PhiloComp.net

Overview of the Website

History and Background

This website was developed by Peter Millican, Gilbert Ryle Fellow and Professor of Philosophy at Hertford College, Oxford University, who previously taught both Philosophy and Computing for 20 years at the University of Leeds. It was initially created (from 2006) to support the case for a new Oxford degree programme in Computer Science and Philosophy, which eventually admitted its first cohort of students in October 2012. Since then the programme has flourished, with a steady increase in applications and admissions, excellent examination results, and wonderful career opportunities for its graduates, fully justifying our optimistic expectations.

Beyond academia, however – and particularly in schools – many people continue to see this as an unusual subject combination, so the website's role has moved to one of "outreach", widening awareness of the many links between the disciplines and the considerable advantages of studying both together, as well as providing resources for self-education.

Website Sections

The links across the top of the website give access to its seven main sections:

  • Home: Discusses the broad and deep links between Computer Science and Philosophy, and why the study of each of them is of value to the other. Read these pages to understand why the two disciplines are such close intellectual cousins.
  • Videos: Collects together the video resources (and accompanying handouts) provided by the site. This section is currently small, but planned for rapid growth to assist both home and school learning over the COVID crisis.
  • Computing: Combines material about computing theory (e.g. Turing machines) and computer programming. Along with the corresponding videos, this is the section of most direct relevance to those studying Computer Science at school.
  • AI: Contains pages discussing the philosophical background of artificial intelligence, and materials for learning some core AI techniques, including an educational chatbot development system (Elizabeth) that introduces natural language processing.
  • Ethics: The recent massive heightening of ethical concern around uses of "big data" and artificial intelligence has prompted the creation of a new website section entirely devoted to ethics. This is currently a small section, but will be growing very soon.
  • Models: Computational models provide an exciting method of exploring phenomena which are hard to study in other ways, and often of considerable philosophical interest. This section looks at a wide range of such models.
  • Texts: Textual scholarship – including in Philosophy – has been hugely enhanced through the development of electronic texts and tools to analyse them. This section links to various resources, and also provides the home for the Signature Stylometric System.