Ali Boyle

I specialise in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. I'm currently a Research Fellow in Kinds of Intelligence at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence in Cambridge and the Center for Science and Thought in Bonn. Before this, I was a Research Fellow in Philosophy at Trinity Hall, Cambridge.

I'm interested in all sorts of philosophical questions about the mind and living things. Most of my research focusses on nonhuman minds and the methods used to study them. I'm currently working on episodic memory - memory for personally experienced past events. I'm interested in the role episodic memory plays in our mental lives, and whether it's uniquely human. Do any non-human animals or artificial agents have episodic memory - and how could we know if they did?

Previously, I've written about whether animals are self-aware, and whether they can 'read minds'. I also do research in the metaphysics of biology, where I'm especially interested in questions about the nature of organisms. What is an organism? When does one organism become two?