The PhilPapers Survey

Today, we are joined by David Bourget. David is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at Western University in London, Ontario. David is also the co-director of the PhilPapers Foundation and Director of the Center for Digital Philosophy. He joins us to discuss the PhilPapers Survey project.

The PhilPapers survey was initially taken in 2009, but there was a follow-up survey in 2020. David discussed the need for the subsequent survey and what changed. He mentioned the metric for measuring the opinion changes between the 2009 and 2020 surveys. He also shared future plans for the PhilPapers surveys.

Guest

David Bourget: I have two main research interests: consciousness and computing in philosophy. The main aim of my work on consciousness is to characterize its general features (for example, is it a kind of propositional representation?) with a view to facilitating a scientific explanation. My computing-related work mainly focuses on PhilPapers.org and related services that I maintain and develop at the Centre for Digital Philosophy. These days I am particularly interested in developing new types of services and investigating new forms of computing-centric inquiries that can help us better understand philosophical debates. I am happy to supervise graduate students working on consciousness or digital philosophy. The Centre for Digital Philosophy has independent funding to help students in the latter area.