Juan Pablo Bermúdez
I am a philosopher and cognitive scientist working on the issue of control: How do we exert control over our actions? What are the limits of that control? And what are the ethical and political implications of our limitations, as they intersect with social contexts and new technologies?
I am Lecturer (a.k.a. Assistant Professor) at the University of Southampton’s Department of Philosophy.
My work currently focuses on two areas:
- Understanding the link between self-control and poverty in the Global South. Most work on self-control has studied populations in the Global North. What can we learn from the nature of human agency and rationality by studying the skills and strategies people develop in a broader set of contexts?Papers on self-controlPapers on agency
- Creating tools to design autonomy-supportive artificial intelligence. This involves identifying the ethical boundaries of AI-based influence, building a classification of mental harms, and building tools that developers and designers can use to check whether their AI systems support or hinder human autonomy.Papers on AI and autonomy
I am Research Associate at the Institute for Ethics in Technology, TU Hamburg. I have been visiting scholar at the Human Abilities Centre (Berlin), University of Oxford, the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Philosophy of Science, and Universidad de los Andes (Colombia).
I am also Philpapers editor of the ‘trying’ and ‘habit’ categories.
When I’m not doing philosophy I try to run 5k as fast as I can. I also love bike touring with my wife Ade, hiking up and down mountains and occasionally making music. (In the photo you can see the Neuchâtel lake behind the Jura mountains, which I hiked and biked around while being a postdoc there.)
Updates
- September 2026: I'll be giving talks at the University of Toronto (Centre for Ethics, and Social Psychology Research Group) and Philadelphia (MindCORE, University of Pennsylvania).
- August 2026: We ran the Agential Capacities in Context workshop at the University of Turku (Finland), co-organised with Polaris Koi and Anssi Bwalya. It was very thought-provoking and great fun — thanks to all the participants!
- June 2026: My paper "Is intending just remembering?" is out now in Mind & Language, part of a symposium on Wayne Wu's account of intention as practical memory.
- March 2026: Our paper "An AI-powered research assistant in the lab", a practical guide to using LLMs for text analysis, is out now in Behavior Research Methods.
- July 2025: Our paper "Autonomy by Design", on preserving human autonomy in AI decision-support, is out now in Philosophy & Technology (with Stefan Buijsman and Sarah Carter) — it's since drawn published replies from Reuben Sass and Ron Aboodi, which we've responded to in turn.
- Summer 2025: I had the pleasure to spend some time in Berlin as fellow of the Human Abilities Centre, Humboldt & Freie Universities.
