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Today's post is by Katrina Sifferd  (pictured below). She holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from King’s College London, and is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Elmhurst College. After leaving King’s, Katrina held a post-doctoral position as Rockefeller Fellow in Law and Public Policy and Visiting Professor at Dartmouth College. Before becoming a philosopher, Katrina earned a Juris Doctorate and worked as a senior research analyst on criminal justice projects for the National Institute of Justice. Many thanks to Lisa for her kind invitation to introduce our recently published book, Responsible Brains: Neuroscience, Law, and Human Culpability . Bill Hirstein , Tyler Fagan , and I , who are philosophers at Elmhurst College, researched and wrote the book with the support of a Templeton sub-grant from the Philosophy and Science of Self-Control Project  managed by Al Mele at Florida State University. Responsible Brains joins a larger discussion about the ways evidence generated ...

This cross-disciplinary symposium on the nature and implications of human and artificial autonomy was organised by  Anastasia Christakou  and held at the Henley Business School at the University of Reading on 8th May 2019. You can find a report on the first part of the workshop here . First talk in the second half of the workshop was by Daniel Dennett  (Tufts) and Keith Frankish  (Sheffield), exploring how we can build up to consciousness and autonomy. They endorsed an "engineering approach" to solving hard philosophical problems, such as the problem of consciousness, and asked: How can we get a drone to do interesting things? For instance, recognise things? We can start by supposing that it has sensors for recognising and responding to stimuli. There will also be a hierarchy of feature detectors and a suite of controllers who will take multiple inputs and vary outputs depending on their combination and strength. When it comes to action selection and conflict resolut...

Our series on new research on confabulation continues, featuring summaries of the papers contributing to the special issue of Topoi guest-edited by Sophie Stammers and Lisa Bortolotti. Today's post, the third in the series, is by Marianna Bergamaschi Ganapini . Since September 2017, she is an assistant professor of Philosophy at Union College (NY), specialized in philosophy of mind and epistemology. She received her PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 2017. My paper “ Confabulating Reasons ” focuses on the confabulatory episodes connected to those mental attitudes (e.g. belief, emotion, intention) whose causes we cannot introspectively access. In the literature, the predominant view is that these confabulations track – or at least attempt to do so – the psychological causes of mental attitudes.  A related hypothesis is that these confabulations are either the result of a general cognitive mechanism that pushes us to understand the world in terms of causal relations (Coltheart, 201...