Peter Millican

peter millican image

Peter Millican is Gilbert Ryle Fellow and Professor of Philosophy at Hertford College, University of Oxford, where he has been since 2005. Previously he lectured for 20 years in Computer Science and Philosophy at the University of Leeds, and much of his career has been devoted to building connections between the two disciplines. 

At Oxford, he proposed and in 2012 established the degree programme in Computer Science & Philosophy (the first new Philosophy programme since 1973), which has attracted many excellent students from the UK and across the world. Peter’s outreach activities include the websites www.philocomp.net and www.turtle.ox.ac.uk, both of which feature his own educational software alongside many other resources.  In 2018 he started the Futuremakers podcast, whose first season focused on AI and its impact, and from 2019 he organised a major series of seminars on Ethics in AI, the first public activities associated with the new Institute.  

 

Research interests: 

Peter has published across a wide range of Philosophy, including Ethics, Epistemology, Philosophy of Computing and AI, Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Religion, and Philosophy of Science.  But most of his published work has been historical as well as philosophical, involving interpretative work on Anselm, Alan Turing, John Locke and especially David Hume (for whose works he created the now standard web resource www.davidhume.org).

Selected publications:

Most of Peter’s publications are available either from http://www.millican.org/research.htm (which contains a selection on various subjects) or https://davidhume.org/scholarship/millican (which contains over 50 papers on early modern philosophy).  Recent papers relevant to the Philosophy of AI include:

  • “Alan Turing and Human-Like Intelligence” (2021), in Stephen Muggleton and Nick Chater (eds), Human-Like Machine Intelligence, OUP, pp. 24-51.
  • “Them and Us: Autonomous Agents In Vivo and In Silico” (2014), with Mike Wooldridge, in Alexandru Baltag and Sonja Smits (eds) Johan van Benthem on Logic and Information Dynamics, Springer, pp. 547-567.
  • “The Philosophical Significance of the Turing Machine and the Turing Test” (2013), in S. Barry Cooper and Jan van Leeuwen (eds), Alan Turing: His Work and Impact, Elsevier, pp. 587-601.

 

More details available at:

peter.millican[a]philosophy.ox.ac.uk
Faculty of Philosophy website
College website
Personal website