The moderators of /r/philosophy are pleased to announce the Fall 2016 /r/philosophy AMA series. After a series of successful impromptu AMAs (see here), we have decided to try our hand at organising a series of AMAs this fall semester with various professional philosophers.

We are pleased to announce at this time the following AMAs:

Date	Name	Appointment/Affiliation	Topic	Personal Website	AMA Link
August 30, 1PM EST	Caspar Hare	Professor of Philosophy, MIT	Ethics, Intro to Philosophy MOOC	Link	Link
September 7, 11AM EST	Kevin Scharp	Reader, Department of Philosophy, University of St Andrews	Philosophy of Language, Logic	Link
September 26, 12PM EST	Kenneth Ehrenberg	Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Adjunct Professor of Law, University of Alabama	Philosophy of Law	Link
October 12, time TBA	Geoff Pynn	Associate Professor of Philosophy, Northern Illinois University	Epistemology, Early Modern, Philosophy of Language	Link
October 24, time TBA	Wi-Phi Team	Wi-Phi Directors	Wi-Phi free online philosophy videos, public philosophy	Link

A couple days before each AMA we will post an announcement post for the upcoming AMA, where people can submit questions ahead of time for the philosopher(s) doing the AMA. They will also take questions live during the AMA.

We hope that everyone is as excited as we are to have some great philosophers join us for some AMAs! If you are a professional philosopher and would like to arrange an AMA to be held on /r/philosophy, please contact redditphilosophy (at) gmail.com. Please use an official email address so that we are able to verify your identity. We still have some slots for Fall 16, and we hope to do a Spring 17 AMA series as well.

Here are some blurbs for the currently announced AMAs:

Caspar Hare

I am a philosopher -- officially Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. I write about ethics, and about practical rationality, and about metaphysics, and about connections between them.

I also teach a MOOC through edX: Introduction to Philosophy: God, Knowledge and Consciousness. This philosophy course has two goals. The first goal is to introduce you to the things that philosophers think about. We will look at some perennial philosophical problems: Is there a God? What is knowledge, and how do we get it? What is the place of our consciousness in the physical world? Do we have free will? How do we persist over time, as our bodily and psychological traits change?

The second goal is to get you thinking philosophically yourself. This will help you develop your critical reasoning and argumentative skills more generally. Along the way we will draw from late, great classical authors and influential contemporary figures.

Kevin Scharp

My areas of specialization are philosophy of language, logic, metaphysics, philosophy of science, and the history of analytic philosophy. My primary focus is the concept of truth and the paradoxes associated with it. In 2013, Oxford University Press published my book, Replacing Truth, in which I argue that the concept of truth is defective (as evidenced by the liar and other paradoxes) and should be replaced for certain purposes with a pair of concepts that, together, can play its role without generating any paradoxes whatsoever. This idea is also the focus of a paper published (July 2013) in The Philosophical Review entitled “Truth, the Liar, and Relativism.”

While my book and many of my papers are on philosophy of language and logic, I also work on philosophy of science (on applied mathematics, measurement theory, units of measurement, and scientific change), metaphysics (on pragmatism, fundamentality, truthmakers, and natural language metaphysics), and the history of philosophy (on Locke, James, Russell, Carnap, Sellars, Goodman, Quine, and Davidson). I am also engaged with philosophy of religion (by advocating a secular perspective on faith and the meaning of life in two recent public events with religious authorities and a sequence of public lectures on the relation between science and religion) and applied ethics (I have a paper in preparation with Alison Duncan Kerr on abortion and the vagueness of ‘person’).

Kenneth Ehrenberg

After getting my JD from Yale in ’97 I worked for two years as a lawyer, one with the NYC Parks Dept and one with the firm O’Melveny & Myers (doing first environmental insurance defense and then a private antitrust case against Microsoft), before going back for my PhD in philosophy at Columbia. There I studied under Jeremy Waldron and Joseph Raz and had worked with Jules Coleman at Yale and when he visited Columbia. My dissertation was about doing legal philosophy by investigating the functions of law in general and legal systems. Some of the ideas are reprised in my new book, The Functions of Law (OUP 2016), although it is a completely newly written work with a completely new ontological claim. OUP is offering a 30% discount on the book: UK addressees can use the code ALAUTH16 and US addressees can use the code ALAUTHC4 for 30% off. After finishing my PhD, I took my first tenure track job at University at Buffalo, SUNY, taking leave to do a term at Oxford as the HLA Hart visiting fellow in 2010. In 2012 I took a second tenure track job at University of Alabama, heading up their jurisprudence specialization. My main areas of interest are in analytic general jurisprudence (especially the ontology of law and methodology of legal philosophy), the relation of law to morality and grounds of legal authority, and the epistemology of evidence law.

Geoff Pynn

Geoff Pynn (PhD, Yale University) specializes in epistemology and philosophy of language, in particular on issues concerning the nature, function, and norms of assertion, and the semantics and pragmatics of epistemic terms like "know". He also regularly teaches logic and early modern philosophy.

Wi-Phi: Wireless Philosophy Team

Wi-Phi's mission is to introduce people to the practice of philosophy by making videos that are freely available in a form that is entertaining, interesting and accessible to people with no background in the subject.

Since our aim is for people to learn how to do philosophy rather than for them to simply learn what philosophers have thought, we see it as equally important to develop the critical thinking skills that are core to the methodology of philosophy.

We see this as a part of a larger mission: building our collective capacity to engage in rational thought and discourse. By providing the toolkit for building better minds, we hope that Wi-Phi plays some small role in realizing that goal.