One of the greatest British exports is Time Team, a show where a group of archaeologists bully a random field in Shropshire or something for three days until it admits there used to be a Roman villa there.

One month from now, IPM5 will be in full swing. Today’s post at The Memory Palace has links to the program and info about registering. Take a look! #philmemory

My 2AM conspiracy theory: When the new plastic Canadian money was minted in 2017/8, it really DID smell like maple syrup. And then they removed it so it no longer did. No, it wasn't a placebo effect, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

#philsci #philsky

Three different people sent me this gif for my birthday And I'm not complaining

New Purdue Postdoc just dropped! philjobs.org/job/show/31449 We're interested in folks studying social ontology / phil of Econ (e.g. nature of the firm, markets, money, collective intentionality). Folks interested in empirical methods are also encouraged to apply

RIP Ask Jeeves. The natural-language search engine founded in 1996 was rebranded as Ask in 2006, and officially shut down May 1. When websites close, the historical record can disappear with them. The #WaybackMachine preserves 30 years of web history: web.archive.org #90s #90sNostalgia #WebHistory

Making my life polycentric by splitting myself into 5 different people and letting them compete for the best paper idea.

New paper alert! 📢 Out now, fully #openaccess, in a special issue of Phil Trans on the evolution of collective intelligence (1/4) royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article...

CO3 is by far my favorite conference. Literally zero people who aren't interested in hearing you talk about monkey theory of mind. It was great to catch up with all my friends from Hopkins and also to make plenty of new ones!

Culture was assumed to be unique to humans, but recent scientific discoveries have revealed that it's in fact widespread in the animal kingdom. This #PhilTransB issue is the first to present a comprehensive picture of the science & implications of this: royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/issue/3...

Rethinking #theory of mind across species! This session examined how #animals track others’ knowledge, follow gaze, and potentially use symbolic representations, displaying diverse pathways to “mindreading” that extend beyond and are akin to human-like #cognition. #CO32026

Wow counting down the days... 😂 #leibniz #philosophy

Happy Easter!

The CAIC Launch event was a wonderful success! We are grateful to our wonderful speakers and the many guests who spent time with us over the last two days! Read about the conference in this lovely write up from the Purdue Exponent: tinyurl.com/5cxysw97

Remember when you first learned about genetics at school? All those fascinating examples of human traits that are each apparently determined by just a single gene? Time to check in on some of your favourites to see how they’re doing. 🧬🧵🧪 1/n

Please remember when you swim in the ocean: 200 meters below you, there is a layer of fish that stretches all around the world. It is so dense, that when it was discovered during WWII it scared the navy so bad they bombed it. This is the ocean's thin inner shell of fish [🧵]

99% of the time, saying that feature F explains why humans are unique or special is just rhetorical window dressing for something like "F is a thing humans do and I think that's neat."

The CAIC launch event is THIS week! We heard there were goodie bags for the first 100 people to stop in! 🎁 👀

The CAIC Launch Event 🚀 is next week! Check out the scheduled talks 👀

You’re unlikely to eat Twinkies as a regular snack or still believe that Pop-Tarts provide a balanced breakfast — so stop consuming ultraprocessed content. Don’t use TikTok. Don’t use Instagram. Don’t use X. Their sugar-high benefits aren’t worth the costs. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/27/o...

🚀 It's almost time to officially launch CAIC! There have been a couple of changes to the schedule-- check them out and then be sure to RSVP: caic.centers.purdue.edu

Kant says: stop reading novels!!!! God forbid you come to remember the characters of fantasy novels when you could instead have memorized 53 new maxims to will and therefore be an even better person.

Episodic memory, as we know it now, might not have emerged at a specific point in our evolutionary history. Instead, it may have been cobbled together in a stepwise manner. Rebecca Dreier (LSE) is at The Memory Palace today exploring this possibility; take a look! #philsky #philscisky

If you work on values in science, and have noticed that the literature is a bit too focused on values in science in Anglophone democracies – and that it therefore stays silent on issues that we should be talking about – please consider submitting an abstract to our workshop! (24–25 August, Helsinki)

Last week's Coffee & CAIC gave us a chance to celebrate our inaugural CAIC postdoc @okaydaniellle.bsky.social on her job market success. Next year she'll be a Bersoff Faculty Fellow at NYU, before starting her TT job @ The Ohio State. We’re toasting her hard work and bright future with Buckeyes!

The Predatory Intelligence Hypothesis 👉 The cognitive challenges associated with interactions with predators and prey create a co-evolutionary arms race that promote bidirectional enhanced cognition Corollary: no predation, little or no cognition www.nature.com/articles/s44...

🥁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

My paper, "Hume on the Prospects for a Scientific Psychology," was accepted by the Journal for the History of the Behavioral Sciences, which is nice. It's on section 1 of the first Enquiry, both as a manifesto for a future science and as a guide to the rest of the Enquiry philpapers.org/rec/JACHOT-4

John Lubbock (1883) on individuality of bees. It's always a bit sad when people write that individual differences in animal psychology are a recent discovery. Using the cutesy label of "animal personality" doesn't make it novel. The study of the phenomenon is as old as the study of animal behaviour.

The schedule and RSVP link for the CAIC launch event is now live on our website 🚀 Check the schedule and RSVP to attend ✏️ caic.centers.purdue.edu

I encountered this Bursaria truncatella after it "inhaled" a Paramecium. I was hoping to see the Paramecium get sealed into a vacuole, but instead it finally managed to escape! My students have nicknamed Bursaria "Micro Roomba." LOL #microscope #science #microscopy #iteachbiology

Just out: my account of an extended thought experiment conducted by Dan Dennett and me. Open access. The Emancipation of the drone: A Dennettian thought experiment www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Obviously saddened we didn't get gold. But the moment of holding up Gaudreau's jersey and seeing his parents in the stands -- made it all worth the loss. I saw the USA team also brought out Gaudreau's kids on the ice for the team photo. Wonderful.

Loretta wants you to know that we'll be heading to The Ohio State University soon where I'll be an Assistant Professor of Philosophy 🥹 The OSU phil department is absolutely fantastic and I can't wait to go do philosophy with them! 🐎 🐻 🚂 🌰

So happy to see this paper published! It represents by far the most fun and enriching experience I've had as a grad student. Reading philosophy is fun, but spending most of my week in a lab with dogs of all breeds and personalities? Nothing beats that. Couldn't have asked for better mentors!!!

If you are in the Baltimore area and would like to help us with our effort to understand how dogs think, sign your dog up to participate in our studies: www.social-cognitive-origins.com/participate-...

We build on seminal work w/ human infants by @hyogweon.bsky.social & @miteccl.bsky.social but find no evidence that dogs can correctly infer the social or physical causes for a failed action, even when interacting with a highly familiar kind of object (pet gates) journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

My high school doesn't even have a wiki to look up who went to it

Bergson’s view of memory has largely been lost in recent philosophical discussion Doudja Boumaza is at the Palace today, with a strong case for bringing him back! #philsky #philscisky

Trust in leadership is essential to success A new study found that PhD students who had greater trust in their graduate advisor finished their first year more motivated, higher in well-being, and more academically successful than those with lower advisor trust. academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

📢 New Paper 🚨 Hadza food-sharing is egalitarian, yet offers in giving games have never matched the equitable redistribution seen in real life. In this study, we allowed people to give *or* take. Lifelike equitable distributions only appeared when people took from peers in surplus. bit.ly/4kvLOwA

APA member Bas van Fraassen has been awarded the 2026 Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy. Congratulations! dailynous.com/2026/01/21/b...

Anyone have suggestions for things to do in Bochum on my day off? I hear the mining museum is nice, but I must confess that mining is not one of my special interests (though I'm sure it's fascinating).

The Memory Palace is back for 2026! Our first post is from Charlotte Harmon, our Purdue student editorial assistant. The piece highlights the work of some of our translators and how language plays a role in the philosophy of memory. Check it out! open.substack.com/pub/thememor...

Finished my readings for this week, and now it's time to play the greatest point and click adventure game (besides Myst and Riven) while drinking a couple of PBRs.

Highlights from today’s Coffee & CAIC with @dryan149.bsky.social and @evanwestra.bsky.social

My fellow grad students do not know about Cow Tools, and I find this deeply disturbing. Even worse, when I try to explain how important it is, they simply stare at me blankly, as though Cow Tools is NOT a significant cultural moment.