Some of the people who influenced me most
Aaron Sloman
Last updated: 5 Jul 2008; 11 Apr 2010; 26 Aug 2020 (Fixed Boden ref)

• The first philosopher I read: Bertrand Russell also on Stanford Encyclopedia
  Some online writings
• Immanuel Kant also on wikipedia
  (who would be doing AI if he were alive now).
• Gottlob Frege also on internet encyclopaedia of philosophy and wikipedia
• David Hume on personal identity.
• Karl Popper, also on Stanford Encyclopedia and BBC discussion led by Melvyn Bragge
• Imre Lakatos. See a summary of his philosophy of science.
• Gilbert Ryle and Some pictures and links
  See also this discussion of logical geography and logical topography.
• Richard Mervyn Hare

  He was my "personal tutor" at Balliol College Oxford, after I switched from mathematics and logic to philosophy. He was very kind to me personally, including inviting me to join him, his family, and his students on a trip to Plas Rhoscolyn in Anglesey, and giving me some of his time to discuss philosophy, despite my being fairly ignorant of most philosophy. He eventually even trusted me to give tutorials on moral philosophy to some of his students, while I was working on my D.Phil.

  I also went to lectures and seminars by other Moral philosophers in Oxford, including Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot, both of whom disagreed strongly with Hare's meta-ethics. Although I liked and admired both, I thought then, and think now, that Hare was more right than they were: they both struck me as being guilty of wishful thinking, since they did not like the conclusions of his arguments and tended to use scorn rather than reason in opposing him. But I also thought Hare guilty of wishful thinking in supposing that his prescriptivist analysis of "good" and "ought" could provide a basis for arguing rationally against fanatics like Hitler or South African white supremacists.

  I later concluded that "better" was the most basic concept and wrote some papers on the implications of treating "better" as a sort of logical operator with multiple arguments.

• Marvin Minsky
• John McCarthy
• Margaret Boden
  Colleague, friend and author of an amazing history of cognitive science
• Max Clowes
  Who introduced me to AI, around 1969, and pushed me to write my first AI paper in 1971.
• Ludwig Wittgenstein
  Who was wrong about many things, but right about the need to consider many different sorts of examples when considering a philosophical problem. In his ability to do that, he seems to have been unmatched.
• There have been many other colleagues and friends from whom I have learnt/benefitted in various ways. One day I may try to produce a list, to say thanks. This would include all the contributors to: Jeremy L, Wyatt, Dean D Petters and David C. Hogg, From Animals to Robots and Back: Reflections on Hard Problems in the Study of Cognition: a Collection in Honour of Aaron Sloman,
  Cognitive Systems Monographs, 22, Springer, 2014,
  https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-06614-1

Maintained by Aaron Sloman
School of Computer Science
The University of Birmingham