Dr Ali Boyle

Ali Boyle is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is also a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar (2024-2026).

Dr Boyle's research is in the philosophy of cognitive science and biology. Her work focusses on nonhuman minds, from animals to artificial agents. Her recent work is about episodic memory - detailed memory for events from our past, which we can 'replay in the mind's eye'. She is PI (Principal Investigator) on the UKRI funded project 'Episodic Memory: Uniquely Human?', investigating episodic memory's role in the mind, and whether - as many have suggested - it's uniquely human.

Aside from memory, Dr Boyle has written on self-recognition, self-awareness, and mindreading in nonhuman animals, and more general theoretical and methodological issues in animal cognition research, such as: what does it mean for us to share cognitive capacities with nonhuman agents? What's the significance of the 'replication crisis' for comparative psychology? How can advances in artificial intelligence shed light on the minds of biological systems - and how can understanding biological systems lead to advances in artificial intelligence?

She is also interested in the ethical and practical implications of work in these areas - for instance, how does knowledge of animal cognition affect people's beliefs or behaviour toward animals? She has parallel interest in the philosophy of biology, especially its metaphysics. Here, she has written on how to count organisms in tricky cases such as conjoined twinning, parasitism and pregnancy.

Dr Boyle holds a BA, MPhil and PhD in Philosophy from the University of Cambridge. Prior to joining the LSE, she held appointments at Trinity Hall and the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge, and the Centre for Science and Thought at the University of Bonn.

Research Interests

• Animal Minds
• Animal Ethics
• Comparative Cognition
• Artificial Intelligence
• Philosophy of Biology