François Kammerer

François Kammerer is a philosopher of mind and cognitive science. Since 2024, he is a researcher (“Chargé de recherches”) at the French CNRS, attached to the Archives Henri Poincaré (Strasbourg). 

January 2019. I was a postdoc in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, with a respectable travel budget, and I had decided to spend one month in Crete to work with Keith Frankish. Officially, I was visiting the philosophy department in Rethymno, but I had found a small flat in Heraklion, where Keith lives, about an hour away from Rethymno. I knew and admired Keith for his work on consciousness and illusionism, and we had exchanged on the topic (I wrote a short piece for his illusionism symposium in 2016), but I wanted to spend the month discussing new ideas, distinct from illusionism, on introspection. My idea was to present him with a draft – that I hoped would become, as it did, a co-authored paper – on possible forms of introspection. The goal of the article was to rigorously theorize about introspection in the most general sense – not just introspection as it exists in us, humans, but introspection as it could be, in modified humans, animals, AIs, or aliens. It was a speculative, weird project that raised a lot of eyebrows, but I found it intellectually very stimulating.

Not much was going on in Heraklion in January. Life was slow. The tourists were all gone, the beach empty, the sea often stormy. You could admire, in the distance, the mountains covered in snow. I was devoting almost all my time to work, with a bit of sightseeing on weekends. I would meet with Keith about twice a week for lengthy morning discussions in his living room. We first discussed the draft I sent him, then continued with further discussions based on his comments, suggestions, and objections. When I was not with Keith, I was mostly working in hipster cafés in the city center or at the city library.

Working with Keith felt like the real deal. We were genuinely trying to figure deep things out at the conceptual level, exploring uncharted territory in a spirit of kind but rigorous collaboration. I learnt a whole lot with him. I was the impatient, impulsive, imaginative, but chaotic youngish postdoc, bubbling with disorderly and hasty ideas. Keith was the wise, cautious, perfectionist, deeply informed, awfully smart experienced philosopher. He reined me in when needed, encouraged me at other times, all the while remaining the exquisitely polite and terribly generous person he is. Think d’Artagnan and Athos – except that Keith is not an old misogynistic bachelor, but a happily married feminist; he and his wonderful wife Maria Kasmirli were kind enough to take me out for a couple of evenings out in Heraklion. When we were not talking about introspection and consciousness, we discussed politics and old movies – I got to watch Powell & Pressburger’s movies because of Keith, although I still don’t think they beat Renoir’s!

The article benefited tremendously from Keith’s work and input. We kept working on it together in the following years, and the result ended up being considerably stronger, more systematic, and more elegantly written than my first clumsy draft scribbled in a very Gallic English. We published it four years later, as the target article of a 15-papers interdisciplinary symposium in the Journal Consciousness Studies, which would end up republished as a book in 2025, The Landscape of Introspection. The article has since then had a life of its own, being cited in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and discussed, notably in the context of debates on LLM introspection, by researchers at Deep Mind or Anthropic.

I often think very fondly of my time in Heraklion and, when I interact with younger researchers and find myself in the role of the more experienced collaborator, I always try to bring with me something of Keith’s mentoring spirit – the way he combined generosity and kindness with a relentless expectation of excellence.