The Problem of Other Minds

Our panellists are Professor Anil Gomes, Professor Thomas Stern and Professor Vasu Reddy. The discussion will be chaired by Ritula Shah.

Anil Gomes is Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Trinity College, Oxford, and Professor in Philosophy at the University of Oxford. His work explores the nature of the mind, our relations to others, and the place of faith and practice in our lives. Much of his research engages with the ideas of the eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant and he is an expert on the philosophy of Iris Murdoch. He has appeared on BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time and written for The Guardian, the TLS, and the London Review of Books. He is the author of The Practical Self (Oxford University Press, 2024).

Thomas Stern is Professor of Philosophy at UCL and Vice-Dean for Interdisciplinarity in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. His research focuses on nineteenth-century German philosophy, especially Nietzsche and Schopenhauer: his book Nietzsche's Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2020) gives a comprehensive account of Nietzsche's later ethical thought, and he edited The New Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche (2019). He has also published on aesthetics and the philosophy of theatre (Philosophy and Theatre, Routledge 2013) and, more recently, on Proust.

Vasudevi Reddy, Emerita Professor of Developmental and Cultural Psychology, University of Portsmouth, has spent her career exploring the origins of social understanding in human infants. She focuses on every day, ordinary engagements (such as teasing, joking, showing-off and feeling shy) which often tend to get ignored in mainstream theories. Her interest in emotional engagement as the route to understanding has led her to questions about the nature and influence of culture on social understanding. Her book How Infants Know Minds (Harvard University Press, 2008) argues for a second-person approach to knowing minds, a dialogical and emotion-based route to resolving an old problem.

Ritula Shah is a broadcaster, journalist and moderator with more than three decades of experience working in international affairs and British domestic politics for BBC News and the World Service. She was the presenter of the World Tonight, Radio 4’s evening news programme, giving her a unique perspective on the events and trends which are shaping our world. She currently presents Calm Classics, on ClassicFM.

Ritula is a Public Humanities Fellow at the School of Advanced Studies, University of London and is on the advisory board of the defence and security think tank, the Royal United Services Institute. She’s also an ambassador for the British Asian Trust.