The moderators of /r/philosophy are pleased to announce the Spring 2017 /r/philosophy AMA series. After an excellent series of AMAs in Fall 2016 (hub post available here), we are continuing this spring with another series of AMAs by professional philosophers. If you'd like to check out all the previous AMAs done on /r/philosophy please visit our Wiki page here, and you can also check out our Wiki page listing AMAs held elsewhere on reddit.

We are pleased to announce the following philosopher AMAs for our Spring 2017 series:

Date	Name	Appointment/Affiliation	Topic	Personal Website	AMA Link
January 11, 12PM EST	Amie L. Thomasson	Professor of Philosophy & Cooper Fellow, University of Miami	Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Art	Link
January 25, 2PM EST	Samantha Brennan	Professor of Women's Studies and Feminist Research, Western University, Rotman Institute of Philosophy Member	Normative Ethics, Feminist Ethics	Link
January 31, 12PM EST	Chris W. Surprenant	Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of New Orleans and Founding Director, Alexis de Tocqueville Project	Moral and Political Philosophy	Link
February 15, 11AM EST	S. Matthew Liao	Arthur Zitrin Chair of Bioethics, Director of the Center for Bioethics, Affiliated Professor in the Department of Philosophy, New York University	Ethics, Bioethics, Moral Psychology	Link
February 22, 12PM EST	David Chalmers	Professor of Philosophy, Co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness, New York University & Professor of Philosophy, Australian National University	Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Technology, Metaphilosophy	Link
March 8, 11AM EST	Lisa Bortolotti	Professor of Philosophy, University of Birmingham	Philosophy of Mind	Link
March 22, 1PM EST	Shannon Vallor	William J. Rewak, S.J. Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Santa Clara University in Silicon Valley	Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Technology, Ethics of Emerging Technologies	Link
April 5, 11AM EST	L.A. Paul	Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, Professorial Fellow of the Arche Research Centre at the University of St Andrews	Transformative Experience, Rationality, Authenticity	Link
April 26, 11AM EST	Jay L. Garfield	Doris Silbert Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy, Logic and Buddhist Studies at Smith College, Visiting Professor of Buddhist Philosophy at Harvard Divinity School, Professor of Philosophy at Melbourne University and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the Central University of Tibetan Studies	Indian Philosophy, Buddhist Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind	Link
May 10, 11AM EST	Kenny Easwaran	Associate Professor of Philosophy, Texas A&M University	Formal Epistemology, Decision Theory	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 doing the AMA. They will also take questions live during the AMA.

The moderators would like to thank each of our participants, our participants from the Fall 2016 Series and Joy Mizan at OUP US for helping us invite a number of different philosophers. Thanks to OUP, you can save 30% on any OUP title by these philosophers by using promocode AAFLYG6 on the oup.com site, while the series is ongoing.

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Here are blurbs for each of the Spring 2017 AMA Philosophers:

Amie L. Thomasson

I am a Professor of Philosophy and Cooper Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Miami, soon to be moving to take up a post as Professor of Philosophy at Dartmouth. Lately I have been working largely on questions about the proper value, functions, and methods of metaphysics. I also work on metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of art, philosophy of social and cultural objects, and phenomenology. Earlier in my career I worked a lot on fictional characters, and a lot of my graduate training was in phenomenology. I have published more than 60 articles and three books: Fiction and Metaphysics (Cambridge University Press, 1999), Ordinary Objects (Oxford University Press, 2007) and Ontology Made Easy (Oxford University Press, 2015).

Samantha Brennan

Samantha Brennan is a Professor in the Department of Women's Studies and Feminist Research at Western University, Canada. She is also a member of the Rotman Institute of Philosophy and a member of the graduate faculty of the Departments of Philosophy and Political Science. Brennan's main research interests lie in the area of contemporary normative ethics, particularly at the intersection of deontological and consequentialist moral theories. She also has active research interests in feminist ethics.

She is author of over 20 articles and chapters, as well as co-editor of eight books. Brennan is also the co-founder and co-editor of Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, an online open access journal in feminist philosophy. She's an active blogger who used to write a lot at the feminist philosophers blog but now mostly posts at Fit is a Feminist Issue, a blog she started with her friend and colleague Tracy Isaacs.

Chris W. Surprenant

Chris W. Surprenant is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of New Orleans, where I am the founding director of the Alexis de Tocqueville Project, an academic center for research and programming focusing on issues at the intersection of ethics, individual freedom, and the law. His work is at the intersection of moral and political philosophy, and his current projects apply this knowledge to contemporary issues in criminal justice reform, including the ethics of punishment; explore the connection between human well-being and entrepreneurship; and examine the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers on Kant's moral and political philosophy. He has received a handful of awards for his academic work. They include being recognized by Princeton Review in 2012 as one of the "Best 300 Professors" in the United States, and by Cengage Learning as one of their "Most Valuable Professors" of 2014, awarded to three professors in the United States who "have made lasting impressions on the education and lives of their students."

S. Matthew Liao

I am a philosopher interested in a wide range of issues including ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, moral psychology, and bioethics. I hold the Arthur Zitrin Chair of Bioethics and am the Director of the Center for Bioethics and Affiliated Professor in the Department of Philosophy at New York University. I am the author of The Right to Be Loved; Moral Brains: The Neuroscience of Morality; Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights; and over 50 articles in philosophy and bioethics. I have given TED and TEDx talks in New York and CERN, Switzerland, and I have been featured in the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, the BBC, Harper’s Magazine, Sydney Morning Herald, Scientific American and other media outlets. I am also the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Moral Philosophy, a peer­-reviewed international journal of moral, political and legal philosophy.

David Chalmers

I'm a philosopher at NYU and ANU. I'm interested in consciousness: e.g. the hard problem (see also this TED talk), the science of consciousness, zombies, and panpsychism. Lately I've been thinking a lot about the philosophy of technology: e.g. the extended mind (another TED talk), the singularity, and especially the universe as a simulation and virtual reality. I have a sideline in metaphilosophy: e.g. philosophical progress, verbal disputes, and philosophers' beliefs. I help run PhilPapers and other online resources. Here's my website (it was cutting edge in 1995) and here's my life story.

Lisa Bortolotti

I am Professor of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham. I studied Philosophy in my hometown, Bologna, before completing masters at King’s College London and the University of Oxford. I got my PhD from the Australian National University in Canberra. After a research position in Manchester, where I worked primarily on ethical issues emerging from the biomedical sciences, I joined the Philosophy Department at Birmingham. I was awarded the American Philosophical Association Book Prize for Delusions and Other Irrational Beliefs (OUP 2009). My latest book is Irrationality (Polity 2014).

My research interests are in empirically-informed philosophy of mind. I am especially interested in the strengths and limitations of human cognition and my work focuses on some familiar and some more unsettling instances of inaccurate or irrational belief, including cases of prejudice and superstition, self-deception, optimism bias, delusion, confabulation, and memory distortion. I am currently leading a five-year project funded by the European Research Council on Pragmatic and Epistemic Role of Factually Erroneous Cognitions and Thoughts (PERFECT), where I ask whether beliefs that are false or irrational can have benefits in terms of bringing about some dimension of success or even furthering agents’ epistemic goals. I argue for the view that there is no qualitative gap between the irrationality of those beliefs that are regarded as symptoms of mental health issues and the irrationality of everyday beliefs. I hope my research and that of my team will contribute to undermining the stigma commonly associated with mental health issues.

In the blog I founded in 2013, Imperfect Cognitions, academic experts at all career stages and experts by experience discuss belief, emotion, rationality, mental health, and much more.

Shannon Vallor

Shannon Vallor is the William J. Rewak, S.J. Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Santa Clara University in Silicon Valley. Her areas of specialization are the philosophy of science, philosophy of technology and the ethics of emerging technologies. She is President of the Society for Philosophy and Technology, an executive board member of the Foundation for Responsible Robotics, and the 2015 winner of the World Technology Award in Ethics.

Her current research focuses on the impact of emerging technologies, particularly those involving automation, on the moral and intellectual habits, skills and virtues of human beings - our character. Her work investigates how human character is being transformed by rapid advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, new social media, surveillance and biomedical technologies, and appears in journals such as Ethics and Information Technology, Philosophy and Technology, and Techné, as well as a 2016 book from Oxford University Press: Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting.

L.A. Paul

Some experiences change what you know and understand. In this way, these experiences change you. Some change you so dramatically and so profoundly that they change who you are in some deep and life-altering way. Such experiences transform you. In my recent book, Transformative Experience, I develop this idea and use it to argue that we can’t rationally control and plan our lives in the way we ordinarily think we can. The idea, at a deeper level, is about the metaphysical structure of the self, and how we can form and construct ourselves through life-changing experiences over time. I’m deeply interested in the nature of transformative experience and what it implies for the rationality of big life decisions, authenticity, and the nature of the self. Related questions I’m working on now include: What is the mind doing when it is disoriented in time? Is it rational to choose to have a chip implanted in my brain and gain a new sense modality? What is the modal and psychological structure of self-deception? How is fear of transformation involved in the fear of having new ideas? What can first person shooter-style computer games and virtual reality experiences teach us about the nature of the immersed self?

I’m a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill. I’m also a Professorial Fellow of the Arche ì Research Centre at the University of St Andrews. My main research interests are in metaphysics, cognitive science, and the philosophy of mind. I focus my writing on the nature of the self, temporal experience, causation, causal experience, time and time’s arrow, perception, mereology, constitution, and essence. My latest book is Transformative Experience, published by Oxford University Press in 2014. You can learn more about my research and read or listen to various discussions of it in the New Yorker, The Guardian, The New York Times, the BBC, NPR, and other venues at www.lapaul.org.

Jay L. Garfield

Jay L Garfield is Doris Silbert Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy, Logic and Buddhist Studies at Smith College, Visiting Professor of Buddhist Philosophy at Harvard Divinity School, Professor of Philosophy at Melbourne University and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the Central University of Tibetan Studies. Prof Garfield’s research addresses topics in the foundations of cognitive science and the philosophy of mind; the history of Indian philosophy during the colonial period; topics in ethics, epistemology and the philosophy of logic; methodology in cross-cultural interpretation; and topics in Buddhist philosophy, particularly Indo-Tibetan Madhyamaka and Yogācāra.

Prof Garfield’s most recent books are Minds Without Fear: Philosophy in the Indian Renaissance (with Nalini Bhushan, 2017), Dignāga’s Investigation of the Percept: A Philosophical Legacy in India and Tibet (with Douglas Duckworth, David Eckel, John Powers, Yeshes Thabkhas and Sonam Thakchöe, 2016) Engaging Buddhism: Why it Matters to Philosophy (2015), Moonpaths: Ethics and Emptiness (with the Cowherds, 2015) and (edited, with Jan Westerhoff), Madhyamaka and Yogācāra: Allies or Rivals? (2015), all published by OUP. Garfield is current working on a book with Yasuo Deguchi, Graham Priest and Robert Sharf, What Can’t Be Said: Paradox and Contradiction in East Asian Philosophy; a book on Hume’s Treatise, The Concealed Operations of Custom: Hume’s Treatise from the Inside Out; and a large collaborative project on Geluk-Sakya epistemological debates in 15th-18th century Tibet following on Taktshang Lotsawa’s 18 Great Contradictions in the Thought of Tsongkhapa and research with Shaun Nichols on the on the impact of religious ideology on attitudes towards death.

Kenny Easwaran

My main work is on formal epistemology and decision theory, with some particular interests in the epistemology of mathematics, and understanding the use of mathematics in describing the world (and particularly in describing our beliefs and decisions).

I started my undergraduate career at Stanford interested in math and music, but after a philosophy of science class and some logic classes, I decided to add philosophy. For my PhD, I attended UC Berkeley's program in Logic and the Methodology of Science, which gave me flexibility to continue advanced mathematical study while preparing for a career in philosophy (though I initially thought I was going to do the opposite). After getting my PhD in 2008, I spent two semesters as a postdoc at the Australian National University, and started a tenure track job at the University of Southern California. In 2014, as my partner was searching for tenure track jobs (he works on nanomaterials for solar energy), we managed to find positions for both of us at Texas A&M University, where I now have tenure.

Most of my work focuses on issues in probability and decision theory, and particularly paradoxes that arise with infinity. One might think that the finitude of our minds means we can only ever consider finitely many possibilities when reasoning about the world. But there are in fact infinitely many ways things could be, and we can implicitly reason about them through our use of language and mathematics, and we never have sufficient information to narrow things down to a finite list of possibilities, unless we ignore the distinctions we can talk about.

I'm happy to answer questions about anything I've worked on, or anything else that sounds interesting. If you want to read some of my work, you can find it all on my website: http://www.kennyeaswaran.org/.

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We hope that everyone is as excited as we are to have some great philosophers join us for AMAs! If you are a professional philosopher and are interesting in signing up for 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 cannot accommodate everyone due to the finitude of space and time, but we still welcome volunteers.