Brian John Copeland (born 1950) is Professor of Philosophy at the
University of Canterbury
The University of Canterbury ( mi, Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha; postnominal abbreviation ''Cantuar.'' or ''Cant.'' for ''Cantuariensis'', the Latin name for Canterbury) is a public research university based in Christchurch, New Zealand. It was ...
,
Christchurch,
New Zealand, and author of books on the computing pioneer
Alan Turing.
Education
Copeland was educated at the
University of Oxford, obtaining a
Bachelor of Philosophy degree and a
Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1978,
where he undertook research on
modal logic
Modal logic is a collection of formal systems developed to represent statements about necessity and possibility. It plays a major role in philosophy of language, epistemology, metaphysics, and natural language semantics. Modal logics extend other ...
and
non-classical logic supervised by of
Dana Scott.
[
]
Career and research
Jack Copeland is the Director of the Turing Archive for the History of Computing, an extensive online archive on the computing pioneer Alan Turing. He has also written and edited books on Turing. He is one of the people responsible for identifying the concept of hypercomputation and machines more capable than Turing machines. With Jason Long he restored some of the first computer music recorded on the Ferranti Mark I.
Copeland has held visiting professorships at the University of Sydney, Australia (1997, 2002), the University of Aarhus, Denmark (1999), the University of Melbourne, Australia (2002, 2003), and the University of Portsmouth
The University of Portsmouth is a public university in Portsmouth, England. It is one of only four universities in the South East England, South East of England rated as Gold in the Government's Teaching Excellence Framework. With approximately 28 ...
, United Kingdom (1997–2005). In 2000, he was a Senior Fellow in the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States.
Copeland is also President of the US Society for Machines and Mentality and a member of the UK Bletchley Park Trust Heritage Advisory Panel. He is the founding editor of '' The Rutherford Journal'', established in 2005.
Jack Copeland and Diane Proudfoot suggested the establishment of a Turing Center in Zurich during a guest stay at ETH Zurich
(colloquially)
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in 2012. The idea was implemented and ETH Zurich was able to open the Turing Center Zurich in 2015. It is operational organizes regular conferences on questions related to computer, artificial intelligence and other.
''The Rutherford Journal''
Copeland serves as editor-in-chief of ''The Rutherford Journal'', an open-access peer-reviewed
Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work (peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer review ...
online academic journal published in New Zealand that covers the history and philosophy of science and technology.[About the Journal](_blank)
''The Rutherford Journal''. The journal is published as needed and was established in December 2005 by Copeland. The full text of articles is freely available online in HTML format. The journal is named after the New Zealand physicist Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937), who studied at the Canterbury College ( Christchurch).
The journal is indexed in various index lists. It was listed in an article on electronic journals in the Journal for the Association of History and Computing and included in the ''Isis Current Bibliography of the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences''. The journal features technology as diverse as totalisators and the CSIRAC computer.
Publications
* '' Artificial Intelligence: A Philosophical Introduction'' ( Blackwell, 1993, 2nd edition due)
* ''Logic and Reality Essays on the Legacy of Arthur Prior
Arthur Norman Prior (4 December 1914 – 6 October 1969), usually cited as A. N. Prior, was a New Zealand–born logician and philosopher. Prior (1957) founded tense logic, now also known as temporal logic, and made important contributi ...
'' ( Oxford University Press, 1996)
* ''The Essential Turing'' (Oxford University Press, 2004) (pbk); (hbk)
* ''Alan Turing’s Automatic Computing Engine: The Master Codebreaker's Struggle to Build the Modern Computer'' (Oxford University Press, 2005)
* '' Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park's Codebreaking Computers'' (Oxford University Press, 2006)
* ''Alan Turing’s Electronic Brain: The Struggle to Build the ACE, the World’s Fastest Computer'' (Oxford University Press, 2012)
* ''Computability: Turing, Gödel, Church, and Beyond'' ( MIT Press, 2013). (with Carl Posy
Carl Jeffrey Posy ( he, קרל פוזי, italic=no) is an Israeli philosopher. He is a full professor emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Jerusalem, Israel.
Carl Posy received his PhD degree
A D ...
and Oron Shagrir
Professor Oron Shagrir (born 1961) is an Israeli philosopher and cognitive scientist.
Oron Shagrir is Schulman Chair of Philosophy and professor of Philosophy and of Cognitive and Brain Sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Jerusalem ...
)
* ''Turing: Pioneer of the Information Age'' (Oxford University Press, 2014: Paperback edition)
* '' The Turing Guide'' (Oxford University Press, 2017) (hardcover), (paperback) (with Jonathan Bowen
Jonathan P. Bowen FBCS FRSA (born 1956) is a British computer scientist and an Emeritus Professor at London South Bank University, where he headed the Centre for Applied Formal Methods. Prof. Bowen is also the Chairman of Museophile Limited ...
, Robin Wilson, Mark Sprevak, et al.)
Awards and honours
Copeland was awarded Lecturer of the Year 2010 by the University of Canterbury's student union.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Copeland, Jack
1950 births
20th-century English philosophers
20th-century essayists
20th-century English historians
21st-century English philosophers
21st-century essayists
21st-century English historians
Academic journal editors
Academics of the University of Portsmouth
Alumni of Corpus Christi College, Oxford
English logicians
English male non-fiction writers
British historians of mathematics
Historians of philosophy
Historians of science
Lecturers
Living people
New Zealand philosophers
New Zealand writers
Philosophers of logic
Philosophers of science
Philosophers of technology
Philosophy academics
Philosophy writers
University of Canterbury faculty