APA Member Interview: Felipe De Brigard

The APA Blog is publishing excerpts from Cliff Sosis’s long-form interviews with philosophers, which appear at his blog, What Is It Like to Be a Philosopher? The excerpts below are from an interview originally published on March 20, 2026, and reprinted with permission from Cliff Sosis.

In this interview, Felipe De Brigard; Professor of Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience; Faculty member of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience; and Associate of the Duke Initiative for Science & Society talks about growing up among and learning to live with bombs, kidnappings, and conflicts in Colombia during the time of Pablo Escobar, Catholicism, Dungeons and Dragons, aspirations to become a priest, hormones, Nietzsche, theater, Descartes, attending the National University of Colombia, memory and Aristotle; applying to and being rejected from 10 grad schools; how Adrian Cussins helped him get into Tufts, Fodor, beer pong, Dennett, and working at the Danish Pastry House; contemplating going to grad school for neuroscience and getting into UNC philosophy; the differences between public and private universities; working with Prinz, Knobe, Lycan, Dorit Bar-On, and eventually Kelly Giovanello in the psychology department; the sometimes contentious relationship between philosophy and science; a comforting conversation with Patricia Churchland; the philosophy and psychology of memory; joining Dan Schacter’s Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory Lab at Harvard; Duke, the experience machine, the Memory and Forgiveness Project, and his last meal…

What was growing up in Colombia like?

It was a difficult place to grow up in. It was the time of Pablo Escobar, the drug cartels, the bombs, the kidnappings. And then, in the 1990s and early 2000s, the conflict with the guerrillas and the paramilitaries was at its worst. It was very dangerous. Of course, I was a child, so only later on was I able to contextualize many of my childhood memories. It was when I grew up that I recognized that the apparently unprovoked crying of my classmate was because his father had been kidnapped for months, or that the sudden absence of another one was due to the unexpected funeral of a family member that was killed by one of the bombs. But the violence and the sense of danger was omnipresent, and most of us who grew up in Bogotá—in Colombia, really—at that time have lots of stories to tell about how close we were to one bomb or another, whether the windows or walls in our homes were affected by the blast wave, or how many people we knew that were kidnapped or killed by some violent actor or another. My siblings often talked about the fact that doing homework at a friend’s house was always a risk; in the time of landlines, you didn’t want to be away from home if a bomb exploded. Communications would be interrupted, and inevitably, you’d think the worst, and often those expectations would materialize. And for at least three years—1989 to 1992, I’d say—it felt like there were bombings every week. I was a teenager when the violence between the guerrillas, the paramilitaries, and the army basically sieged us inside the city, as going anywhere outside urban areas was extraordinarily dangerous. I liked hiking in natural parks and rural areas—I still do—but every time I left Bogotá, I knew I was risking being kidnapped or murdered.

Did I worry? Probably, but there is a point in which you stop doing it. It is part of life.

Colombia is also a beautiful and happy country, and my compatriots have a kind of resilience that is almost magical. Additionally, I grew up with a wonderful family—I am the youngest, by a long shot, of 5 siblings—and was profoundly and overtly loved by all the members of my family. For me, my family was, and continues to be, always a safe place.

Religious household?

Very much so. Both my parents were Catholic, I went to a Catholic school, and I actually was profoundly religious—even considered becoming a priest myself—until perhaps my second semester in college. Philosophy made me change my mind.

Earlier you mentioned you wanted to be a priest when you grew up?

I was an altar boy at the local church, and all through middle and high school I belonged to a religious group—kind of a “high school club”—that taught catechism to very poor children and prepared them for their first communion. The group also collected money and food and distributed them among very poor families in the north of Bogotá. We worked very closely with social workers, and we really tried to help people very much in need. I was very active in that group and even became the president in my last year in high school. 

I was under the impression that being a religious person and being an ethically good person were correlated. Since striving to be a good person has been such an important part of my life since my childhood, I thought the path was obvious. Once the hormones kicked in and celibacy started to look a bit less appealing, I began to explore other options.

Any sign you’d be a philosopher? Where did you apply to college and why?

I liked my philosophy classes and loved to read. I really liked literature, history, and theology, and I had a serious interest in helping people. Now, in Colombia, unlike the US, you don’t apply to a college and then decide what your major is going to be. Instead, in your last year of high school, you apply directly to a particular department in order to enroll in a particular major. In a way, you are supposed to know what you want your profession to be when you are 17 or 18. Now, military service was also mandatory for men between high school and college. And often what happened is that, in your last year of high school, you applied to a particular program and, if you got in, they’d hold your spot for one year until you were done with your military service. So, once I decided that I wasn’t going to go to the seminary—and now that I think about it, both my brothers-in-law helped me a lot during this time, when I was trying to make my mind—I decided to apply to the medical school at this one private university. I knew by then that I was going to be drafted, so I made arrangements so that they would hold my spot for a year.

However—and, please, to the young fellows that may be reading this, this is the opposite of career advice—one night, at a party, a friend of mine and I dared each other to get accepted at the National University. Unlike every other university, which accepted your grades and the Colombian equivalent of the SAT, called ICFES, the National University had its own admission exam, and it was famously very difficult. I registered for the exam, but when I did, I applied to the philosophy department, in part because I knew I didn’t dislike philosophy, and in part because I thought it would be easier than the admissions exam for medicine. Besides, since I was going to the army for a year, I figured it wouldn’t matter. The main point of the whole maneuver was to win a bet. Now, long story short, I was admitted to the philosophy department and, for various reasons—including the fact that I had just turned 17 when I was recruited by the army—I was discharged as I arrived. Since my admission to the medical school had been deferred, I found myself with a year to spare, so I decided to attend the National University just for kicks. The first semester studying Wittgenstein, Aristotle, and especially Descartes, completely changed my life. I never left philosophy since.

What impressed you about Aristotle, Wittgenstein, and Descartes?

I came to Aristotle through Plato and always tend to read them as offering two contrasting views on truth and knowledge. Plato—and his mouthpiece Socrates—taught us that truth is unattainable, that these silly human bodies our souls are trapped in make it impossible to appreciate things for what they really are, but that searching for truth and knowledge is a pleasant and noble endeavor, so we should enjoy the ride! By contrast, I feel that for Aristotle, the process of inquiry was troubling, and that mental solace was only reached when truth and knowledge were attained. Scholars of Greek philosophy would probably disagree with my reading, but to this day, I like to think of them as representing this sort of back-and-forth between doubt and certainty, which is kind of how I feel I live my life as a philosopher and as a scientist. Also, it is worth mentioning that Aristotle has been a huge influence in my way of thinking about several issues in philosophy of mind—particularly about memory. In fact, my most recent book, “Memory and Remembering,” is, in a sense, an homage to Aristotle’s “On Memory and Reminiscence,” which I think anticipates many of the central issues in contemporary philosophy of memory.

My love for Descartes was different. During my first semester in college, we read a bunch of Descartes—but not the typical stuff you read in intro to philosophy in the US. We actually read his treatises on The World and The Man, as well as his work on optics, the meteors, and geometry. For me, Descartes was primarily a scientist who, reluctantly, had to offer a dualist “non-solution” to the mind-body problem because he couldn’t figure out a mechanistic way out. Again, scholars would likely disagree with me, but I don’t think Descartes was very happy with his dualism, and I like to believe that had there been no Inquisition and better neuroscience, he would have been a materialist.

You joked earlier that hormones may have influenced your decision to not pursue life in the church, but you also suggested philosophy may have also influenced your decision.

Philosophy was critical, of course, but the seed was already planted. I have a vivid memory of a conversation with my father, walking back from mass on a Sunday evening, when I asked him about heaven and eternity. I must have been 12 or 13 years old, and I was petrified with the idea of living forever. I was also terrified of the idea of being bored. I told my dad that I was worried that, if I was to go to heaven, I was going to get bored at some point. My dad told me not to worry, that God would have an infinite amount of board games and books for me to enjoy for all eternity. But, I insisted, there is only a certain number of variations of board games and story plots before they become repetitive, and then they will be boring. ‘We are talking about eternity, here!’ So, my dad told me that I shouldn’t worry about that either, for God was going to change my mind in such a way that I wouldn’t get bored again. ‘But if God changes my mind,’ I replied, ‘then the person in heaven wouldn’t be me!’

As I grew up, those conversations became more frequent and the worries more pressing. I recall another one, as an older teenager, in which my very patient father declared that maybe, just maybe, I didn’t have the “gift of faith.” I hated that response, of course, for it seemed silly to me that the solution of a question about the dogma required me to believe in the dogma to begin with. Of course, in college, I learned that this very same strategy was followed by the Catholic church in the Middle Ages to “solve” perennial questions about their dogma, such as the problem of evil. The credo ut intelligam—I believe to understand—associated with Anselm and many other medieval philosophers, did not sit well with me, and I quickly began to think of Catholicism as a sort of “asylum of ignorance,” to use Spinoza’s poetic trope.

A second, major influence in my religious conversion was the Euthyphro. The way in which Plato presents the dilemma about the nature of morality and the authority of the gods crystallized something that, as a teenager, I struggled with a lot: the fact that many religious and pious people—particularly Catholic priests but also deacons and nuns—behaved in ways that were profoundly and undeniably immoral. Plato opened my eyes to the fact that religion and morality need not correlate, that more often than not they pull in opposite directions, and that it makes perfect sense to be a morally good person and an atheist.

Inspirational classes or teachers?

A few, yes. I really liked one of my philosophy of mind teachers—Juan José Botero—from whom I learned a lot about the intersection between phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science and neuroscience. I also really enjoyed learning from Douglas Niño, who is a Peirce scholar—in fact, one of the philosophers who knows the most about Peirce and American Pragmatism that I’ve ever met. But my biggest influence, without a doubt, was my neuropsychology teacher, Dr. Patricia Montañés, from whom I learned an enormous amount about the brain and neuropsychology. I worked with her for most of my undergraduate degree, and we actually co-wrote a book together: an introductory textbook to clinic and cognitive neuropsychology.

When did you decide to go to grad school? Where did you want to go and why? Receive any guidance on that front?

It was in 2001. In Colombia, most undergraduate degrees take 5 years to complete—sometimes more—but I was trying to finish mine in 4. By about my second year in college, I knew I wanted to pursue graduate studies and that I wanted to continue learning about the relationship between the mind and the brain. Cognitive neuroscience was non-existent in Colombia back then, so I thought I had two options: either to continue a clinical career in neuropsychology or to pursue a degree in philosophy of mind at an empirically oriented philosophy department. Despite my profound love for neuropsychology, I realized halfway through my college training that I didn’t want to become a clinician. I was much more interested in the theory than in the practice of neuropsychology. So, I thought the second alternative was going to be better for me. But, as I mentioned, my English wasn’t that great back then, and I also had no idea how to even apply to grad schools in the US. Internet was barely available, and I had very little guidance. I gathered as much money as I could to apply to some PhD programs I knew had, in their faculty, philosophers of mind I had read, and went for it. I think I applied to 8 or maybe 10 places. I was rejected from all of them.

I was disheartened, not only because I didn’t get in, but also because I had spent my little free time applying rather than finishing my degree. So, I started my fifth year in college, hoping to finish and reapply. But then, something wonderful happened: a new professor of Philosophy called Adrian Cussins had recently moved to Bogota, and the university where he was teaching was looking for an interpreter; someone who could translate his lectures in real time for the students. I was then working really hard to improve my English, and since I had read some philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, I was able to get the job. That year working with Adrian changed my life. Not only because I was able to do philosophy in English for the very first time, but also because he taught me that being a philosopher was more than merely commenting or regurgitating what “famous” philosophers had said: you could actually question their views, even challenge them! He showed me, for the first time, that it was possible for me to become a philosopher, and not simply a commentator or a scholar of philosophy, which is what I was trained to be when in college. Adrian also helped me revise my writing sample and wrote the letter of recommendation that, I am sure, was responsible for getting me into the master’s program at Tufts. 

What is the relationship between science and philosophy? What would be the practical relevance of philosophy if we didn’t engage in interdisciplinary work? In your mind, what would be left of a field like philosophy of mind without empirical work?

My views about the relationship between science and philosophy have evolved—or, rather, have become clearer—with time. One thing that is clear to me is that not all professional philosophers think of philosophy in the same way. I imagine that this must’ve happened to others too, but when I first started to think about becoming a philosopher, I conjured up in my mind images of famous thinkers which, as regulative ideals, helped to shape my professional goals. In my late teens and very early twenties, those ideal philosophers were people like Umberto Eco, Jorge Luis Borges, and Charles Sander Peirce, all of whom had in common the fact that they knew a lot about everything and were able to seamlessly jump from topic to topic with grace and erudition. I wanted that. I wanted to know a lot about lots of things, and I wanted to know enough to know what I didn’t know and to question what I thought I knew. I thought philosophy was the training that would have allowed me to explore the world of knowledge from that perspective.

But I was wrong. In the 25 years or so that I’ve been in this business, I have found many professional philosophers—teachers, classmates, and colleagues—who think that philosophy has its own proprietary set of issues and questions, and that other disciplines, which seem to be simply grouped as “not philosophy,” are not worth studying or learning about. I understand that time is limited, and one must, by necessity, pick and choose what to learn, but I am talking about philosophers who are utterly uninterested in learning anything outside their little academic niche and who show zero curiosity about areas of knowledge they know nothing about. I find that baffling and quintessentially un-philosophical. I tend to think of philosophy as a discipline that is characterized by its approach to issues rather than by its subject matter. As a result, I have a hard time parcellating areas of knowledge into “philosophy” and “not philosophy.”

Personally, I try to read and study as much as possible outside of philosophy, while at the same time doing my best to be on top of the philosophical literature. I feel that philosophers of mind who never read anything other than the three or four journals that publish papers with the abstruse technical vocabulary they are used to really miss out on lots of interesting new ideas that likely are helpful for their own research. Additionally, in learning about other disciplines, philosophers can help to identify and clarify conceptual confusions and difficult theoretical issues that are squarely philosophical but that only become apparent when you know what you are talking about. I think this is especially true of neuroscience and psychology, where philosophy can really be of use—but only if you are willing to really learn the discipline and only if you are willing to rid yourself of the straightjacket imposed by the technical vocabulary that only a tiny subset of philosophers use and claim to be able to understand.

The same goes for scientists, though. In my field, it is not unusual to see famous, typically emeritus neuroscientists, go on and write books on consciousness or on the self in which obvious conceptual mistakes are made, the kinds of errors that have been discussed by philosophers of mind for centuries. There are also plenty of such authors that think that the solution to the mind-body problem is “obvious,” because we just have to think of the mind as “an emergent property,” or whatever, as if by the magic of invoking a fancy term the issue was suddenly resolved. It isn’t. Scientists, too, have to choose how to spend their time, and when you have to dedicate most of your waking hours to study polypeptides in glial cells and write grants to keep your lab afloat, you are not expected to also be an expert in all the conceptual difficulties associated with the notion of emergence.

Now, here’s the rub: many of the issues associated with a notion like “emergence” are actually identified by philosophers of mind who may not know much about the subject area of neuroscience, but whose work clearly has implications for neuroscientists waxing philosophical about the mind as an emergent property. So, there is clearly value in doing “traditional” philosophy of mind, I think, even when disconnected from the sciences. We often don’t know what possible useful consequences our research may have—this is why I am so reluctant to use the term “practical relevance” to refer to a particular research area, since more often than not, research that ends up being practical or useful was not pursued with that goal in mind, just as research that is pursued only with that goal in mind often end up being completely useless.

I understand that many philosophers prefer not to spend much time reading and thinking outside their subject areas, and sometimes they may produce work that is potentially helpful to advance our understanding of the mind. What I don’t understand is their reluctance to learn stuff outside of their comfort zone, their unwillingness to consider the limitations and the shortcomings of their own technical terminology and a priori methodologies, or the arrogance with which they dismiss counter-evidence to their views simply because they come from areas of research they are ignorant about.

Were you criticized for your interdisciplinary approach to philosophical problems?

Yes, but not by everyone, and not for the same reasons. Some of my teachers and classmates at UNC, for instance, really did feel that philosophy and science were non-overlapping magisteria, and that philosophers must be stewards in keeping this gap unbridged. Others were worried that combining science and philosophy was going to negatively affect me in the job market. Today, it is hard to envision this, but 20 years ago, many people thought that experimental philosophy was merely a fad, that it was going to fizzle out quickly, and that people working with empirical approaches to philosophy were not going to get jobs, mainly because philosophy departments wouldn’t offer positions in those areas. Things turned out to be very different.

What interests you in memory, and what do you think explains that interest?

My interest in memory started in college, when I studied neuropsychology and had the chance to see patients with memory disorders of various etiologies. I was fascinated by the fact that the neuropsychological profile of some of these patients wasn’t uniform (even when receiving the same clinical diagnosis) and also kind of dynamic. One day, they seemed to be able to perform relatively well in some memory tasks, and the next day, they weren’t. I thought that their brains were trying their best to carry out some kind of computation, with the resultant output being the best solution they could come up with, given the damage. Later on, in graduate school, I studied ordinary false memories—the kinds of false and distorted memories we all have frequently. I was amazed by the systematicity of false memories, in the sense that they typically are not haphazard, but have some logic to them. That helped to solidify my feeling that remembering was a complex computational process, and that errors in our memory contents give us clues about the nature of such computations.

You’ve got a dual appointment at Duke in philosophy and psychology. Can you tell me about your lab and how it bridges those worlds, and the practical relevance of this work?

Duke is a wonderful place to do interdisciplinary work. As you mention, I have appointments in philosophy and psychology and neuroscience, but I am also a faculty in the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. As a result, I can accept graduate students from philosophy, psychology and neuroscience, and cognitive neuroscience. Right now, for instance, one of the grad students in my lab is doing her PhD in philosophy, two came through the PhD admissions in Psychology and Neuroscience, and the last one came through cognitive neuroscience. Likewise, the post-docs in my lab can be philosophers, psychologists, or neuroscientists. And the truth is that it does not really matter much what you do: if you work in my lab, you will learn and discuss philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. One day in a lab meeting we may discuss a paper that came out in the Journal of Philosophy, next week we may have a meeting about some novel computational model on causal reasoning, and the following one, a lab member may present on her latest neuroimaging results on the neuroscience of counterfactual thinking.

Given your focus on memory, how has your research affected your understanding and relationship to your own memories?

You learn to appreciate both the wonders of its reliability and the normality of its fallibility. I enjoy many of the feelings elicited when reminiscing: nostalgia, melancholia, and the sheer joy of reenacting, even if just mentally, a cherished past experience. Likewise, I’ve become more forgiving of my memory errors. I laugh now at the occasional false recollection, and comfort myself in the fact that, when I cannot recall someone’s name or some fact I knew before, it need not be because my memories are decaying—although they probably are—but because of the tumultuous interference created by all the stuff I’ve read and experienced in between.

You contributed to my new book, Too Weird to Believe, Too Plausible to Deny! Tell the people a little bit about the stuff you discuss in the book. Interested in returning to those questions?

Yes, thanks for inviting me to contribute! My contribution is based on an old paper of mine, which I wrote while in grad school—it started as a final paper for Josh Knobe, I remember, so it must have been in my second year. We read bits of Nozick, including the thought-experiment of the experience machine. I had never read Nozick before and was not acquainted with the experience machine thought-experiment, but when I first read it, I thought it was utterly unintuitive. I remember thinking that, throughout my life, I had met lots of people who constantly sought to abandon reality, via drugs, video games, or simply by going away. My knee-jerk reaction was that you’d only prefer to stay in the real world rather than connect to the experience-machine if either your real-world situation is overall pretty good, and/or if you calculate that the reward of plugging in and experiencing something new outweighs the costs of abandoning a life you know. Thus, I decided to experimentally manipulate the alleged independent variable—the value for reality—by controlling for status quo, so I created these matrix-like vignettes in which participants were invited to think that they were connected to an experience machine by mistake, and that they were asked to choose if they wanted to disconnect or remain connected. If people really valued reality over virtual experiences, then you should see people overwhelmingly choosing to disconnect. But that’s not what you see. Instead, most participants wanted to remain connected. You can shift those percentages a bit if you make their real life very attractive, and thus you get a few more people willing to disconnect. By contrast, if their real life is pretty grim and sad, the overwhelming majority prefer to remain connected. I interpreted those results as conforming to the pattern you’d expect from the so-called “status quo bias,” a well-known psychological tendency to prefer the situation you are familiar with over unfamiliar ones.

Other researchers have replicated and developed these ideas further, and for a little while, I read some of those papers—including those that were critical of my whole approach. However, my research since has taken me through different paths. It was fun to be invited to contribute to your volume because it allowed me to think and read about the experience-machine again!

What are you working on now? Any projects you’re especially excited about? 

I have several ongoing projects, but perhaps the main one is the work my team and I are doing in Colombia for the Memory and Forgiveness project. The purpose of that project, which started about 5 years ago, is to explore the relationship between memory and forgiveness in direct victims of political violence in Colombia. Based upon prior work from our lab, in which we have explored how imagination—particularly, counterfactual thinking—can help to modify the affective content of negative memories at retrieval in individuals with anxious ruminative thinking, I started to think of forgiveness as a psychological process that involves similar emotional reappraisal mechanisms. I didn’t know much about forgiveness at the time, but I was very lucky to join forces with two good friends: philosopher Santiago Amaya, who holds a similar view about forgiveness, and political scientist Pablo Abitbol, who has been working with victims of the Colombian conflict for decades. We teamed up to explore whether direct victims of guerrillas and paramilitaries do, in fact, change their affective reactions when remembering past wrongdoings as a function of whether they have forgiven the perpetrators.

Forgiveness is a very complex phenomenon, and a lot of the philosophical work on forgiveness assumes a bunch of stuff that does not hold in complex situations like the internal war in Colombia. For instance, a lot of work in philosophy assumes that the goal of forgiveness is to repair an existing relationship between two individuals—the victim and the perpetrator—but in the violent context of Colombia, you often find that the perpetrator is not the person who’s asking for forgiveness, but rather, say, the commander of the battalion that perpetrated a certain massacre. Moreover, often the victim and the perpetrator didn’t even know each other, nor do they plan to have a relationship afterwards. Anyways, as it happens with philosophical examples, they tend to be oversimplified. I wanted to explore forgiveness in real, complex situations, and I have learned a lot. I look forward to continuing to explore the collected data in the months to come, and to continue thinking deeply about the relationship between memory and forgiveness.

This section of the APA Blog is designed to get to know our fellow philosophers a little better. We’re including profiles of APA members that spotlight what captures their interest not only inside the office, but also outside of it. We’d love for you to be a part of it, so please contact us via the interview nomination form here to nominate yourself or a friend.