Mind & Language
The twentieth-century turn. Wittgenstein twice over, Frege and Russell, ordinary language philosophy, consciousness and the hard problem, Chalmers and Dennett, and what a meaning actually is.
Part of Philosophy
12 moments in this segment.
- - Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951). The Tractatus and the Investigations, the limits of language, twice redrawn. This photograph dates from 1930.
- - Is "Universal Grammar" really wrong? (the debate). A deeper look, part of the history of philosophy.
- - Ludwig Wittgenstein (The School of Life). A deeper look, part of the history of philosophy.
- - Noam Chomsky (b. 1928). Universal grammar and the mind's innate structure, and a relentless public critic. The subject dates from 2000; this photograph was taken in 2015.
- - Noam Chomsky - Universal Grammar. A deeper look, part of the history of philosophy.
- - Dennett and Sapolsky argue over free will. Daniel Dennett and the neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky debate whether free will survives what neuroscience shows, staged by How To Academy. It was among Dennett's last public debates; he died in April 2024.
- - Alison Gopnik on the evolution of human intelligences. The annual Natural Philosophy Forum lecture at Johns Hopkins, given by Alison Gopnik of Berkeley, arguing that human intelligence is plural rather than singular. Her work on how children learn has become a reference point in current arguments about what artificial systems do and do not do.
- - What is a point of view?. Rick Lewis, editor of Philosophy Now, gives the 2026 Annual Philosophy Lecture in Malta on the tension between the subjective and objective standpoint, and on what having a point of view amounts to.
- - A long interview with Nick Land. An extended interview with Nick Land, whose accelerationist writing and association with the so-called Dark Enlightenment have made him one of the most contested figures in recent political philosophy. Kept as a primary statement of a position rather than an endorsement of it.
- - Will Hornett on the form of agency. The first of four lectures in the 2026 UPD-Cambridge series, given online by Will Hornett of Cambridge on the philosophy of action and what shape agency takes, followed by a question session.
- - Robert Brandom on Sellars, Kant and the mind-independent world. Robert Brandom speaks at a Sellars conference at Zhejiang University on Sellars's reading of Kant and on what it means for a world to be independent of mind. Brandom is among the most influential living analytic philosophers.
- - David Chalmers: what are we talking to when we talk to AI?. David Chalmers at Berkeley on whether a large language model is an entity at all, and what the older picture of artificial intelligence as a single digital mind now fails to capture. Chalmers has been central to philosophy of mind since the 1990s.
