Influences
His philosophical ideas were deeply influenced by the writings of Immanuel Kant, Gottlob Frege and Karl Popper, and to a lesser extent by John Austin, Gilbert Ryle, R. M. Hare (who, as his 'personal tutor' at Balliol College discussed meta-ethics with him), Imre Lakatos and Ludwig Wittgenstein. What he could learn from philosophers left large gaps, which he decided around 1970 research in Artificial Intelligence might fill. E.g. Philosophy of Mind could be transformed by testing ideas in working fragments of minds, and Philosophy of Mathematics could be illuminated by trying to understand how a working robot could develop into a mathematician.
Much of his thinking about AI was influenced by Marvin Minsky and despite his critique of logicism he also learnt much from John McCarthy. His work on emotions can be seen as an elaboration of a paper on 'Emotional and motivational controls of cognition', written in the 1960s by Herbert A. Simon. He disagrees with all of these on some topics, while agreeing on others.
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“Without looking, then, to those extraordinary social influences which are now acting in precisely this direction, but only at what is inevitably doing around us, I think we must regard the land as a commanding and increasing power on the citizen, the sanative and Americanizing influence, which promises to disclose new virtues for ages to come.”
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