly/MSAXLgY

Can a single cell learn? Even without a brain, some microbes show simple forms of cognition. Can this basal cognition be engineered? Check our new paper with @jordiplam.bsky.social on the minimal synthetic circuits & their cognitive limits. @drmichaellevin.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Ask Ed about the obscure reference in the title.

A decade ago, a naïver me thought Brockman's online salon 'The Edge' (funded by Epstein) was the coolest thing a scientist or philosopher could be part of. Now that admiration goes to Ivette Fuentes instead: www.science.org/content/arti...

I don't know how well those listed actually knew Epstein (according to Giuffre, it seems Minsky at least knew him far too well) but as a fan of many of their scientific outputs, this is so bleak: Scientists: Men's 'intellectual' contributions vs Girlfriends: photos of women's naked bodies.

👋💡 BIAP Open Philosophy Blog 🌍 📝 Our senior member Riin Kõiv (UB) just shared a new blog post on her open access article: 📖 “Genetically caused trait is an interactive kind” Philosophy of the Life Sciences, Volume 13, Article 31 (2023) 🔗 Read it here: openphilosophy.blog/can-genes-ca...

Postdoc job! I expect to have an opening at Johns Hopkins for a postdoctoral researcher working somewhere in the broad realms of physics, philosophy, and complexity. Apply at Academic Jobs Online: academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/30496

If you are curious about vitamins or natural kinds in history of science check out my new paper: “What is it about vitamins? Vitamins as investigative kinds” in Philosophy of Science 🎉 www.cambridge.org/core/journal... @philscijournal.bsky.social @leverhulme.ac.uk @assemblinglife.bsky.social

A month on and I am still getting emails about these daft e-cards 🤦‍♀ When will "postdoc appreciation week" end!

So @theturing.bsky.social has decided they no longer need Humanities (!) - so the The Alan Turing Institute’s Humanities and Data Science Interest Group are having one final event: "Network power: the humanities and data science in collaboration" In person and online, Oxford, 25th Sept. Pls share!

So many women scholars who soon get forgotten. We need to write them actively into/as lineages, not as isolated names: aeon.co/essays/why-a...

I am happy to share my review of @gregoryrupik.bsky.social interesting book "Remapping biology with Goethe, Schelling, and Herder", which is well-researched, thought-provoking and exciting. "It tickles me that I can trace my scholarly roots to Goethe!" link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Wonderful new post on the #projectEPIC blog by @jelliedsours.bsky.social. Jodie reports from the #EpistemicInjustice in Healthcare symposium at the meeting of the International Network of Philosophy and Psychiatry epistemicinjusticeinhealthcareproject.blogspot.com/2025/09/inte... #philsky #philpsy

The first major output of the @templetonworld.bsky.social @arc-intrepid.bsky.social adversarial collaboration testing IIT & predictive processing theories of consciousness is out now arxiv.org/abs/2509.00555

Or should you ask whether the system has closure of constraints as @kathrynnave.bsky.social suggests is neccessary for autonomy and normativity? Nave K (2025): A drive to survive: the free energy principle and the meaning of life. ISBN 9780262381673 p. 244.

The Free Energy Principle - What is it? What it is not, how to use it and where the problems lie...all this is described in this excellent book by @kathrynnave.bsky.social ! Every biological system has one main task - to survive! But what is the best way?

'The Idealized Mind: From Model-based Science to Cognitive Science' published by MIT Press. Claims: models of the mind are idealized models; this is consistent with scientific realism; yet, it blocks realism about neural representation and neural computation based on evidence from neuroscience.

seemingly new to bsky: @xabibaran.bsky.social one of the most interesting people thinking about the conditions and consequences of agency and autonomy. Surely worth a follow.

Preprint alert! wiringthebrain.bsky.social and I submitted a commentary on Anil Seth’s forthcoming BBS article, which claims that AI needs to be alive in order to be conscious. We argue that it needs to be a subject, instead. osf.io/preprints/ps... #philsky #neuroskyence