ProfessorDiane Proudfoot

Diane is Professor of Philosophy at UC, where she is co-director and co-founder of the Turing Archive for the History of Computing. She is Honorary Research Professor at the University of Queensland and until 2020 was also co-founder and permanent international fellow of the Turing Centre Zürich, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zürich. In 2016 she was a fellow of the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies and in 2018 she was the John Findlay Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Boston University. Prior visiting scholarships were at New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; earlier scholarships include a Fulbright-Hays Scholarship to the University of California Berkeley and an Andrew Carnegie Scholarship to the University of Cambridge.

Diane’s research is in both mainstream philosophy and the crossover area between philosophy, cognitive science, and computer science. Her research is primarily on Alan Turing, the philosophy and history of Artificial Intelligence, philosophy of language and logic, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. She has more than 60 journal articles and book chapters in those areas.

Currently Diane is working on a volume on Turing and Wittgenstein (for Oxford University Press), a monograph on Wittgenstein on AI, a book with Jack Copeland on the cognitive science of religion (for Blackwell), and additional varied research projects. The latter include work on: human-AI communication; ordinary language philosophy and AI; G.E.M. Anscombe’s analysis of intention; Saul Kripke on empty reference; the free will defence to the argument from evil; and the implications of brain-machine interfaces for the concept of mind. Some of this research involves real-world experiment—using actual Turing tests, EEG headset studies, or experimental philosophy of language.