Cameron Buckner

Cameron Buckner is a Professor and the Donald F. Cronin Chair in the Humanities at the University of Florida. His research primarily concerns philosophical issues which arise in the study of non-human minds, especially animal cognition and artificial intelligence. He began his academic career in logic-based artificial intelligence. This research inspired an interest into the relationship between classical models of reasoning and the (usually very different) ways that humans and animals actually solve problems, which led him to the discipline of philosophy. He received a PhD in Philosophy at Indiana University in 2011 and an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellowship at Ruhr-University Bochum from 2011 to 2013. Recent representative publications include “Empiricism without Magic: Transformational Abstraction in Deep Convolutional Neural Networks” (2018, Synthese), and “Rational Inference: The Lowest Bounds” (2017, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research)—the latter of which won the American Philosophical Association's Article Prize for the period of 2016–2018. In 2023 he published a book with Oxford University Press that uses empiricist philosophy of mind (from figures such as Aristotle, Ibn Sina, John Locke, David Hume, William James, and Sophie de Grouchy) to understand recent advances in deep-neural-network-based artificial intelligence.