I’m honoured to have received the 2025 Lakatos Award from the London School of Economics for The Brain Abstracted.

The award lecture took place on November 28th, see recording, Apocalyptic Technology: AI and the Limits of Science.

And you can read the lecture here.

Before the lecture there was a workshop with fabulous talks commenting on the book by John Krakauer (Johns Hopkins), Maria Serban (University of East Anglia) and Nick Shea (Institute of Philosophy). Many thanks to everyone at LSE, especially Roman Frigg, Ali Boyle and Tom Hinrichsen for organising a wonderful event.

(Photo: Roman Frigg with the workshop speakers)

I am delighted to have received the 2024 Nayef Al-Rodhan International Prize in Transdisciplinary Philosophy for The Brain Abstracted. This prize is organised by The Royal Institute of Philosophy in London – many thanks to everyone at TRIP for a wonderful event. More details here.

My colleague Shannon Vallor was shortlisted for her book The AI Mirror, as well as Chris Armstrong for Global Justice and the Biodiversity Crisis.

Here’s a clip from an interview at the award ceremony.

Current project is a collaboration with Dr Juanma Parrilla in Engineering at Glasgow Caledonian University:

Does cognition predate life? A philosophy-inspired engineering approach to defining and testing proto-cognitive processes in inert matter.

The project is funded jointly by The British Academy, the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Royal Society.

Published by MIT Press on March 5th 2024

Published by MIT Press.     Amazon page.       Google books preview.      Review of Outside Color in The New Republic.

You can read more about my colour project on the Philosophy of Brains Blog.

And here is a short article and an interview I did for Nautilus magazine. 

I am a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh.

I specialise in philosophy of neuroscience and philosophy of perception.

I also write about the history of the mind/brain sciences and the history of philosophy of science.

This is my page on philpapers.org. This is my page on Researchgate.

Click here for papers.             Click here for book page.