Alex Grzankowski

Alex Grzankowski is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Birkbeck College and King’s College London, University of London, and Reader in Philosophy in the School of Historical Studies, Birkbeck. He also serves as Associate Director of the Institute of Philosophy at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, and Director of the London AI and Humanity Project.

Education

• PhD, University of Texas at Austin (2013)
• BA, Cornell University

Research Interests

Grzankowski’s work spans philosophy of mind, metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of emotion. Central themes include mental representation, rationality, free will, propositions, and the nature of emotions. Current projects investigate emotion in cognitive science and psychiatry, interpretability in artificial intelligence, and non-propositional attitudes.

Publications Overview

From 2025 to 2015, Grzankowski has published extensively in leading journals such as Mind and Language, Journal of Philosophy, Inquiry, Nous, Philosophical Studies, European Journal of Philosophy, and Episteme. His articles address foundational questions about how emotions represent values, propositional vs. non-propositional content, the epistemology of perception, AI interpretability, and the metaphysics of mental states. He has also co-edited two major volumes: Non-Propositional Intentionality (Oxford University Press, 2018) and Thought: its Origin and Reach – Essays for Mark Sainsbury (Routledge, 2024).

Doctoral Supervision

At Birkbeck, he has supervised at least one doctoral candidate to completion: Kevan Norris, whose thesis (2019) examined Hylomorphism and the Mind-Body Relation.

Current Projects & Labs

Grzankowski directs the London AI and Humanity Project, which hosts public lectures and interdisciplinary research on large-language-model mentality, AI ethics, and human–machine interaction. He is currently working on Emotions as Transitions, Deflating Deflationism (with collaborators at Cambridge), and A short book on LLMs, Reference, and World Models (with Derek Ball).