Draft:Sebastian Sunday Grève

Sebastian Sunday Grève (born 21 January 1987) is a German philosopher in the Western analytic tradition  noted for his work in epistemology  and the philosophy of mind. Since 2019, he has been Assistant Professor in Philosophy and Fellow of the Institute of Foreign Philosophy at Peking University.

Education and career
Sunday Grève was born and raised in Germany. During his childhood, he spent much of his time playing soccer. When a knee injury prevented him from pursuing a professional career as a soccer player, he first became interested in Buddhism and later in literature and philosophy including authors such as Goethe, Schiller, and Nietzsche..

He applied to study philosophy and German linguistics and literature at university, and was admitted to the University of Göttingen. He spent the final year of his undergraduate degree at the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen, Norway. He wrote his BA thesis on Saul Kripke's work on the problem of other minds, and graduated in 2011. He then went to Birkbeck, University of London, from where he graduated in 2014 with an MPhil in Philosophy. His MPhil studies were supervised by Marie McGinn and Jennifer Hornsby, under whose guidance he also wrote his MPhil thesis on the philosophies of Plato and Wittgenstein.

In 2014, Sunday Grève's essay "The Importance of Understanding Each Other in Philosophy" won the Annual Essay Prize of the Royal Institute of Philosophy.

He then read for the DPhil at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford, under the supervision of William Child and Timothy Williamson. He was awarded the doctorate in philosophy in 2018 for a thesis entitled Skill and Scepticism: An Enquiry Concerning the Nature and Epistemic Value of Intuitive Judgement.

Before the completion of his studies, Sunday Grève took up the post of Stipendiary Lecturer in Philosophy at Christ Church, Oxford. In 2019, he accepted a job offer from Peking University as Assistant Professor in Philosophy and Fellow of the Institute of Foreign Philosophy

During the academic year 2020–2021, Sunday Grève was a Berggruen China Fellow, where he worked on Alan Turing's philosophy of intelligence.

Philosophical Work
Sunday Grève has contributed to epistemology and the philosophy of mind. In general, his work displays a high degree of interdisciplinarity addressing overlapping concerns in artificial intelligence, philosophy, and psychology.

In his doctoral thesis, Sunday Grève developed an epistemological and psychological theory of intuitive skill that shares features with Daniel Kahneman's heuristics and biases approach on the one hand and Gary Klein's naturalistic decision-making approach on the other.

In other work, building on ideas from Kripke and Wittgenstein, Sunday Grève has argued that all words have the potential for being rigid designators. Following Russell, he calls this category of words the "real names". In particular, Sunday Grève argues that whether a given expression is a real name or not, that is, whether it will designate the same object in every possible world where it exists (and nothing else in any possible world) or not, depends on how the word has been used in the language:"Even for a concept such as gold to have been so much as amenable to scientific investigation it was necessary for the concept to have had a particular kind of history, that is, a particular kind of tradition within which the words that are used to express it are passed from link to link in such a way that their use is developed as one that carries the potential of their being or becoming real names. In other words, it required a certain scientific spirit. Perhaps Kripke underestimated the influence of nonscientific and antiscientific tendencies in human societies . . . One broad consequence of the ubiquity of these tendencies in human cultural history is the widespread existence of the conceptual phenomenon that Wittgenstein described in terms of family resemblance. Wittgenstein's idea thus marks the difficulty involved in the scientific and philosophical search for real names."In philosophy of artificial intelligence, Sunday Grève has argued that machines, including large language models, can be conscious  ; and, more generally, that machines (in particular, humanoid robots) can be intelligent, conscious, sentient, etc. in precisely the way that a human being typically is.

In the ethics of artificial intelligence, Sunday Grève holds the view that one of the most urgent tasks for human society as well as for every human being individually is to decide, and hence to discover, what sort of life with machines they really want.

Publications

 * "Real Names", in Martin Gustafsson, Oskari Kuusela, and Jakub Mácha, eds, Engaging Kripke with Wittgenstein, Routledge (2023), 28–59.
 * "Artificial Forms of Life", Philosophies 8 (2023), 89 (21 pp.).
 * "Intuitive Skill", Philosophia 51 (2023), 1677–1700.
 * "AI’s First Philosopher", Aeon (2022), 21 April 2022.
 * "Nietzsche and the Machines", The Philosophers' Magazine 93 (2021), 12–15.
 * Wittgenstein on Philosophy, Objectivity, and Meaning, co-edited with James Conant, Cambridge University Press, 2019.
 * "The Importance of Understanding Each Other in Philosophy", Philosophy 90 (2015), 213–39.