Rate My Professor Herman Cappelen

Herman Cappelen is Chair Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy, School of Humanities, at the University of Hong Kong, a position he has held since 2020. He directs the AI & Humanity Lab and the MA program in AI, Ethics and Society at HKU, and serves as co-director of ConceptLab Hong Kong and a member of the steering committee of the HKU Institute of Data Science. Cappelen earned his PhD in Philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley in 1996, with a dissertation on the metaphysics of words and semantics of quotation, and his BA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from Balliol College, University of Oxford in 1989. His distinguished career trajectory includes Assistant Professor and Associate Professor of Philosophy at Vassar College (1996-2005), Associate Professor at the University of Oxford and Somerville College (2006-2007), Chair Professor at the University of St Andrews (2007-2015), and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oslo (2015-2020). Previously, he directed the Arché Philosophical Research Centre at St Andrews and served as Research Director of the Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature at Oslo for ten years.

Cappelen's research encompasses philosophy of language, conceptual engineering, philosophy of artificial intelligence, metaphilosophy, and related areas such as the philosophical foundations of explainable AI, AI safety, human-AI communication, and metaphysics of virtual reality. He is the author or co-author of twelve monographs, including The Concept of Democracy: An Essay on Conceptual Amelioration and Abandonment (Oxford University Press, 2023), Making AI Intelligible (with Josh Dever, OUP, 2021), Fixing Language: An Essay on Conceptual Engineering (OUP, 2018), Philosophy without Intuitions (OUP, 2012), The Inessential Indexical (with Josh Dever, OUP, 2013), Insensitive Semantics (with Ernie Lepore, Blackwell, 2005), and Language Turned on Itself (with Ernie Lepore, OUP, 2007). He edits the Cambridge Elements series on AI and Philosophy and is Editor-in-Chief of Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. His accolades include election as Fellow of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters (2008), Member of Academia Europaea (2018), Permanent Member of the Institut International de Philosophie, and various fellowships such as the Berggruen Institute China Fellowship (2025-2026). Cappelen's work has shaped debates on intuitions in philosophy, semantic minimalism, relativism, and AI cognition.