Huw Price

Huw Price (/hjuː praɪs/; born 17 May 1953) is an Australian philosopher,[3] formerly the Bertrand Russell Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy, Cambridge,[4] and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.[5]

Huw Price
Born (1953-05-17) 17 May 1953
Oxford, England
NationalityAustralian
Alma materAustralian National University
University of Oxford
Darwin College, Cambridge
EraContemporary philosophy
RegionWestern philosophy
SchoolAnalytic philosophy
Neo-pragmatism
InstitutionsTrinity College, Cambridge
ThesisThe Problem of the Single Case (1981)
Doctoral advisorHugh Mellor
Main interests
Philosophy of science
Notable ideas
Global expressivism (anti-representationalism),[1] subject naturalism (philosophy needs to begin with what science tells us about ourselves)[2]
Websiteprce.hu

He was previously Challis Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Time at the University of Sydney,[6] and before that Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh.[7] He is also one of three founders and the Academic Director of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, and the Academic Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence.

Work

Price is known for his work in philosophy of physics and for his brand of "neo-pragmatism"[8] and "anti-representationalism," according to which "all utterances must be looked at through the lens of their function in our interactions, not the metaphysics of their semantic relations."[9] This view has acknowledged affinities with the work of Robert Brandom and, earlier, Wilfrid Sellars.

He was elected a Fellow of Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1994,[10] and a Fellow of the British Academy in 2012.[11]

Machine intelligence

Around 2012, Price co-founded the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, stating that "It seems a reasonable prediction that some time in this or the next century intelligence will escape from the constraints of biology." Price voices concern that as computers become smarter than humans, humans could someday be destroyed by "machines that are not malicious, but machines whose interests don't include us," and seeks to push this concern forward in the "respectable scientific community".[12][13] Around 2015, he assumed the directorship of the new Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, stating "Machine intelligence will be one of the defining themes of our century, and the challenges of ensuring that we make good use of its opportunities are ones we all face together. At present, however, we have barely begun to consider its ramifications, good or bad."[14]

Publications
  • Facts and the Function of Truth (Blackwell, 1988)
  • Time's Arrow and Archimedes' Point: New Directions for the Physics of Time (Oxford University Press, 1996)
  • Naturalism without Mirrors (Oxford University Press, 2011)
  • Causation, Physics, and the Constitution of Reality: Russell's Republic Revisited ed. with Richard Corry (Oxford University Press, 2007)
  • Expressivism, Pragmatism and Representationalism (Cambridge University Press, 2013)

References
  1. Huw Price, Expressivism, Pragmatism and Representationalism (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 87.
  2. Huw Price, Expressivism, Pragmatism and Representationalism (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 5.
  3. "A Companion to Philosophy in Australia and New Zealand". Retrieved 8 December 2013.
  4. "Faculty of Philosophy – Teaching and Research Staff". Retrieved 31 December 2016.
  5. "Trinity College – The Fellowship". Retrieved 28 December 2012.
  6. "Centre for Time: People". Retrieved 28 December 2012.
  7. "History - The University of Edinburgh".
  8. MacFarlane, John (5 February 2014). "Review of Expressivism, Pragmatism and Representationalism" – via Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  9. deVries, Willem (8 September 2011). "Review of Naturalism without Mirrors" – via Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  10. Humanities, The Australian Academy of the. "Price, Huw, FBA FAHA".
  11. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 30 October 2015. Retrieved 3 June 2015.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  12. "Risk of robot uprising wiping out human race to be studied". BBC News. 26 November 2012. Retrieved 13 March 2016.
  13. "Cambridge to Study Technology's Risk to Humans - News - Communications of the ACM". Associated Press.
  14. "Cambridge University launches new centre to study AI and the future of intelligence". phys.org. 3 December 2015. Retrieved 13 March 2016.
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